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Select Answers: What makes great selling, Triple H booking, TKO PLE
🕑 Added 2025-12-05 17:00:16 +0000 UTCWelcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.
When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.
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Watching Dolph Ziggler again reminds us how good he is at selling an opponent’s moves. But what are the particular skills that make someone good at selling? It seems something very difficult to master.
Selling is such a subjective element of pro wrestling, too. I've seen people who legitimately believe he's an overseller and making everything about him. There's nothing that is universally loved. My view of selling is does it look like a natural, or at least humorous motion from the move? Does it look effective? Does it make the move look better? All of those are very important. The ability to cleanly bump is important, but the willingness to unconventionally bump is also important. Above anything, you have to be willing to look ridiculous in doing so. Nic Nemeth checks all the boxes.
Why do you think triple h’s booking style and philosophy changed from him booking nxt to him booking raw and smackdown? There’s clearly a difference when you look at the way he booked the women on nxt vs how he books them now and how wrestling was a focal point on nxt and now it ain’t as much
There are a number of reasons. WWE was not a creatively satisfying product to consume when Triple H was running NXT. So it made sense to do the exact opposite on NXT of what Raw and Smackdown were doing. If there was an audience that wanted something different, it was a good idea for him to serve that audience. Now, he gets to use whoever he wants, and do truly whatever he wants. There are almost no restrictions. He has a huge budget, and every talent at his disposal. That changes things.
With the introduction of Wrestlepalooza and TKO trying to make more “big event” PLE’s and Vince’s disdain for WCW now gone; do you think TKO tries to bring back some of the big WCW PLE/PPV names like Starrcade/SuperBrawl/Clash of Champions as big marquee PLE’s?
I'm gonna go on a big hunch here and say that Nick Khan probably was the driving force behind WWE using WrestlePalooza and making sure the rights were acquired. He was a big ECW fan. However, I think that TKO wants to create their own events. It was reiterated to me that the major events will continue to be promoted. I think they will make attempts to establish their own. I think taking the biggest, like Starrcade, would be ideal.
Comments
Matt Rain
I agree 100% about selling being subjective. It doesn’t matter as much how you sell, as long as it makes the move look good. Ziggler’s style is considered more theatrical, but it always looks devastating and puts the move over. Conversely someone who I think doesn’t get enough credit for selling is Okada. He does more realistic selling, but that also works in making it look like he’s taken real damage. Every performer’s style is different, but the goal is the same.
