On the August 29 episode of WWE Raw, Kevin Owens made a whole lot of wrestling fans very happy when he won a Fatal 4-Way match to win the vacant Universal Championship (with the help of Triple H). The strangely prescient Owens has been savoring his victory ever since (with the help of his wonderful family, of course), but it turns out he didn’t have a whole lot of time to prepare for his historic win.
On a recent episode of the Talk is Jericho podcast (episode 281), Owens revealed to host Chris Jericho that he only found out that he would be winning the big one at around 5 p.m. the day it happened … which means he only had a few hours to come to terms that he would soon be the official face of the company. Knowing him, however, he was probably preparing for that moment his entire life.
Owens talked at length about how he thinks his title win was perfect, particularly because it sets up so many storylines and branching angles both in the short term and farther down the road. He also took the opportunity to talk about how he’s grateful to be part of this storyline that involved Triple H, because Triple H was the one who took a chance on him and brought him to WWE in the first place.
As he elaborated (transcription via Wrestling Inc.):
“It couldn’t have been better, but not just for storyline purposes, the ‘where do we go from here?’, ‘why did Triple H do it?’, ‘what’s going to happen with Seth [Rollins] and Triple H?’, this and that. It obviously opens a lot of doors for interesting stuff TV-wise. But for me personally, when you win the world title, people assume, ‘oh, you probably want it to be this incredible battle where you claw, blood, sweat, and tears, and you just had this apparent moment.’ Besides the fact that I’m a heel, Triple H got me here. He made the call to hire me. He made the call to take a chance on me because he hired somebody who wasn’t a cookie cutter WWE Superstar. And there would have been a chance where somebody would have been like, ‘you hired him? Are you kidding?’
“Even when I was hired, I was told by [WWE Senior Director or Talent Development] Canyon Ceman who called me to announce ‘okay, we’re going to sign you, but I was specifically told to tell you don’t get your hopes up for RAW or SmackDown because you’re not the typical WWE Superstar. You’re going to have a chance in NXT just like everyone else.’ So I said, ‘oh, I’m up for the challenge’ and he said, ‘I figured that’s what you were going to say’.
“That’s how my career started here and then Triple H always obviously believed in me. That’s why he signed me and he saw something in me. And Terry Taylor even straight up told me once at the Performance Center, he was like, ‘Triple H sees something in you. I don’t see it, but it’s my job to bring it out.’ And then, later on, like, now, I have a great relationship with Terry. But part of why I love it is because he’s so honest. Other people really dislike that about Terry. I love it.
“So anyway, last Monday night, Triple H literally handing me the title, but that was a moment, like, that was incredible to me and I got to say ‘thank you’ in the ring. Like, he gave me the title and I said, ‘thank you’, but it wasn’t ‘thank you for giving me the title’. It was ‘thank you for everything’. Yeah, because without him, like, I had Steve Austin saying good things about me [and] I even had The Rock saying good things about me before I got signed by WWE. But without Triple H taking that chance, who knows where I’d be now?”
Luckily, we don’t have to wonder about where Owens would be now, because he’s on top of the world in WWE as the friggin’ Universal Champion. Here’s hoping he keeps proving people wrong (and by extension, proving Triple H right) for a long time to come.
