Triple H is hanging up his pro wrestling boots. While appearing on ESPN’s First Take with Stephen A. Smith, Triple H, whose real name is Paul Michael Levesque announced that he is retiring from in-ring competition. This news comes as WWE is getting ready for its biggest show of the year, WrestleMania 38 which takes place in Dallas, Texas on Saturday, April 2 and Sunday, April 3.
“For me, as far as in-ring, which I get a lot, I’m done,” Triple H told Smith, as transcribed by Wrestling Inc. “I won’t – I would never wrestle again. First, I have a defibrillator in my chest. Which, it’s probably not a good idea for me to get zapped on live TV.” Recently, Triple H has been dealing with health issues. In September of last year, WWE announced that Triple H underwent successful heart surgery a week earlier in Connecticut. The surgery was needed after Triple H suffered a cardiac event.
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“I had viral pneumonia,” Triple H recalled. “My lungs were inflamed. and as the next couple of days went on and I got home it got increasingly worse and my wife saw some blood and stuff that I was coughing up. I went and got checked and I – it was coming from the viral pneumonia but I had fluid in my lungs. I had some fluid around my heart. So they followed up on it. Did an EKG and echo and everything and basically the way your heart pumps out 55-65% of your ejection fraction is a good number. I was at 30. and I got a quick text message saying, ‘Don’t take time. Pack a bag real quick, head to the emergency room. I’ll fill you in on the way.
“So by the time I got to the emergency room, my ejection fraction had gone down to 22,” Triple H continued. “Which, I was in heart failure. Bad. By the next morning – as they figured that out that evening – by the next morning as they got the MRI done and they were sending me in for a heart cath my ejection fraction was down to 12. So I was nosediving and sort of at the one-yard line of where you want to be – or where you don’t want to be, really, for your family and your future.”
Triple H, who is WWE’s Executive Vice President of Global Talent Strategy & Development, has not returned to a daily workload but has done some work for the company in recent months. Before the surgery, Triple H was running NXT but Shawn Michaels has been overseeing it since his medical leave. Triple H’s last match was in June 2019 when he teamed up with Shinsuke Nakamura in a win over Robert Roode and Samoa Joe in a non televised event in Japan. His last match on TV was earlier in the month when he faced Randy Orton in Sudi Arabia. In his career, Triple H, 52, has won the WWE Championship nine times, the World Heavyweight Championship five times and is the second Grand Slam Champion in WWE history.
