Last Updated on: 6th November 2013, 02:26 pm
This excerpt from Figure Four Weekly is great. In just a few short lines, it answers a question that a lot of people including me have spent a lot of time trying to answer but never nailing down quite so well. Why does Triple H irritate the hell out of so many wrestling fans?
by the way, if you are a wrestling fan, you need to subscribe to theF4W/Wrestling Observer siteright now. Value for your money doesn’t even begin to describe this place. For all you get, they could charge twice the price and it would still be more than worth it.
Watching Hunter walk to the back was a funny thing. He was there holding onto his belt for dear life, and I don’t even think the cameras were on him. And I just thought, does having the belt really mean that much to the guy, still, after all these years? People have often asked my why, say, Shawn Michaels doesn’t get another run with the title, and what bullshit that is, and I always answer, “To be honest, I don’t think he gives a fuck.” Shawn got into the business wanting to be a superstar and a champion, he achieved that, and I think that at this stage in his career a belt is just something heavy that he would have to carry through security at the airport. When I was a little kid I wanted to become a wrestler and win a BELT, and during my career I won a few, including the Texarkana Title. This made me happy because a person who lived on the other side of the country trusted me enough to lose to me with the assumption that at some point I would come back and return the favor, which I did. It was a fun six months and I made wacky banners on our Web site to celebrate the victory and we did promos on the radio show and that sort of thing, and the key is that in the end I was satisfied that I had accomplished such a thing in my small career. I could work for 100 more years and never “win” another belt and I would be fine with that. And I look at Hunter and I wonder why he has this need to continually have THE BELT. I mean, what has really been accomplished with this 13th title win? It’s not like this time he actually defeated someone in legitimate athletic competition. It would be one thing if this was a period where it was actually an honor to be the champion in that you were the guy the company trusted to carry the ball, and holding that belt was a huge responsibility. I could even understand if it was most anyone else, like a Jeff Hardy, who also grew up wanting to be a champion and found the company he worked for thought enough of him to give him that honor. But for HHH in 2009, he’s working in a company where the belt changes hands so many times that the champion is hardly the guy the company is built around, he doesn’t carry all the responsibility for success or failure on his shoulders because no one man today makes that much of a difference, and it can’t even feel like that much of an honor to get it when your father-in-law runs the place and your wife writes the storylines. I guess in the end what he grew up wanting was to be Ric Flair, and the most important thing to him remains equaling or surpassing Flair’s title record. And I guess to people who don’t know anything about wrestling that will be a big deal when it happens. But to the people who do, who know what an accomplishment it was for Flair to be awarded all those titles by all those different promoters all over the world for all those years, every title Hunter is awarded by his family will make him look like an even bigger mark, which I’m pretty sure is not the legacy he was hoping for as a child.
