Triple H recently spoke with Scott Dargis for NBC Sports; you can read a few highlights below:
Triple H compares and contrasts putting together the Cruiserweight Classic and the Mae Young Classic, and the opportunities presented to the wrestlers in those respective divisions:
“I think the Cruiserweight Classic was easier from a sense of being able to find video and opinions on talent. There are cruiserweights working all over. The opportunities for guys at that level in our business is numerous. While not lucrative necessarily, there’s guys doing it all over the place and all you need is a phone right now to post your stuff up, so you can find footage of people everywhere. It made it easy.
The women is a lot different. The women don’t get booked on the independents nearly as much. That opportunity is very small and that was kind of the key about creating the Mae Young Classic. The thought about it in the very beginning was to create that opportunity. There’s a respect level that I have for these women and it speaks to the difference you’re talking about.
The cruiserweights were the guys that while they might have said ‘Oh I’m smaller, I don’t know if I would make it in WWE,’ you had some examples of smaller guys having success like Rey Mysterio, but there were still other opportunities. You could travel around and get booked all of the time. There was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow no matter how you were doing it. The ability to stay active was there.
For the women, they got into the business for the same reason all of us did. They love it. They watched it one day and thought it was the greatest thing they ever saw and thought I have to do this. Except there was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There was the opportunity for maybe a woman here or there and those were even limited. Even the bookings, if you go to any show in any little armory around the world there’s probably one women’s match on there, if you’re lucky. If one woman is on the show she’s usually someone’s valet.”
Triple H comments on the decision to release the episodes of the Mae Young Classic at once instead of airing it weekly like the Cruiserweight Classic:
“Well I think for us it’s an experiment in that our fanbase skews fairly young. Our fans sort of over index in their digital use. We wanted to see where our fans would net out in what they really like. There’s something in the world right now, like you take Netflix for example, they take a season of a new show and put it up at one time because people like to binge watch.
House of Cards or whatever comes out … I don’t watch any TV so I’m going to get into uncomfortable realm right now (laughs) … those shows come out at once and you get people that just sit home on a weekend and watch the whole season.
We found that while people were uber-interested in the Cruiserweight Classic, that as it started to get into the later episodes, even though the matches were getting more important and the stars were getting bigger and you were learning more and more about them, the component of when it aired got less and less important and as opposed to appointment watching, they were just watching it whenever they wanted. They transitioned from the air dates to the VOD.
This is an attempt by us to see what they prefer. We’re going to do the brackatology show, put it out and then we’re going to drop those first four episodes, which is the first round and you can binge watch that first round and then that next week you’re going to get the next batch of episodes and then that takes you to the finals the following week.”
