The annual Royal Rumble marks the official kick off of WrestleMania season, as plans begin to fall into place on the direction of the WWE ahead of its biggest annual event. Before Jey Uso and Charlotte Flair punched their respective tickets to the main event of WrestleMania 41, Paul “Triple H” Levesque was announced as the first inductee into this year’s Hall of Fame class.
Levesque’s announcement came as a surprise, with Shawn Michaels and the Undertaker partnering with WWE President Nick Khan to break the news unexpectedly at the end of the organization’s Town Hall earlier in the week.
Levesque was asked at the post-Rumble press conference about his reflections on the announcement from US Weekly, where he shared conversations he’d had with Khan about the timing of his Hall of Fame induction, opting to push that out a number of years. Instead, Levesque was on the receiving end of what he calls the “ultimate pay of respect.”
“I’ve had the honor of calling a lot of people to tell them, ‘We’re going to induct you into the Hall of Fame’ or be there in person to say to them ‘we’re going to induct you into the Hall of Fame,’ and watch them cry and get emotional because of our passion for what we do. It hit me way harder than I thought it would,” Levesque said. “When we left there, it was an oddly comical and surreal moment. Taker and Shawn were there. We went to a meeting and as it slowly started to dawn on me, ‘here we go.’ The same moment that I watched everybody else have, that emotional all flooding over you over your career, the people you’ve worked with, what it meant to you, the fans you’ve met around the world, the moments you’ve been able to create and share.”
Levesque admits he’s excited for his induction despite it being at the busiest time of the and spoke to how meaningful the recognition is from the likes of Michaels, Taker, and Khan.
“I wish it wasn’t at WrestleMania so I could focus on it more. But it’s one of the most meaningful things of my career and to have it come from Shawn and Taker, the two guys in the business that I probably respect more than anybody, and to have it set up from Nick, which on one hand is mildly irritating because he fooled me,” Levesque said. “But in business for me outside of the in-ring, there is nobody I respect more than him. He is my partner in all this. Him doing that for me is incredibly meaningful.”
