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By Ella Jay/Feb. 23, 2024 1:44 pm EST
While professional wrestling may be a scripted combat sport, it still presents an inherent risk of injury. Given these physical implications, WWE Chief Content Officer Paul "Triple H" Levesque stresses the importance of not only keeping yourself safe in the ring, but your opponent as well. In fact, Levesque says the latter is the first lesson that hopefuls are educated on in training school.
"The first thing that you're taught when you start learning how to do this [is to] protect your opponent at all times," Levesque told "Xav & Michelle for Breakfast." "It's a team effort. Everybody's working together to make something look incredibly realistic hopefully, but be as safe as possible. And there's a fine line there. Mistakes happen all the time, and half the time injuries happen on simple things that nobody thinks you're going to get injured on, but you turn the wrong way or something. There are people that are just not necessarily the safest or reckless in the business and they usually weed themselves out."
Like Levesque pointed out, injuries are seemingly inevitable in the professional wrestling industry. Unfortunately for WWE, the injury bug has hit their locker room hard in recent months. Since December, three of WWE's top main roster stars – Charlotte Flair, Seth Rollins, and CM Punk – have sustained significant physical damage. In the cases of Flair and Punk, their injuries will keep them sidelined well beyond WrestleMania 40. The "WWE NXT" brand has endured a similar fate, with stars like Wes Lee, Cora Jade, and Shotzi expected to miss several months of action due to back surgery and a pair of torn ACLs, respectively.
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit "Xav & Michelle for Breakfast" with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.