World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) star Triple H will not return to the ring.
He told Stephen A. Smith the news during ESPN’s “First Take” on Friday. This follows a bout with viral pneumonia last September that left him wondering whether or not he would survive. Triple H, whose real name is Paul Levesque, even got choked up telling Smith.
“I will never wrestle again,” Levesque, who is also an executive vice president with WWE and married to Stephanie McMahon, a former wrestler, daughter of Vince and Linda McMahon and the chief brand officer for WWE, said. “First of all, I have a defibrillator in my chest, which, you know, probably not a good idea for me to get zapped on live TV.”
Triple H made his WWE debut in 1995, is a 14-time world champion and managed a minor crossover into the world of entertainment, co-starring with Wesley Snipes in “Blade: Trinity” and in several WWE-adjacent animated projects like “Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery” and “Surf’s Up 2: WaveMania.”
While suffering from viral pneumonia, Levesque said that he was coughing up blood, and when he went to the hospital, they discovered fluid around his heart and in his lungs. This led to heart failure. He recovered, but he will stay out of the ring for good (his last match was in 2019 and in the same year battled Dave Bautista, a similar crossover star, in WrestleMania).
Levesque is literally and figuratively a part of the WWE family (he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2019) and will undoubtedly have a long history with the organization going forward.