Paul Levesque Says He Sees WrestleMania 40 As His First WrestleMania Without Vince McMahon
Paul Levesque discusses WrestleMania 40 being his first without Vince McMahon.
In July 2022, news broke of Vince McMahon’s retirement, with it later emerging that Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque would be assuming all creative duties as the Chief Content Officer. However, with McMahon coming back to facilitate a sale of WWE in 2023, reports indicated he began to oversee some of WWE’s creative plans once again. Due to his presence, ‘The Game’ has now revealed he doesn’t see WrestleMania 39 as fully his own.
Appearing on What Do You Wanna Talk About?, Paul Levesque told Cody Rhodes that he sees WrestleMania 40 as his first WrestleMania in charge of WWE’s creative.
“It’s not like one day, ‘Here, it’s yours’ and everything else went away, right? There was so many aspects to that of, ‘Hey, Vince is stepping away. You’re gonna take this spot.’ But he’s chiming in and he’s still meeting with me all the time, and he’s still directing traffic from the side. And there’s no real clear moment for me, but I would consider [WrestleMania 40] that, yes. The only thing that is difficult in that transition, you’re trying to… at the end of the day when people are like, ‘But it’s your decision, right?’ ‘Yeah, sorta.’ And you have to defend your position and you have to be able to sell that to people, and explain it to people if it’s a little bit not your position or a little bit, ‘Well, why did this happen?’ And you don’t want to say, ‘Well because it wasn’t totally my decision.’ And not because you don’t want to seem like you don’t have that power, but you have to position it that way.”
-Paul Levesque
On April 7, POST Wrestling shared that Levesque’s concerns over Vince McMahon’s involvement in WWE bled into the latter half of 2023. When the company’s merger with UFC under the TKO banner became official, the Chief Content Officer caught wind that McMahon had been booked to be at the December 11 RAW. Still, his return to creative was mainly felt around WrestleMania 39.
In terms of what he had an effect on in early 2023, Vince is believed to have been a leading voice in the decision to have Roman Reigns defeat Cody Rhodes in California, while the former Chairman also advocated for Edge to defeat Finn Bálor.
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As always, we’ll aim to provide any further updates on Vince McMahon returning to creative in 2023 as soon as we hear more.
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