Faced with multiple scandals, Vince McMahon was left with no other option than to retire from WWE in 2022. However, he continued calling the shots and influencing WWE creative, and it wasn't until Endeavor took over the company in early 2023 that he was finally forced out.
Since then, the quality of what we see on RAW, SmackDown, and NXT has improved massively. Triple H had already had a successful stint in charge of NXT, and fans were confident that his approach to booking the main roster would be a huge improvement.
Thus far, it has been, and WWE ratings, attendance, and critical acclaim are all better than they have been for many, many years.
During a recent interview, The Game - who will be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame this Friday - reflected on learning under his father-in-law, admitting that it became more challenging as McMahon got older.
"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.'"
It's interesting that McMahon had questions about how Triple H was running NXT, especially as there was a time when that show was considered vastly better than anything shown on RAW and SmackDown.
However, when Vince finally took charge of the developmental brand, he ran it into the ground with a colourful new look that was promptly ditched when the Cerebral Assassin was given full control over WWE creative.
You can watch the full interview with Triple H in the player below.