Moderators Chest Rockwell Posted March 27, 2022 Moderators Share Posted March 27, 2022 The Steiner feud comes to mind when I think of HHH using his clout to shit the place up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vamp Posted March 27, 2022 Share Posted March 27, 2022 Not sure how much you can blame that on HHH though. He probably pushed for the NWA length matches I guess but unless Steiner was hiding it really well everyone else should have realised that he was in no shape to go that long. Although I do wonder how well both Steiner and Goldberg would have done on SmackDown instead. I'd have quite liked to have seen Angle against either of them around that time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members air_raid Posted March 27, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 27, 2022 3 hours ago, simonworden said: I would add not letting Goldberg take the title off him at Summerslam which I'm not sure was Triple H or the company insisting Goldberg works more than 5 mins a night back then. They figured that out a bit later on didn't they! There was a bit of short sightedness In how Goldberg matches were booked but the theory in that one was sound ; use the mult-man clusterfuck to screw Bill over so people want to see him win a one on one rematch. Plus Hunter was fucked injury wise at SummerSlam so needed another month to be in condition to put him over “properly.” Unfortunately when he did, it was in a plodding match that went on way too long. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Chest Rockwell Posted March 27, 2022 Moderators Share Posted March 27, 2022 37 minutes ago, Vamp said: Not sure how much you can blame that on HHH though. He probably pushed for the NWA length matches I guess but unless Steiner was hiding it really well everyone else should have realised that he was in no shape to go that long. Although I do wonder how well both Steiner and Goldberg would have done on SmackDown instead. I'd have quite liked to have seen Angle against either of them around that time. HHH was injured yet was on tv every fucking week for half an hour. It was painful. The matches were a bit shit and one sided and the booking buried Steiner, but none of that was even the worst part of the feud. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted March 27, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 27, 2022 Pretty sure I've read that one of Steiners feet basically was basically paralyzed when he was working with Triple H. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Tommy! Posted March 27, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 27, 2022 49 minutes ago, LaGoosh said: Pretty sure I've read that one of Steiners feet basically was basically paralyzed when he was working with Triple H. I believe so, I remember somewhere talking about drop foot syndrome and him essentially being unable to do much with one leg, which makes HHH going so long with him madness. Apparently rumble 03 is the only time WON best and worst match of the year have been back to back. I'll let you guess which was which. The fucking over of Orton in 04 was also awful to sit through, killed all his momentum and gave us a handful of dull matches making Orton look a right tit before they focused on big Dave. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members air_raid Posted March 27, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 27, 2022 56 minutes ago, LaGoosh said: Pretty sure I've read that one of Steiners feet basically was basically paralyzed when he was working with Triple H. He had this : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_drop Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chasingamymatt Posted March 27, 2022 Share Posted March 27, 2022 I was never a big fan but anything health related sucks even at his age. Hope he enjoys retirement and family time. Better this than another name added to the sad list of guys going before their time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted March 28, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 28, 2022 (edited) Triple H as a wrestler - I was never a huge fan. He had that 6-9 month period in late 99 to mid 2000 where he was easily one of the greatest all rounders of all time. But I don't think he ever reached that peak ever again. For someone who was on top and prominent for such a long period of time I don't think he had the number of memorable promos, angles, feuds or great matches that someone with his career should have. When he was good he was very good, but he wasn't good very often. Quite often he was actually uite bad and insufferably boring. The only other person he ever got over was Batista and more than a few wrestlers had their momentum stalled by a feud with Triple H that always ended with a 30 minute borefest. Triple H couldn't carry a mediocre wrestler to a good match either like Cena or HBK could. Always felt like he was in that awkward spot of looking like a main eventer and being too good for the mid card but rarely good enough to actually be a main eventer and carry the company. Ironically enough, I'd say he was a B+ player for most his career. Edited March 28, 2022 by LaGoosh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FUM Posted March 28, 2022 Share Posted March 28, 2022 Triple H was always my favourite wrestler. He’ll always rub people up the wrong way because of who he married and I do wonder how much more credit people would actually give him had that not happened. To me, that was the biggest risk he ever took in his career and he was lucky to keep his position as opposed to being buried for it. His feud with Cena was always a stand out for me. It was the pinnacle of Cena not being accepted and Triple H zones into that. For me, the victory over Trips at Mania is what finally cemented Cena to the top. I am biased as I love the guy but nobody has made more careers than Triple H for me. Foley, Cena, Batista, Bryan and even to some extent The Rock aren’t what they became without him. He is probably the greatest heel foil in the history of the business in my opinion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Awards Moderator HarmonicGenerator Posted March 28, 2022 Awards Moderator Share Posted March 28, 2022 Between the Rumble street fight, the Summerslam 02 match with Michaels and the WM27 match with Taker, he’s been in some of my favourite ever matches even if he’s never been one of my favourite wrestlers. Great entrance music most of the time too, and I did love his version of NXT for a long time. Triple H is definitely more in the positive column than the negative for me. Hopefully he enjoys his retirement. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted March 28, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 28, 2022 9 minutes ago, FUM said: His feud with Cena was always a stand out for me. It was the pinnacle of Cena not being accepted and Triple H zones into that. For me, the victory over Trips at Mania is what finally cemented Cena to the top. You may be right, as it was clearly a feud with the intention of establishing Cena as the top guy, but I was just thinking about how if it worked, it worked in spite of Triple H rather than because of him, and it was a pretty good example of Triple H's worst instincts. If you compare Triple H's feud with Cena to JBL's feud with Cena, yes, the JBL feud had a lot of silly nonsense in it, but JBL understood that his entire role was to make John Cena. For all his faults, JBL knows when his job is to get thoroughly beaten and to make the babyface look like a mega-star, and he did everything he could to make Cena. The moment Cena jumps to RAW, Triple H is doing promos drawing attention to his faults, playing too cool for school, and constantly big leaguing him. Yes, Cena won in the end, but Triple H probably did more to rile up the "Cena sucks" portion of the audience than to sell that he was actually concerned about having to wrestle the guy. And that's Triple H's legacy to me - a guy who, when he was on, could absolutely make a new star. Everyone is rightly talking about how great he was selling for the reveal of Cactus Jack, but he carried on wrestling for another twenty years, and it's pretty telling he never really managed that again. He never showed that fear or concern when booked against Brock Lesnar, or Bill Goldberg, or any number of other wrestlers who could have benefited from it at the time. Similarly, in his match with Daniel Bryan and the intergender tag with Ronda Rousey, he seemed to realise that his role as a corporate heel was to get beaten up, bump and sell, and get his comeuppance - against Bryan, it really felt like we were finally getting Triple H settling into a role that actually fitted the Authority gimmick rather than shedding it to play bad-ass conqueror every time he had an actual match, and it's no surprise it was one of his best matches in years. When he fought Roman Reigns at Wrestlemania, the show was already running ridiculously late before the match even started, and I remember thinking - naively - that it meant maybe they'd just have Reigns steamroll through him and beat him in short order to really make a new star, but instead it was a long, plodding Triple H match. You can talk about the "Reign of Terror" and how much he was needlessly booked to go over decently over midcard acts in the early days of the brand split (Spike and Bubba Ray Dudley obviously didn't deserve wins over Triple H, for example, but they also didn't have to lose to him via Sleeper Hold nor did they ever have to face him in the first place) just as much as to cut the legs off potential main eventers (even if mileage may vary on whether that "potential" was ever likely to pay off, but for me his biggest fault was just complete inconsistency. No top level act in wrestling has ever done less to keep up the conceits of kayfabe, or to keep their own character remotely consistent. Something I love about William Regal is that he could be doing comedy one moment, heartfelt sincerity the next, and then be the most vicious and remorseless heel imaginable, and it all feels like one coherent character, not a performer jumping from point to point. Triple H, though, would be the suit-wearing heel boss holding Daniel Bryan down on RAW, then show up to NXT as a babyface taking credit for making the same kind of indie stars he was putting down on RAW, then on the pay-per-view he'd dress up in biker gear or Conan The Barbarian costumes for his entrance, and then next week on RAW he'd be doing goofy comedy skits as a babyface in DX for a nostalgia pop, only to go right back to the Authority the following week. For the latter ten years or so of his career, at least, he felt like a bloke playing a part rather than a believable or coherent character, and dragged down so much of what he was involved in as a result of that, and his need to constantly (especially as a babyface) act as if he was too cool for school and above whatever he was being booked to do. On top of all that, he seemed desperate to beat Shawn Michaels at his own game. While "I'm sorry, I loved you" probably started it all, the Michaels/Undertaker matches at Wrestlemania really amped up a trend towards dramatic moments in big matches, and Triple H seemed constantly desperate to get the kind of iconic moments those matches provided. Whether that was through his own interminably long, self-indulgent and melodramatic matches with The Undertaker or, my personal "favourite", a moment in the Ladder match against Kevin Nash where Nash, on his knees, offers up the "Too Sweet" sign and Triple H responds with a crotch chop - there was just this constant sense that he was doing stuff he thought looked really cool and significant, and it was almost always just a bit pathetic. His best matches...he had a couple of great hardcore brawls with Mick Foley in 2000, and WWE house style main events against The Rock and Steve Austin between '99 and 2001, a brilliant match with Bryan Danielson, and Shawn Michaels' comeback match in 2002. I'm not saying that Triple H is necessarily bad, but he was played a pretty good hand in terms of opponents in all of those cases. At the other end of the spectrum, he consistently stank up the joint against The Undertaker (even if you're someone who inexplicably likes their Wrestlemania matches, surely nobody is a fan of the never-ending Power Trip/Brothers of Destruction matches?), had a comically bad match with Sting, dragged Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose into his comfort zone, and seemingly did all he could manage to kill the aura of Brock Lesnar within months of him returning. That's before getting into the entire, awful, DX reunion run. He was responsible for so much worse than he ever did good, and that's without any consideration of his "politics" or the rights and wrongs of him being booked to go over - he just had, consistently, more bad matches than did nothing for his opponent than he had the star-making performances he's praised for. 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Paid Members Jazzy G Posted March 28, 2022 Author Paid Members Share Posted March 28, 2022 I agree as I've already said that his opponents have had a lot to do with his better matches. Somebody more capable than he was would have done a much better job during that Steiner feud. Likewise with the way he treated Booker T in the build up to, and finish of, their match at Wrestlemania 19. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members LaGoosh Posted March 28, 2022 Paid Members Share Posted March 28, 2022 (edited) Randy Orton was well on his way to breaking through as a genuine top level over main event act until Triple H cut his legs off by having an amazingly shit Wrestlemania main event with him and then never really putting him over properly after that. You could argue that Orton never got that close to being a top star on that level ever again. And in a run of bad heel authority figure characters Triple H and Stephanie's endless slog as The Authority was by far the worst. That payoff to that entire shitty run was another painful boring slog Wrestlemania match with Seth Rollins that didn't do anything at all for him either. Then that terrible Roman feud where he tried desperately to get Roman over as a face then one night decided "fuck it", and beat the shit out of him in his babyface biker gear and gave DX crotch chops to massive babyface pops from the crowd. I would genuinely put his match against Taka Michinoku over every Wrestlemania match he's ever had. Even in DX he was always the shit uncool hanger on despite being the leader. Edited March 28, 2022 by LaGoosh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Jazzy G Posted March 28, 2022 Author Paid Members Share Posted March 28, 2022 I completely forgot about that Orton feud. He got beaten even worse than Jericho at Mania X8. It was a great build as well, although Shane looked stronger than he should have as well during the build. Arguably after Orton won the title from Benoit at Summerslam he was made to look like a transitional champion. I do think they only did that one to try and remove Lesnar as the youngest ever champion though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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