• That Orton still hadn't really tapped into audience enthusiasm as a face. 

• "I'm bored by Triple H," or, "I'm tired of Triple H," or, "Even though I really like Triple H, even I wasn't ready to see him as the champ again."

I made specific note of the fact that many of these statements came from these wrestlers' fans. (Orton-haters seemed to say, "Thank God it's not Orton... but look who it is.") In a sense, being negative about this title change is a form of being positive about both men. Sometimes being critical is born of affection. Or, in my case: a wish for better opportunities for these men and the rest of the roster, in the upcoming months of stories.
 
Consider: any Orton fan should be worried that his title victory was so rushed and that his title reign seemed so awkward. It was electric in a mundane static-cling sort of way, not dangerously captivating. Any Triple H fan should worry that he could become stale again very quickly and that his win was so compromised.
 
Fans of both should worry that the Orton v. Evolution storyline was hurried. Instead of naturally anchoring these men in the limelight, they now seem to need to yank limelight in their direction for a segment. Orton's rushed rebellion has nearly concluded the Evolution story, doing so long before it reached its dramatic apex. Drama evolved past Evolution; only the WWE writing staff seems not to have noticed. Swerves and adding new members to Evolution will be like shocking the corpse with the defibrillator: it'll bring the body back for a while, but ultimately, it's served its purpose. In the absence of the truly great Evolution angle that might have been, what do we have? Problems, threefold.
 
 
1. Orton Still Hasn't Wholly Connected with the Audience
Emotionally, he has partially jacked into the crowd. By all accounts, the Abercrombie Zombies and the Fitch Bitches love him. In the case of the latter, he's just toooooo cuuute. (So my email tells me.) In the case of the former, his body-sprayed, gelled, dude-ical lifestyle is something to revere and aspire to: "One more Ketel and Red Bull will make me just like Orton! Dude, I'm gonna go tell that chick that I'm majoring in 'cliterature.' "
 
Wait, strike "cliterature." That's too clever.
 
My digs aside, Orton has tapped into the female and the Duuuude audience, but not the wrestling faithful as a whole. You can blame the lack of Orton promos on his speaking inabilities or on the booking, but Orton hasn't had the chance to fully sell himself. A spit to Triple H's face is good for a pop, as is confounding him. But that only endears Orton to the anti-Triple H crowd. It doesn't really endear Orton to the "we still don't care about Orton" crowd, because the moment Orton isn't facing Triple H, that crowd won't care about Orton anymore.
 
Therein lies the heart of the problem. You cannot make Orton a superstar because he is not Triple H, yet the booking currently emphasizes that. Oddly, painting him as "not Triple H" undermined even his title win. It's doubtful that even the greatest Orton devotee said to himself or herself, "Benoit beat both Michaels and Triple H, but he lost cleanly and plausibly to Randy." Because Orton is not Triple H, it also means that he is unlikely to be the man to win (against Benoit) when Triple H and Michaels could not. How can the newly good-hearted youngster prevail against the greatest technical wrestler when a legend and a cerebral assassin cannot? In a sense, that he's not Triple H indicates that he shouldn't have won.
 
He won nonetheless, and his greatest inroad to public acclaim is that he defies — and is not — Triple H. Ultimately, he will trade on that commodity, and it will define his ongoing feud with Triple H. With that in mind, Orton needs three things: (1) he needs to develop his own personality through the confrontations in this feud; (2) he needs Triple H to remain a viably hateful opponent; and (3) he needs a much better story. More on this later.
 
 
2. Triple H Is Tiresome
I've been saying it for ages, but I seem to be in much greater company these days. Everyone has read all the arguments multiple times: he's been champion forever; when he doesn't win cleanly, he cheats; he's a monster or a sneak whenever it means that his history can be rewritten to make him win; he crushes opponents so badly that it hammers all the heat out of them; his promos go on forever and haven't changed in four years; the promos weren't that original four years ago, to begin with; every great Triple H match has been sold more by his opponent's work or promos anyway. And on and on and on and on.
 
Keep in mind, he's not bad at all. Someone plugged Triple H into the juvenation machine at the beginning of this year, and he almost returned to his 2000 form on several occasions. He dropped some muscle weight, started stretching again and rediscovered putting focus on the opponent working him, rather than the other way round.
 
I could be wrong, but I think history bears out the reasons behind his rejuvenation, and I think Triple H realized that himself. After all, the McMahon-Helmsley Era was entertaining largely because it was the first instance of his dominance. (His later forays into total dominance weren't essentially any different.) That said, the largest part of his 2000-2001 dynamism involved his myriad interactions with and without the belt: chasing Rock and Angle, facing Benoit and Jericho, facing Stone Cold and later joining him. He was interesting when his championship was not a certainty and even when it was nonexistent. (He also teased a face turn with the Love Triangle angle, which certainly leavened his "that damn good" persona.)
 
But I deeply suspect that Triple H's status as a must-see main eventer was tied to his opponents. Just look at the names from 2000-2001, a practical Murderer's Row of charisma: Foley, Rock, Austin, Angle, Jericho, with Benoit slipping into the picture on unquestionable technical wrestling godhood.
 
That may be Triple H's greatest problem and greatest secret: that being the dominant heel elevates the belt, but that the belt doesn't mean much without an opponent that bleeds charisma or unqualified excellence. Monster heels tend not to have any natural charisma besides being monstrous, yet that is often how Triple H is booked. The Monster Heel offers an epic foe to be defeated, but the defeat is ultimately dependent on the virtue or talent of the champion who seeks it. Moreover, when Triple H drops the monster persona and cheats to win, it robs his own character as much as it robs his opponent of victory.
 
Where is the charisma in such change? Charisma frequently lies with the face and is dependent on him. It may be that, as much as his opponents need him for a hot story, Triple H needs his opponents for a hot match. Look at his "non-epic" matches for the past few years:
 
RVD: Almost no psychology, needs people to "work an RVD" match to help him more than he can help others.
Kane: Good stamina, pretty agile for a big man, but still a monster.
Scott Steiner: It was like Triple H confronting the Ghost of Christmas Future — a match that I believe ultimately scared him into laying off the steroids and discovering flexibility and general human movement again. Also, both matches were awful.
Nash: Plodding and unoriginal slugfest. Hell in a Cell made it "marquee plodding."
Goldberg: Plodding and unoriginal slugfest, awkward.
Orton: Plodding, staple stuff, awkward; their title match was "livened up" by an interference cast larger than West Side Story crossbreeding with War and Peace.
 
So many of Triple H's great matches can be tied to great opponents. Again, Foley, Jericho, Benoit, Rock, Angle, Austin and Michaels brought enough to the table that the matches could have been pretty great even without Triple H. Most of those men have had must-see matches with opponents who rated far less in stature. Toss in Hogan, Flair and Undertaker — who bring the Legend Status — and you can see that a lot of what made those "great Triple H matches" great was the people he faced. Begin the McMahon-Helmsley era with matches against Kane, RVD and a ramshackle Kevin Nash, and we probably wouldn't mark Triple H anywhere near the greatness column. Hell, take away his Street Fight and Hell in a Cell with Foley, and Triple H's bid for greatness could have been D.O.A. at WrestleMania 2000.
 
This is where he and Orton are in trouble. Personally, I've never felt that Triple H brought much to the table besides reliability and competence. He suplexes and uses his knee a lot. Sixty percent of his matches are punches. He uses lots of restholds. There's that sledgehammer. He blades.
 
In fact, blood, foreign objects and gimmicks seem to feature very heavily in his "great" matches. Triple H has wrestled an inordinate number of Hells in Cells, Last Man Standing, Two-Out-of-Three Falls, and other gimmick matches (tack on two Iron Man matches, two Elimination Chamber matches, a Street Fight, a Four-Way Elimination, etc.). If you think about it, those sorts of special-condition matches bring a sense of greatness or spectacle to a match, irrespective of the wrestlers' talent levels. It takes a terrible lot of awfulness to make a Hell in a Cell wretched, unless you're the Big Bossman. Most of the time, the match stipulations make the match content a little better.

Once you take away the blood and the gimmickry of those matches, you're left with men having a match, and Triple H constructs fairly plain matches. You're left with punches, knees and some suplexes. All that Olympian rhetoric glosses a punchy-punch and here's-a-suplex product that a gifted jobber could produce: only he can't produce it with an historical record and a marketing machine.
 
Now, I'm not going to make the case that Triple H is not a good wrestler. He rarely errs, and he tries hard. But sometimes your best is no damn good or not good enough. That's something that will be glaringly exposed in a basic one-on-one match with Orton. Randy is slowly improving, of that we can be sure. But put him and Triple H in the ring with no interference or foreign objects for a straight pinfall or submission match, and the result is going to be pretty dull. Once you remove all the punches, you're left with clotheslines, plain suplexes, knee attacks, restholds, a Pedigree and an RKO. In the hands of a fair ring psychologist (Triple H) and an abysmal ring psychologist (Orton), that's not enough to last through to WrestleMania. That's enough for 15 minutes.
 
There will be a lot of sledgehammer work, special matches, interference and cerebral assassination employed to dress up this conflict. The only trouble is that we've seen it all before. Except for a five-month burp between late March and August, it's something we've seen for about the last two years.
 
 
Meet the New Story, Same as the Old Story...
After piling on complaints about the two wrestlers, here's where fans should be most troubled. Because you can absolutely love Triple H and Orton, and still be worried about the drama they are about to enact. Or, in this case, reenact.
 
I think it was a Raven who — in the process of scolding Rick Scaia — said that there are no new stories in wrestling. I'm sure he was paraphrasing a wiser man who suggested that there are no new stories in literature. I've forgotten who that man was, but I'll lay a fiver that says it was Joseph Campbell. Nonetheless, Raven is right: barring extraordinary unforeseen circumstances, any story you see on WWE TV will be a tweaked version of something you've already seen on WWE TV.
 
There are tricks to get around this, though. The simplest is: don't repeat the same story with the same personnel. For instance, if Edge forms an inexplicable The Odd Couple-esque tag team with Rhyno, then parts ways with Rhyno after accidentally causing the two of them to lose the tag-team titles, you do not then have Edge form an inexplicable The Odd Couple-esque tag team with Kane, then part ways with Kane after accidentally causing the two of them to lose the tag-team titles.
 
It's that simple. After Edge and Rhyno split, you wait a month or two before running another odd couple story, and you make sure that Edge and Rhyno aren't part of it. Unfortunately, WWE doesn't seem to be doing that with Triple H.
 
In case you're dead, let me recap. Triple H spent around 18 months or so in an on-again off-again feud with Shawn Michaels. You see, many moons ago, Triple H was in a cocky heel stable with Shawn Michaels, with Michaels as the leader and Triple H as the dutiful sometime-partner and frequent apprentice. Then Triple H went on to glory, to capturing the title and being a big important man. But he felt that he still lived somewhat in Michaels' shadow, even though he publicly stated otherwise. Triple H claimed that he had surpassed his master, and he and Michaels had a series of matches to determine who was the greater man. (It was Triple H, according to WWE.)
 
Then Triple H spent about four or five months worrying about Chris Benoit, except for the parts when he was still worrying about Shawn Michaels, which were many.
 
Also, for many moons, Randy Orton was in a cocky heel stable with Triple H, with Orton as the sometime-partner and frequent apprentice. Then Orton went on to glory, to capturing the title and claiming that he was a big important man. But he's still living in Triple H's shadow, even though he publicly states otherwise. He claims that he has surpassed his master (by beating Benoit, which his master could not do), and now they will likely have a series of matches to determine who is the greater man.
 
This is a bad idea.
 
As said, wrestling recycles stories constantly. It's an inevitability with which we've all learned to cope. But rarely do they run the same story, back to back, with the same character. Triple H just polished his "the pupil beat the master" award after his program with Michaels, and now he's in a "will the pupil decisively beat the master?" program with Randy Orton. And, keep in mind, this program is likely going to last another six months. Even if you don't mind this sort of instant storyline recycling, there are still some very elemental flaws to this program.
 
The first is that Orton is no Shawn Michaels. WWE has gone from an extended program with a truly excellent wrestler and a good/very good wrestler (Triple H), to a program with a good/very good wrestler and a young man who still has a steep trek up the learning curve in every way.
 
Orton simply cannot cut a promo like Shawn Michaels, and he's light years behind in the ring. (In both respects, Shelton Benjamin would be a better choice — doubly so, if you take into account Triple H's implied racism toward Booker T.) Thus, not only do we have a long, drawn-out story ahead of us that apes a long, drawn-out story we just saw, but the talent level involved has practically been cut in half. More than half, if you're a sourpuss like me.
 
The second elemental problem is the time issue. Michaels spent over three years off WWE television (except for rare cameos), so any storyline he was involved in was more interesting because fans had gone so long without seeing him. Also, his history with Triple H really was history: they were arguing about grievances, wounds and slights incurred four or five years before. Finally, both men had spent considerable amounts of time as World Champions, thus providing fans with individual claims of superiority.
 
Conversely, Orton's been a major player for less than two years. Prior to that, he was either injured for long stretches or functionally uninteresting. In many respects, fans were just getting used to him as he was, when WWE whipped the carpet out from under them and redefined Orton's role and character. Secondly, the audience saw no period of separation between Triple H and him. The two have had 15 minutes of promo and segment time on every show for around 18 months. They are always there, together, and they always have been. This adversarial turn appeared overnight. The two are hard to pull apart, to think about as two different people. Finally, unlike Triple H, Orton didn't spend years away from his mentor, establishing himself as champion. Instead, he got one month: a laughably implausible victory followed by weeks of poor promos or no promos, a spit take and a loss.
 
The third elemental worry is perceived importance. This worry flows from the second, in that Orton never became an established champion the way Triple H did. But it also involves the perception of the relationship between the antagonists, and people's perception of how important the two stables were.
 
In terms of the antagonists' relationships, Triple H fared better than Orton. Enough time passed between his days as Michaels' lackey that people forgot about him, well, being a lackey. After years in the main event, the subservient nature of his relationship to Michaels faded away. The moment Michaels returned to TV did not mean that Triple H suddenly faded in terms of prominence or legitimacy. Orton, however, does not have that luxury. Evolution's history is still ingrained in viewer's minds: Orton is still less important than Triple H. Orton is still the guy who opens the limousine door, who takes orders, who gets in line. Sure, he might tell the audience otherwise: but you, me and the guy in Section 22, Row H, Seat 4 knows that Randy still reflexively wants to go fetch the water bottle so Triple H can do his spit-take on cue.
 
Lastly, we come to the importance of the stables. Say what you will about Degeneration-X, but it is now part of vaunted WWE History. It "attacked" WCW Monday Nitro. It helped usher in the rawest of the Attitude Era. Originally intended as a heel faction, the crowd took to DX so strongly that it made stars out of Triple H, Chyna and even — to the horror of many — Road Dogg and Billy Gunn. It is dubious to claim that DX didn't change the wrestling landscape. From that, Triple H v. Shawn Michaels sprang.
 
On the other hand, we have Evolution. Their great intro music aside, Evolution hasn't offered much. Flair flops, gets nostalgia pops and, well, he's there. (There are those who think that every moment of his Evolution toadying degrades his legacy.) Evolution hasn't made Batista anything more than tolerated, and he's still the butt of frequent jokes. It made Orton... well, it made Orton what he is today. It's up to you to decide what that is. Mainly, however, it was (and is) the Triple H show. Take Triple H out of Evolution, and you still have Triple H. Form Evolution without him, and you have a hundred thousand internet fans making Darwin Awards jokes.
 
Triple H v. Orton is a story already told in Triple H v. Michaels. The trouble is that the former had the better wrestlers, the better promo artists, more established stars, a better established history and, most happily, a long time away from both men's backstories. The two came together with greater talents and more time away from each other. Triple H and Orton, however, seem as if they've never been apart. And their history together involves, really, one man — Triple H — who brings all the credibility to the table, despite the fact that he ultimately is supposed to lose it to the other.
 
 
Rewrite the Future
Supposedly, the future is unwritten. And, if you're not a member of a wrestling booking committee, that's probably true. Via some means or impulse, however, the WWE booking committee has let slip their plans for the road to WrestleMania. They have prescribed Benoit losing the title and Randy Orton going head-to-head with Triple H. So far, both have come true. One suspects that their goal for Triple H v. Orton, for the title, at WrestleMania, will come to pass.
 
For people who dislike Orton and Triple H, there is plenty to worry about. After all, the next half-year of wrestling is primarily devoted to these knuckleheads. Surprisingly, though, those men's fans should be just as concerned. Orton is not a proven talent, and he is not wholly accepted by the fans. Each error of speech or movement can potentially seal his fate for years to come. Any misstep, miscue or misspoken match-making comment can send him back to the midcard the moment his program runs its course.
 
Triple H fans — long beleaguered by complaints that he is stale, predictable and omnipresent — now face another title reign indistinguishable from the last. He again cheated to win, and he cut the same promo about it. The sledgehammer is not far behind, and another inexplicable "monster" victory will stamp this reign as a mere continuation of the last three.
 
But, most importantly, their fans should long for another story, one that does a better service for the talents involved. Triple H v. Orton is merely Triple H v. Michaels reworked. But Orton fans should know that he can never approach the gravitas that Michaels commands; likewise, Triple H fans should know that Triple H spending six months in a story he just spent nearly two years in will erode general goodwill for (and interest in) him. They should also know that his ability rises to the level of his opponents, and spending six months carrying a struggling new wrestler will only expose his relatively pedestrian in-ring talents. (No amount of knee-strikes and restholds will eliminate, from the public consciousness, the fact that Orton relies on European Uppercuts, restholds, and more of the same. If anything, Triple H and Orton must worry about avoiding battles of non-variety.)
 
At present, we have two men involved in a variation of a story that only recently died. But it has been resurrected with less wrestling talent, less promo talent, less monumental history, less reflection and less of a sense of defining an era. Randy Orton, Triple H and — most importantly — the audience deserve something unique to these men. If Orton wants to be a better man, and Triple H wants to be his own man, then they deserve their own story. No matter how expertly or competently they perform this tale, they will remain the actors who revived it, who walked in another's path and reinterpreted the lines already movingly conveyed by their predecessors.
 
The first iteration of Triple H involved in a mentor/student story went on long enough, perhaps longer than necessary. A retread of the same will not confer on Triple H the sort of majesty to which he pretends, nor will it confer on Orton the sort of legitimacy he so desperately needs.
 
We have seen the future. Enough, already.