Triple H Compares New York Knicks Victory to WWE Storylines

The recent NBA Championship victory of the New York Knicks became intertwined with WWE thanks to Danhausen cursing super-fan Stephen A. Smith, and then uncursing the team just as they started a winning streak. Smith recently interviewed COO Triple H, and asked him what he might have learned about fan engagement from the Knicks’ historic win.

“I think the hardest thing in the world is to keep your finger on the pulse of what people are looking for,” he answered, accurately. “The world is always changing and you’ve seen it over the years with WWE, and I do think that as an entertainment form, when you start out as a performer, your goal, everything about your goal is to make that crowd cheer, to make that crowd boo. Everything is about fan engagement. So you’re taught sort of those nuances from moment one. It’s everything we do.”

Athletes, he noted, can’t always be the babyface, but they don’t always like getting cast as the heel: “Whereas in a sport, you know, there sometimes you have home games, sometimes you have away games, sometimes you’re getting booed, sometimes you’re getting cheered. You want to sort of tune that out. When it’s positive, you can use it to your advantage, but when it’s negative, and I suppose you can use that negativity, too, but you sort of tune it out, to go just go do your job.”

“Our job, everything about it is to engage with those fans. I do think we do it well, but you know, when sports is on, when when the story is right, when you have an underdog story like the Knicks, where they can can dig out from underneath, can dig out from years of disappointment and a fan base that has been just hanging on hope and just supporting them all through it and you can deliver like that, then there’s nothing else like it, you know, and and that’s what we aim to give is that emotional feeling. When that delivers for fans, there’s nothing else like it.”

“And you see it with the Knicks, you see it with their parade, you see it with the support they’ve gotten from around, especially the New York area, but from around the globe, there’s Knicks fans everywhere and and there’s nothing like it.”