Triple H addresses talent requesting releases online

Multiple wrestlers signed to WWE have publicly asked to be released from their contracts lately. No one has been granted their release since Ronnie “Tye Dillinger/Shawn Spears” Arneill at the beginning of this year, but it hasn’t stopped others from asking.

During his conference call with the media earlier today (Nov. 20), Triple H - working his Paul Levesque, Executive Vice President of Talent, Live Events and Creative gimmick - was asked about WWE’s approach to public release requests.

The Game didn’t offer a very clear answer with regard to corporate strategy, discursively talking about guys just doing it to work the internet, and temporary flare-ups between talent & management that blow over. But he did make it pretty clear he doesn’t have a whole lot of respect for people who do business in public.

Here’s what he said:

“Some of this, for some talent, some of it is legit. Some of it, in a moment of time, um, I think when you get to the bottom of it, I don’t understand people airing - if you have an issue, talk to us. If you think ‘oh, I’m gonna go put that on the media’ that’s not a way to go about doing your business. If I had a complaint with a talent, I don’t go on Twitter and complain to them, I speak to them. So I’ve never understood that process, if it’s legit.

Now there are a lot of people out there just getting clicks... I watch guys do it all the time. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t, sometimes they just think it’s funny. There’s a moment in time with they hit something and it gets them a ton of buzz and they go [laughs] ‘I’m just messing with people’. You know, it is what it is, you let people say what they’ve got to say. But for us, there’s also a lot of talent that - I think there are moments in time when things happen, people get frustrated, they say some stuff. It’s like any long-term relationship, you say some stuff, you’re fighting and you’re like ‘I don’t want to see you any more’ and then you come back a few minutes later and are like ‘I was just mad at the moment, and of course I want to stay in this relationship’ and you know, [laughs] it is what it is.

But there’s a silliness to it, to me there’s a maturity issue of it’s not how you handle business. Anybody that’s out there that is serious about it that’s talking on the internet - that ain’t the place to do it. We all have phones, we all have cell phones... you handle your business like a professional. Everybody likes to think we don’t stick to the word and everybody likes to say professional wrestlers, the key word in front of that - professional. That’s what we’re trying to change about the business and make people more professional.”

Without knowing the details behind folks like Luke Harper, Mike Kanellis, Sin Cara and others tweeting release requests, it’s difficult for us to judge their professionalism. I don’t think anyone else should tweet theirs, though.

Unless it’s just for clicks, I guess. It certainly doesn’t seem like it will lead to their being released.