WWE: Freddie Prinze Jr. Reveals the Pitch That Angered Triple H
Freddie Prinze Jr. has been a goldmine of interesting stories from his time as part of the WWE writer's room, and his latest story involves two big-time superstars. On the latest episode of his Wrestling with Freddie podcast, Prinze Jr talked about Jeff Hardy's journey to the WWE Championship back in 2008, and it turns out Triple H was not on board with the story he was pitching at the time. Prinze Jr. pitched Hardy winning the title, and to back up his argument he provided Hardy's latest merchandise sales, which were bigger than Triple H's at the time, and the end result led to The Game leaving the meeting in a pretty huffy mood.
"So I start pitching why this is a good idea [in a production meeting]," Prinze Jr. said. "I'm telling you, this is an honest story, we've done nothing but tell the truth. If he has a relapse, if he goes down again, you take the title off him. You've taken it off him before for stuff like that on smaller belts. I said we've taken it off of other people in a day. I said we can pull this off. You know, I'm giving this passionate plea, it's about five minutes long, and then Hunter starts shooting it down, again. You know, I don't want it to be a fight. I don't want it to be an argument. I don't want to have enemies in the company, but I don't want this whole story that we've built up to let the fans of Jeff Hardy down."
At that point, McMahon cleared the room so that he could meet with Bruce Prichard, Kevin Dunn, and Triple H.
"We're waiting outside, we wanna know the answer," Prinze Jr. said. "The production meeting on this day was on the same floor as a VIP cafeteria, so there's like this empty cafeteria behind us. A lot of free space. I'm sitting there and looking at Freebird [Michael P.S Hayes] and I go 'what do you think?' and he goes 'I don't know, you did your best!' He's like trying to prep me for failure. So now I'm like shoot, man, this is not gonna happen. This is seriously getting killed right now?"
"Listen, again, Hunter was proven right at the end of the day. I mean Jeff got in trouble less than a year after this happened. They gave him the other belt after that, the other championship. And then he got in trouble and then got in bigger trouble and had to leave the company for a while. So at the end of the day, he was right, but all of a sudden the door swings open and only Hunter comes out, and he doesn't even look at me. Right, and he walks by. So this now means two things; one, this dude doesn't like me anymore or is probably going to work against me now, which is what happened. Or two, Jeff's going to be the World Heavyweight Champion!"
As Prinze Jr. points out, ultimately there were some issues, but Hardy did return to the company for a great run later on.
H/T Wrestling Inc