Triple H vs. Booker T Fails to Realize the Purpose of WrestleMania

Call me a romantic, but "racist keeps championship for a couple more months" isn't the sort of Grand Storytelling the event is marketed as showcasing.

WWE

WrestleMania takes place in March or April, but in the WWE universe (the metaphorical one, not the consumer of product), it is the end of the year, the beginning of another. There are two good WrestleMania stories: the valiant champion faces his biggest threat, and the cowardly heel at last gets his due. They work best when they’re given just enough time — give Roman Reigns years with the strap and it’s like slow torture, but give Randy Savage a year and you have one of the greatest stories in wrestling history. It’s a science. A very messy, very imprecise science, but wrestling is a matter of the heart, and when is that ever simple?

I want to talk about this match’s central flaw, and I will, but first I need to talk about how Triple H’s victory over Booker T fundamentally failed the purpose of a WrestleMania title match. There have been worse WrestleMania main events, but I don’t need to tell you how little workrate factors into how I feel about a wrestling match. This is one of the worst, especially thinking along the lines of what a WrestleMania title match was meant to accomplish, which was to establish the year’s top draw.

WWE wasn’t exactly bulletproof on this front going into WrestleMania XIX. Hotshotting the title onto Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania IX, Steve Austin’s heel turn at WrestleMania X7, the systematic embarrassment of Chris Jericho at WrestleMania X8 — these were bad decisions for the business, but you can see the logic behind them: squeezing the last bit of juice out of Hulkamania during a business decline, giving Steve Austin something new to do, riding the high of Triple H’s return from the injury that doesn’t get enough credit for how thoroughly it derailed the company before the WCW/ECW InVasion angle. Sometimes you step up to the plate, swing, and miss. That’s what happens when you’re creating narrative entertainment on the fly, when there is no way to predict or even really prepare for someone to be taken off the board by injury. 

Here, at WrestleMania XIX, they decided to do something unprecedented, setting up a truly vile heel to take a fall to a wrestler in Booker T who had earned this moment in character and as a performer, only to have the heel win. I think the kindest thing you can say about the decision to put Triple H over at WrestleMania XIX is that there was safer money in having the soon-to-debut Goldberg chase a heel Triple H, even if they decided to pull the trigger at Unforgiven and not SummerSlam. I think the kindest thing you can say about the decision in retrospect is that WWE largely learned their lesson from this storyline, which was one of their first to really dig into the real lives of their wrestlers beyond the “I dreamed of being a champion” angle that defined many of their stars. Later, when heels picked at histories of addiction and abuse, from Eddie Guerrero’s “addicted to life” championship triumph to Chris Jericho repeating the phrase “Punk’s drunk daddy” a bunch, they knew what buttons they were pressing, and which button they ultimately had to press at the end to make it feel like their characters had reached a point of closure. 

Unfortunately, they learned that by fucking up here, when the issue at hand wasn’t a personal demon one could conceivably slay within the confines of a wrestling ring, but a legitimate societal problem — the way arrest histories follow Black men throughout their lives and block them from opportunities they’ve worked far harder than their white peers to earn. The storyline leading into this match personifies cultural racism in the persons of Triple H, Ric Flair, and Jerry “The King” Lawler, respectively an Iron Cross enthusiast engaged to the owner of the company’s daughter, a sad drunk from North Carolina who used to be somebody when he was younger, and a guy who talks a lot of shit about Booker T’s 1987 robbery arrest for someone who was arrested on the charge of statutory rape in 1993. They, collectively, are the victors here, the racist champion, his racist friend, and a racist color commentator who would have been fired mid-match were wrestling to operate like any other sports league or entertainment entity short of Fox News.

I haven’t really talked much about the match itself, which I would call “mechanically fine” except that its finish is utter horseshit, Triple H at the peak of his Pedegree-as-a-megaton-bomb powers. Reign of Terror Triple H is an entirely different animal than any other version of The Game, even the one that nerfed (a frankly overrated) Chris Jericho the year before and the one who tried and failed to nerf Daniel Bryan 11 years later. Never a great worker, being the heel champion of Raw allowed him to expand his horizons when it came to his vanity-flattering attempt to emulate world champions who were. The Harley Race high knee was joined by a sleeper hold and the Indian death lock, which Jim Ross notes here that he hasn’t seen in about 10 years — a classic wrestler! A student of the game! 

Nobody gives a shit, though, because the way he goes about emulation is akin to when a grocery store releases a seltzer water that tastes like Dr. Pepper, or, to use the parlance of the box, has “a hint of the Doctor flavor.” That’s Triple H as a worker and as a booker, a guy who fetishizes things like Dusty Rhodes’ Great American Bash callsheets but whose ultimate ambition is to be Vince McMahon. He does a good enough job obfuscating this in his position of power now, having been given the gift of McMahon’s embarrassment and other wrestling bookers like Tony Khan and Billy Pumpkins’ fumble-fucking around with money they made outside of the business, but in the ring it’s all I can see: a man who desperately wants to be a classic champion but who never really figured out how to make that leap because he never really had to.

Booker T, by contrast, was one of the best wrestlers of his generation, a signature talent in a company, WCW, that never really knew what to do with him until it was too late. This was a problem, of course — if you were on the wrong side of the Monday Night War, there was only so much WWE was willing to invest in you — but Booker was so good that he came out of Vince Russo’s WCW and the InVasion not only without permanent embarrassment, but primed for better things. With all of this, his personal story, and a pinfall over Triple H behind him, WrestleMania XIX should have, by all rights, been that better thing. But it wasn’t, and Booker T would have to wait until 2006 to win the World Heavyweight Championship. A year later, he’d request his release from the company due to burnout. He’s been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame twice, but he never got his due.

Rating: *

I’ll have a bonus essay about the Booker T/Triple H feud up for paid subscribers later this week — I have a lot to say about it, but it’s more than what reasonably fits into a single newsletter.