Triple H spoke with Pwinsider.com about the new Global Cruiserweight Series that will be premiering on the WWE Network in July. Here are the highlights.
On the show and finding new talent for it:
“I would say the vast majority [of talents on the series] will be non-contracted or long-term contracted WWE talents, ” explains Levesque. “We haven’t finalized the selection process, watching tapes and seeing who we want to work with and all of that. It’s going to be a discovery process. Look, I want to have the best in the world. I don’t want to negate anyone from that process because they are under contract to us. At the same time, I’m looking for the best in the world and the brightest around to give them a platform that they’ve never had. I’m certainly looking at the vast majority from being from the outside [of WWE.] When I say Global, I mean Global. We are recruiting from everywhere. UK, Japan, China, to find the best talent. That doesn’t mean we are going to find someone everywhere, but we are really trying to turn things over and really find someone from every part of the globe to be part of this and show the world who they are and what they can do.”
On trying to make news stars from this program:
“This will be in-ring [series]”, said Levesque, “But there will be a lot of….if you just take talent that you don’t know anything about and it’s someone no one has heard of before, they can do anything they want in the ring, but it’s just not as exciting. You aren’t as emotionally invested into who they are as characters as performers, as people, as performers, as where they are trying to go in their careers. I want people to learn about these talents and learn about who these talents are. This is not just me saying I’m giving you a platform and you have eight minutes in the ring and ‘Go get ’em, kid.’ This is, ‘I’m going to tell the world who you are. I’m going to tell them what you do. I’m going to tell you bits and pieces about your journey so far in your career and I’m going to give you an opportunity with someone else to really shine in the ring and show everyone who you are and what you can do’ and really allow you to learn about these guys in this tournament.”
On how he came up with the idea for the series:
At the end of the day, I was just having this conversation with my wife. I kind of approach this as I’m just a huge fan. I started out that way and I will be that way my whole life. I kind of do what I think I’m going to dig and that I’m going to like and that’s the way I approach it. There’s this talent that I like and I’d like to go and see what they can do. So, I push for going to see what I can do with that. I think it’s important for everything to always grow and become bigger. I’ve looked for a long time at that population of talent in that under 205 lb. category, the Cruiserweight category and thought, ‘Man, there’s a lot of really talented performers’ and I don’t mean guys that can just do flips. Really talented performers that have characters and can speak are really good. They are underutilized to me and they don’t have the platform to show what they can do. I feel like that’s a miss. Not intentionally a miss, but just something that we’ve left sitting on the table, and I don’t want to leave stuff sitting there on the table.”
You can read the entire interview here.
