Triple H Explains His Choice For All Time Favorite Opponent

On Friday night during SmackDown, WWE honored Triple H with a "25 Years of Triple H" tribute. Well, honored might be a bit of a stretch, it was more of a roasting. There were indeed tributes played throughout the show for some of his greatest moments and highlights over the years, but when we got to the main event segment, it was Triple H sharing the ring with Shawn Michaels, and Vince McMahon making a surprise appearance on the ramp, that served as the main feature of the evening. And both men proceeded to give "The Game" a hard time.

During a recent interview, Triple H talked about his greatest opponents of all time. Surely, the man has had some fantastic feuds throughout the years and names such as Mick Foley, The Rock, Steve Austin, Batista, Randy Orton, John Cena, and others all come to mind. But one name stood out above the rest for Triple H. That man was the same man who roasted him in the ring on Friday night: Shawn Michaels.

"There's been a bunch of them," Hunter told ESPN. "Honorable mentions, for sure: Austin, 'Taker, Rock for sure, Mick Foley. But if there's one guy where I could have rolled out of bed on five minutes' notice, and as long as I got my boots tied in time we could have gone out there and done 45 minutes and tore it up without ever looking at each other beforehand? It would have had to have been Shawn.

"When we're talking 25 years, we're talking 25 years of friendship and traveling up and down the road. We joke about it now: I know what he's going to say sometimes before he says it. He knew what I was going to do in the ring before I did it. Even now, doing NXT, we can be in an arena watching something that we're trying to produce, and we make eye contact and know exactly what each other are thinking. So if I was going to say anybody, it would be Shawn. Which is more of a credit to him than to me, because he probably could have done that with anybody."