Before Triple H was the CCO of WWE, married to Stephanie McMahon, or a multi-time WWE World Champion, he was a member of the most popular backstage faction, The Kliq, which featured babyfaces and heels who hung out together in an act of clear Kayfabe rebellion.
Now, at the time, fans didn’t really know about this friendship unless they were really into the nerdy world of unofficial newsletters like The Wrestling Observer, but that all changed with the “Curtain Call,” when the four members of the friend group hugged it out at Maddison Square Garden. With Scott Hall and Kevin Nash leaving WWE for WCW at the end of the show and Shawn Michaels untouchable as one of the promotion’s top stars, “The Game” was punished most for the situation, losing his spot on the card and having to work his way back up it as a result.
Triple H explains how the Curtain Call changed WWE forever
Discussing what happened at the time and the conversation he had with his future father-in-law at the time, Triple H explained to Greg & The Morning Buzz in the morning what went down and how it signaled a change in the business.
“It was a huge deal. When all that went down and I took the brunt of the heat for it because I was the only one that could. Kevin and Scott were leaving. Shawn was world champ, what are they going to do to him? I took the heat. No problem,” Levesque said via Fightful.
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“As I was leaving Vince’s office, after a thorough a** chewing, as I was walking out, I looked back at him and I said, ‘Let me ask you this, Vince. If this is so wrong. If lifting that curtain is so wrong, why was it the loudest thing at Madison Square Garden that night? It was sold out. The biggest reaction, by far, was that. The business is changing, and it’s passing people by, and they’re not seeing it yet.’ He said, ‘You might be right, but that doesn’t change where we are right now. The punishment is what it is.’ That was the truth. The business is changing. Fast forward, the internet comes in, and everybody knows what we do. They know the real stuff. They know who is married and who is in relationships, or at least they think they do. Half the stuff on the internet is wrong, but it’s all out there, and they know how this works.”
And the rest, as they say, was history; The Outsiders eventually formed the NWO in WWE, Vince McMahon screwed Bret Hart at Survivor Series to truly kill Kayfabe in 1997, and the line between wrestlers inside and out of the ring has blurred even more. Now, wrestlers have web series where they shoot angles and break down the walls between on-screen feuds; some are very publically friends with wrestlers they are feuding with, which may or may not be brought into the storyline, depending on what a promoter wants to book.