The Eternal WWE Rivalry Of The Rock Vs Triple H | Feud Forever

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The King of Kings, and The Most Electric Man In Sports Entertainment. The Game, and The People’s Champion. Paul, and Dwayne.

This is the fourth in our series of articles on the power dynamics behind the scenes in WWE. 

There’s the rise of the Bloodline dynasty that’s slowly taken over WWE.

There’s the Fall of the McMahon Family, once all-powerful, but now totally removed from their own company.

And then The Great One, where two decades in Hollywood turned him from arguably the most unselfish top guy in wrestling, to its most effective backstage politicker.

But two names kept coming up, where they would do battle with each other over and over and over, both in the ring, and behind-the-scenes. 

I’m talking about Paul and Dwayne. I’m talking about Triple H and The Rock.

Theirs is an oddly conjoined story of one-sided jealousy, backstage sabotage, rises to the very top of their respective fields, and then coming back together in an oddly tense co-existence. 

This is the eternal rivalry of The Rock and Triple H. This is Feud Forever.

CHAPTER 1: WWF DEBUTS

Triple H was born without either a single ‘H’ in his name, or a silver spoon in his mouth, on July 27th, 1969, as Paul Levesque. 

In his teenage years, he entered and won several bodybuilding competitions, and started work as the manager of a gym in his hometown of Nashua, New Hampshire.

It was there he became connected to the former wrestler Killer Kowalski, who was running a professional wrestling school in Malden, Massachusetts, just under an hour’s drive away. He started training there in early 1990, in a class that also included a young Chyna and Perry Saturn. 

He made his professional wrestling debut in Kowalski’s own promotion, the International Wrestling Federation, two years later on the 24th March 1992.

He would wrestle around the Northeast on the indies, until he was signed to a one-year contract to WCW in early 1994 – where he would debut one of the more infamously bad names in professional wrestling history: Terra Ryzing. 

A few months later, Levesque dropped the Terra Ryzing character to play an upper class snob based on his own name: Jean-Paul Lévesque – speaking with a French accent, despite the fact that he couldn’t speak French. 

But he was getting nowhere in WCW, so after a year he jumped to the WWF.

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