Triple H on Why 2019 Was the Right Year for Chyna's WWE Hall of Fame Bid

When WWE announced Chyna would be joining D-Generation X's 2019 Hall of Fame induction, the [...]

By Jeremy Snodgrass

When WWE announced Chyna would be joining D-Generation X's 2019 Hall of Fame induction, the wrestling world threw a party in her name. However, it wasn't long until fans starting poking WWE for not doing it sooner. Chyna, who may be the most influential female Superstar in WWE history, had to wait 17 years just to be inducted — posthumously. A stint in the adult film industry is what WWE claim delayed Chyna's induction, and that stance drew its own share of criticism from fans and former Superstars. But despite the salty customers, Triple H says that 2019, the year of the first-ever all-women's WrestleMania main event, was the perfect year for Chyna to be enshrined.

In an interview with CBS' State of Combat podcast, Triple H explained that even though Chyna's induction may seem tardy some but compared to someone like The Honky Tonk Man, who wrapped up his active WWE career in the early '90s, her wait has been brief.

"After she left the business and everything else prevented [her Hall of Fame induction] for a period of time, it's funny because people look at it and go, 'Finally, they are putting her in,'" Triple H said. "But she's going into a class with Honky Tonk Man. Like, he's just getting in there and is a generation before. It's not a time-limit type thing. ... I'm thrilled that it's this year, partly because finally the time has passed where everything can just happen and it can be right for her where the moment of putting her in the Hall of Fame for this manner is about her accomplishments and not about anything else. That was always my bigger point of this. You can't do it when [the negative] becomes the conversation. The conversation needs to be about her accomplishments and what she did here."

There's also the inescapable fact that Triple H and Chyna used to be romantic before he married Stephanie McMahon. While that has fed no shortage of fan fiction, Chyna's involvement in pornography was the reason WWE stuck to.

Regardless of timing and how it came about, Triple h seems genuinely thrilled for Chyna and her family.

"It's awesome. I'm thrilled for her as the human being that I knew, for her family and for her sister, who I knew," Triple H said. "There is probably not a woman who has ever made as big of an impact as she did. Somebody that transcended the business on her own and I'm sure will be in the Hall of Fame sometime on her own. I think it's fitting she is in there with DX in the beginning because it's how she started, and I think it's what it should be."

Chyna passed away in 2016 after an apparently accidental overdose. Her absence this will make the ceremony bittersweet, however Triple H thinks her being added to such a female-empowering weekend it poetic.

"If you could go back and say it to her, it's something that in that point of time you would be like, 'No way, that would have been inconceivable,'" Triple H commented. "She probably inspired a lot of the women that are doing what they are doing right now, and it couldn't have been any more of the right time and the right spot, and it all happened for a reason that way."

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