Shawn Michaels Discusses Who Came Up With ‘Triple H’ & ‘Heartbreak Kid’ Names

A discussion about the ‘Triple H’ and ‘Heartbreak Kid’ names.

Stephanie McMahon welcomed WWE Senior Vice President of Talent Development Creative/NXT overseer Shawn Michaels onto her What’s Your Story? podcast.

While looking back at memories and highlights from his in-ring days, Michaels opened up about who came up with the ‘Heartbreak Kid’ and ‘Triple H’ names. On the Triple H front, Michaels shared that former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon was initially against the idea of Hunter Hearst Helmsley’s name being changed.

McMahon felt that it mirrored ‘Double A’ Arn Anderson. On the Heartbreak Kid front, Michaels credited the late Curt ‘Mr. Perfect’ Hennig for that.

“Heck, I saw a story out there, something like, ‘Geez, Mr. Perfect gave Shawn and Hunter their names.’ I’m like, ‘I gave him the Triple H name.’ We were calling him that a long time before — that was another one. ‘I don’t want you calling him that.’ We wanted to call him Triple H a lot earlier. Even when he was just Hunter Hearst Hemsley, because we were just running around together. It’s from ‘Double A’ Arn Anderson… I thought… ‘Triple H,’ you know what I mean? So we would just call him that. We would just call him that, running around and stuff, and then we had mentioned it to Vince (McMahon) one time. Like, ‘No, it’s too much like ‘Double A’ Arn Anderson.’ ‘It’s nothing like it.’ One’s double, the other’s triple… You lose sometimes but then, I think it was the Hell in a Cell match. We were leaning on quite a bit with the Attitude (Era) stuff and all that, and then he’s like, ‘You know what? We can start calling him Triple H.’ I was like, ‘Oh, okay’ so, that’s how I got it but I would like to go on record is that that was mine before Curt’s but Curt (Hennig) does get all the credit for The Heartbreak Kid for sure. Oh yeah. Absolutely, yeah… It was from a Chris LeDoux song. Curt was big into country and western and I used to ride with him a lot obviously… He put it (cassette tape) in and it’s ‘Shot Full of Love.’ It was a Chris LeDoux song and it was Heartbreak Kid. At the time, it was like, ‘Ehh, it was alright.’ In your mind, you envision yourself being cooler. Not so much ‘The Game.’ I knew it wasn’t gonna be that cool. I thought it’d be something a bit more masculine and then, obviously, I just blurted it out once in a promo…”

Elsewhere in the chat, Michaels revealed that his wife negotiated his latest WWE contract. For more on that, click here.

If the quote in this article is used, please credit What’s Your Story? With Steph McMahon with an H/T to Fightful for the transcription.