WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque appeared at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to discuss several topics, including how former WWE CEO and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon was asked about John Cena’s heel turn during U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address.
Triple H said, “Just recently, John Cena, when we talk about generational stars, for 20-plus years, has been the ultimate good guy in WWE. For him personally, that’s just who he is. Done more wishes for Make-a-Wish than any other celebrity in history. He’s just an incredible human being. But his character, John Cena, his character has been the ultimate good guy for 20-plus years. The Rock, who now has a character developed called ‘The Final Boss’, he’s on the board of TKO legitimately, but it’s part of the character, and he has all this power and control. He just used some of that power and control, and John Cena just turned heel, became a bad guy, for the first time. This was one of the biggest stories we have ever done. Within a few hours, that moment had over 100 million views on social media, within hours. It was front and center on SportsCenter. It resonated everywhere. Jon Stewart used it as a vehicle to explain Washington D.C. and political power with a new administration. I think it’s no secret my mother-in-law is the Secretary of Education, and she just had a moment the other day where she was walking out of the State of the Union, and the one question someone shouted at her was, ‘Ms. McMahon, as the new Secretary of Education, what do you think about John Cena turning heel?’ It resonated so massively. It transcended everything. It was water cooler talk around the globe and made headlines everywhere.”
On how women athletes at the WWE Performance Center tend to pick up the sport faster than the men:
“I will say this, we have a performance center in Orlando, Florida. We have a 100 to 120 athletes at any given time training in there on a day-to-day basis. I’m not sure exactly what the mix is, but a large percentage of women, large percentage of men. We have an NIL program that recruits across college athletics on every level. So women are a big focus of what we’re doing leading to the future and how we’re training and getting them up. Across the board, the women pick this up way faster than men do [laughs]. It’s an amazing thing. Shawn Michaels runs that program for us, and I will it to Shawn all the time, it is amazing to me that we’re getting these women that come in, start training with us at ground zero, just like the men, and six months in, eight months in, nine months in, he’s putting those women on TV already live, and the guys are down here, and I’m not sure why that is. It may be just [they’re] smarter, whatever that is. But it resonates that way, and it’s incredible to see that sort of, ‘Here you go. Just go at it.’ It’s incredible to watch it happen.”
On the company’s 2025 events in Perth, Australia taking place in the fall:
“Right now, we’re going three weeks back to back of live events, non-televised. But also each week, Raw and SmackDown coming from international markets, and markets that we wouldn’t necessarily go to. Barcelona, Germany, places that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to go to with TV. We have Perth coming up in the fall, we have France coming up, Clash in Paris. The ability for us to hit the markets that are most important for Netflix but also most important for us, and to really service and become a global brand in a bigger way than we ever have before.”
You can check out Triple H’s comments in the video below.
