Triple H explains why babyfaces need to be selfish.
Triple H recently appeared on Andrew Schulz’s FLAGRANT podcast to promote WrestleMania 41. During the conversation, WWE’s Chief Content Officer was asked if good guys, or babyfaces, made for better villains (aka heels).
“So it’s a funny thing and, and this might be completely off. I have like a theory that and I don’t mean this in a negative way at all. To be the babyface, you have to be a little bit more selfish. Austin was a great babyface, but he’s not selfish. It’s sort of he was such because his character was a bad guy that they just loved,” he said.
“You always hear the stories about the top sort of good guy in the business and there’s just because it’s all about you as a bad guy, your job is to make the other guy look good. Just keep yourself alive doing it, keep yourself hot doing it, keep yourself all that stuff. But the truth is, the biggest reaction that you get as a bad guy is when you give the good guy the comeback.”
The real-life Paul Levesque elaborated on his comment by drawing an analogy between pro wrestling and the Rocky franchise, where the babyface (Balboa) has to overcome bad guys (Creed, Drago, Mr. T) in order to establish himself as the ultimate good guy.
“We talk about it all the time, like in in the Rocky movies, right?… And Rocky’s not about boxing, but it’s about overcoming, right? But the bad guy in Rocky I is (Apollo) Creed. He’s just an arrogant guy and this guy wants to prove himself against Creed. He doesn’t have to win, but he just has to stay the distance and he does.
“They get to the second one, but now he has all these things he has overcome in his life and it’s still the same bad guy, but he’s got to overcome that. And the first one was a fluke and blah, blah, blah. He overcomes that. Now you get to the third one. Now he’s succeeded as the babyface. So what do they do? They have to make Mr. T the ultimate bad guy that is so mean and so nasty, talk sh*t about his wife and ends up sort of causing (Burgess Meredith’s Mickey Goldmill character) so much stress that he dies and now Rocky’s got to avenge. He just can’t fight. He gets the sh*t kicked out of him. Now he’s got to find a way to come back against all that.”
Triple H on social media criticism of WWE
Elsewhere on the podcast, Triple H had a blunt response to social media complaints of the WWE product, saying the internet was not a real place.
“Here’s the beautiful thing about our world. The internet is not real life, right? And the b*tching and the f*cking complaining that is on there is not real life,” he said. “You could read the internet, and it’ll sound like this thing is dead.
“And I’ll use Cody [Rhodes] as the example, ‘Cody’s already jumped the shark, he’s dead as a babyface.’ And he’s like, ‘Really? I don’t know. I’m in an arena with 10-15,000 people every night going ape shit for me, selling the most merchandise, but sure whatever you wanna say on the internet, that’s the golden rule.’”
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