Triple H Comments On How Vince McMahon’s Booking Changed As He Got Older

In an interview with the High Performance Podcast (via Fightful), Triple H spoke about learning about booking from Vince McMahon and how McMahon’s grip on the product tightened as he got older. He also noted that McMahon would do things differently than he would.

He said: “When you learn, especially from mentors, you learn what to do and what not to do. There were things that bothered me about the way he did things. Certain things with his personality, he would run things totally different than I would, and we’ve talked about that before. Even when I was running NXT he would be like, ‘Why are you doing it like that?’ ‘Because it’s working for me.’ He was much more controlling, especially as he got older, much more controlling. When I first came in, when we started DX, we were just doing our own thing. Nobody was scripting anything. We were doing our own thing, most times we were coming back and he was mad at us and screaming at us, ‘We’re gonna get thrown off the air, goddamnit, don’t do that again.’ We were just like, ‘Whatever,’ and we’d go do it again the following week. Then there was a point where that started to work and we started to really get over and it started to do big business and ratings changed. Now, all of a sudden, we show up to TV one week and they hand us a script, ‘What is this?’ ‘It’s what Vince wants you to say tonight.’ ‘What? He doesn’t tell us what to say.’ ‘He wants to start.’ We’d go into his office, ‘What is this?’ ‘It’s a script. It’s what I want you to say.’ ‘This is terrible. It’s not funny. It’s not us.’ I was much newer. Shawn [Michaels] was Shawn at the time. We’re sitting in the meeting, we read it a couple of times, we had the argument with him and he said, ‘That’s what I want you guys to do. Just go do it.’ Shawn crumpled up the piece of paper and said, ‘I ain’t saying any of this shit.’ Threw it at Vince and we walked out of the office. I was like, ‘Wow, we’re getting fired.’ There were various points of time where he would become very controlling of things. Very specific to how he wanted it to be. It’s his prerogative, he’s the boss. We would all talk about it and be like, ‘It would be better if we did this.’ Even Pat Patterson would come to me, ‘Vince wants to do this thing and it’s so stupid. Let’s do this instead.’ ‘Pat, I talked to him until I was blue in the face. You go talk to him.’“