Triple H speaks ahead of the Wednesday Night War.
This Wednesday, Oct. 2, the war officially begins as AEW and NXT go head-to-head at 8 p.m. ET. Thus far, the two companies have traded shots through the media, with no one firing a bigger cannonball than Kenny Omega when he said NXT superstars would be the opening match to his main event, calling them "developmental talent" while AEW has "real stars."
The in-character promo drew the ire of many fans online, but NXT Founder Triple H was unfazed.
"It doesn't matter to me. I'm not sure if you're aware of social media and that landscape. It's a fairly negative place (laughs). If you're going to get thin-skinned and read into stuff and get angry about stuff that people say, it's gonna be a rough life," said Triple H in an interview with Sporting News. "There's a statement about opinions over the years I've heard. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. Everybody is entitled to put an executive tag on the front of their name and think that's a cool thing. Whatever. It's all good. Bring your best show. If that's how you want to look at it, bring your best show. I'll bring my best show. We're all good and the winners are the fans and they'll choose what they want to watch and how. It doesn't matter to me. It really doesn't and it's not my interest and my interest is the best show possible. I'm going to take the talent roster that we have, I'm going to take the in-ring product that NXT has that I would put up against anything in the world, bar none, and I'm going to put on the best show possible every single week for two hours. My competition is everything else out, but the truth is for our fans, I just want to deliver the best product that I can to them. That's as far as it goes."
A big difference between AEW and NXT will be the respective venues. AEW will be held in arenas that hold thousands of fans. Meanwhile, NXT will remain at Full Sail University each week, which holds roughly 400 fans. Triple H doesn't believe size matters when it comes to the arena.
"I'm of the opinion that if you are tuning into a live event like what we do and you're counting the people in the crowd, you've missed the plot. The entertainment aspect doesn't change. The in-ring, bell-to-bell product is as good as anything else on the planet, bar none. The crowd there is crazy hot and they built this. And sometimes people say they do their own business, they do their own entertaining things," he stated. "I think that's fun and I think that's fun for people watching. But I think even if you looked at it and said it's a little smaller than I would have thought, five seconds later, once that match starts, you forget all about that. It doesn't matter. I almost feel like that is part of the magic of it. It feels more intimate. It feels grittier. It feels more in-your-face. It feels a bit more exclusive to me and I love that difference."
Triple H continued, "To me, I'm a fan from day one. That's how I got into this and I look at it this way: If I'm a music fan, do I want to see Metallica in a stadium or does it really matter to me if they're playing at the theater down the road? It's the same. And that intensity ... it's almost crazier at the theater. I'd almost rather go to it there. It's intimate and tight. I'd rather it be that.
"There's something that spreads it out and it loses that special, underground, sort of vibe, that a little more dangerous vibe. I've had people from outside our business come, even say WrestleMania weekends when we've been in slightly smaller venues with NXT, and say that they went to the stadium show for WrestleMania and it was crazy and epic and everything about it. It's the Super Bowl. The grandeur and the spectacle is unbelievable. And they went to NXT and they came back to me and, not that one is better than the other, but NXT felt like you were sitting on the ground in a riot. To me, there's a couple of cool things that you can brag around. One is going to the Super Bowl and seeing that there was 100,000 people there. It was sold out. I couldn't hear. Oh my god, the spectacle, the stadium, that's grandiose and all those things. And then there's also the feeling of being in that riot environment that puts your adrenaline through the roof. They're both incredible, but they're different. I want to embrace that difference. I'm not trying to be the 100,000 people spectacle; I'm trying to be that intense feeling of sitting on the ground in a riot," said Triple H.
NXT will go live for two-hours on USA beginning at 8 p.m. ET on Oct. 2. At the same time, AEW Dynamite premieres on TNT.
