Triple H: I Thought I Killed Marty Garner When I Hit Him With The Spiked Pedigree

This incident happened 30 years ago.

In a new interview with Variety, Triple H and Shawn Michaels spoke about a plethora of things, including the time Triple H thought he accidentally killed someone in the ring when he hit a spiked pedigree on an extra (Marty Garner AKA Cham Pain) and the reaction he got backstage following the match.

“It’s funny, when I first came in here, I had started using a version of the Pedigree in WCW and they wanted me to do — I think they had seen (Diamond) Dallas (Page) do the Diamond Cutter or something and they wanted me to use that so I used it for a couple of matches on TV. I didn’t feel comfortable using it and I felt like somebody else is already doing it and I said, ‘Well, I have this other move that I did before’ and I did the Pedigree and I remember Chief (Jay Strongbow) coming to me like, ‘Well, why didn’t you do that the whole time?’ I was like, ‘Because you guys told me not to.’ But, that kid that took the — I think his name was Cham Pain — was a friend of The Hardys. He came in to do an extra, and he’s a good hand and all that stuff. We just talked about it beforehand — doing the Pedigree — and when I went to do it, he went straight up and down and I tried my hardest to hold ‘em up. Because I was like, oh, I can piledrive him and he landed–I thought I killed him. I was like, ‘Holy sh*t.’ I was like, ‘Are you okay?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m okay.’ When I walked back through Gorilla (Position), everybody was staring at me like, ‘What’d you do?’ I was like, ‘He said he’s fine.’ It’s not like I threw him up there. He just jumped up there and he was totally fine with it so, we got lucky…”

At the time, Levesque was wrestling under the name Jean-Paul Levesque, he would soon move on from that name before finally discovering himself as Triple H, with his variety of nicknames like the Game or the Cerebral Assassin.

h/t to Fightful for the transcription.