CREDIT // SOURCE - Jason Ounpraseuth
Corey Graves interviewed Triple H on After The Bell to talk about WrestleMania and his experience watching it as it was the first time it was held in the Performance Center with no fans. Graves asked Triple H if he ever imagined that the Performance Center would one day be used to host a WrestleMania.
"After the first two shows and the live Smackdown, the first one, it seems like this barrage of just events happening," Triple H said. "The moment in time when I walked in there and they had now transferred it from the kind of Raw and SmackDown set to repositioning everything, and I got in there in the giant WrestleMania sign that Kevin Owens would end up jumping off of was in the Performance Center. It was surreal and just, I don't know, a crazy experience.
"I called Canyon, who runs development for me, and we were talking. I remember the moment walking into that building for the first time when we were scouting locations, and it was like a knickknack store from like a importer from Korea or something. It was all these like shelves to the ceiling of these knickknacks as far as you could see, and I remember walking in there and just rows and rows and rows and rows of all this stuff. If you would have said to me, in that moment in time, it's a nice building right? We'll have WrestleMania in here in a few years. You're out of your mind, but here we are. I can't recall anything crazier."
Graves asked Triple H about things that he liked from WrestleMania this year. Triple H gave credit to Rhea Ripley for putting on a great match with no crowd at such a young age as she was getting more comfortable working in front of a crowd.
"It's hard for me, at this point in my career, to imagine going out there in front of nobody and trying to pull that energy and that level of performance. Imagine if you're Kevin Owens, just climb up that thing 30 feet, just fall off there and land on that table, just do it. That takes something special to go out there and have that performance. You here Rock talk about that and you know it. The the electricity and the connection between our fans and what we do, there's nothing like it," Triple H said. "I thought Charlotte and Rhea Ripley had an amazing match, and to me, I think Rhea Ripley, 22 years old, you're just kind of getting to where you're starting to feel comfortable with crowds. Then they take the crowd away and go like do it again."
Along with the Boneyard Match, the Firefly Fun House Match created a lot of buzz at WrestleMania. Triple H called the match an acid trip and gave credit to John Cena and Bray Wyatt for taking it as far as they did.
"Man, my hats off to everybody that was a part of it from a cinematic scope as well. The Fun House, I just knew conceptually what the thought was. Everybody that I would ask like, 'hey, how'd that go?' I'd get the same response, 'people are either gonna love it or hate it.' I was like really? And most of the people that shot it were like, 'I have no idea what we shot,' because it's it all goes together. Like if it all goes together well, it might be awesome, might be the worst thing anybody's ever seen. I kept getting that. I was like, oh my God. I didn't know what to expect. It's like this crazy acid trip," Triple H admitted. "You talk about reinventing and getting outside the box, my hats off to Cena on that. To get outside the box of your own character and everything that you've done and be that self aware and be okay with putting that out there for everybody and Bray as well, it was a crazy trip, and it just delivered something completely unique and business changing."
Triple H has talked about the idea of a holding WrestleMania for more than one day before, and he elaborated more on the idea. He compared WrestleMania to a festival with all of the events that happen around WrestleMania.
"Well, I mean my opinion is my opinion, but I think it was much more enjoyable than the eight-hour extravaganza," Triple H admitted. "I think at some point that is probably what it should be. It's just become so big. When you think about it, in a way, it started out as a concert that ended up being a festival, and it's this week-long thing. When you think about it in that manner now, you know, the Thursday would have been Hall of Fame, Friday was Smackdown, Saturday was going to be Takeover, Sunday would have been WrestleMania [and] Monday would have been RAW. It's a week-long festival, and I think that big main-stage attraction needs to be those two nights and it'd be this weekend of events.
"I do think that's probably a change that that out of chaos comes the genius and maybe that is the genius of it. And I know there's been people saying that for a period of time, but that's a major shift, and it doesn't come easy. I think people in the world look at stuff like that. They go, 'why don't they just make it two nights?' Yeah, because that's really easy. There you go two nights."
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