On this day in wrestling history, April 26, 1995, we welcomed one of the greatest performers in professional wrestling history. Debuting in the WWE, Hunter Hearst Helmsley began what would eventually be a hall of fame career.
Like many of the greats, there are detractors that claim he wouldn’t be anything without marrying into the McMahon family. While those may be correct assertions to an extent, it’s more widely believed he wouldn’t have been with the WWE for twenty-five years had he not been family. There’s no denying the intensity and passion he has for wrestling, and he’s shown he deserves every accolade he’s gotten and more.
And it all began with a simple idea.
It’s all in the style
From the moment he stepped out of the curtain on WWE’s Wrestling Challenge, Paul Levesque took the first steps into what would be a phenomenal character, one that would make him one of the most hated heels in history.
(Special thanks to @awrestlinghistorian for the excerpt)
“In one of our first meetings after I officially signed on with World Wrestling Federation, Vince McMahon told me that he liked the character I was doing in WCW and wanted me to bring a lot of its elements with me up north. The biggest change we were going to make was that I was no longer going to be a Frenchman. Vince was concerned that if they ever wanted to turn me babyface, which meant turn me into a “good guy,” it would be immeasurably more difficult to do if I was this over-the-top European guy.
“His idea was that I would take that elitist attitude and turn it American. I’d be an aristocrat, a blueblood, someone who came from a life of privilege and made sure you knew it. A lot of people thought Vince created the character as a message to his snobby real-life neighbors in Greenwich, Connecticut, who looked down at him as “the wrestling guy.” The story was that having a character with their background on his show, running around acting like an asshole, he was kind of flipping them all off. I never found out if that was for sure, but anything’s possible, I guess.” – Triple H Making The Game book.
For many, he’s the water spouting King of Kings we’ve come to love, but this persona made its mark as he was impossible to ignore and infuriated pretty much everyone just by walking to the ring. He played the character to the hilt and is a perfect lesson on how it should be done.
Despite all the grumblings about who he married and what it meant to his career, it’s impossible to ignore how great he is. Much like Chris Jericho being underappreciated by many fans in WWE, we won’t know what we’re missing until he’s gone.
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