WWE Executive Vice President of Talent, Creative and Live Events and 14-time World Champion Paul “Triple H” Levesque recently spoke with ESPN:
On 50/50 booking:
“Do I keep track of the exact wins and losses of talent? No. To me, all of this stuff is a feel. All of it is a feel. Sometimes you’re beating a talent because you want to beat them and that’s the sympathetic reaction you’re trying to elicit. There are some talents that, when you beat them, they get more popular, but as soon as they start on a winning path, their popularity begins to wane. People want that underdog to strive to succeed and then get a little bit of success and then get knocked back off that perch and be the underdog again. People don’t understand it when Vince [McMahon] will say it’s not about wins and losses or those things. Do they matter? Sure. Are they the be all, end all? Absolutely not. I suppose there’s a stone somewhere that it’s written on that says, ‘Thou shalt not book 50/50 because it won’t lead to success for your promotion.’ We’ll stand on that stone while we’re selling out Brooklyn three days in a row.”
On developing characters:
“Everybody is different, every single person. There are a lot of talents that, over the years, you take them and you turn their personality way up and that’s them. That’s their character. And that works for a lot of guys. A lot of them, as they become good, they start to morph themselves in a bigger, better way. And those are the ones that you just try to help cultivate to become big stars by turning up the volume. There are a lot of other guys [who] need to transform into something else. In their personal lives they’re quiet, or they’re reserved or whatever, and when the red light goes on and you give them a character that they can sink their teeth into, they become something great. If you knew Glenn Jacobs and you knew Kane, they’re two totally different things. That’s kind of the arc of what we do.”
On NXT tag teams:
“I think you go back five or six years ago when the tag teams were on the decline. Part of that was a thinner talent roster. NXT has been able to beef up the ranks enough for us to split rosters, and you see this resurgence. … I’m really proud of them — of the entire developmental system. It has allowed for the resurgence of tag-team wrestling and resurgence of women’s wrestling by giving them the platform to be able to do what they do.”
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