Summary

Paul "Triple H" Levesque revisited one of the most infamous moments from his early WWF run, the 1996 Pedigree that left Marty Garner planted awkwardly on an episode of Superstars.

Speaking during a long-form conversation alongside Shawn Michaels, Levesque said he had only recently gone back to using the Pedigree after being steered toward a different finisher when he first arrived from WCW. He said the spot with Garner went wrong because Garner went straight up and down on the move, leaving Levesque convinced in the moment that he had badly hurt him.

Levesque said Garner immediately told him he was okay, but the reaction backstage made clear how ugly the landing looked. The story adds another memorable backstage anecdote to the recent media run around WrestleMania weekend, and it follows other comments from Levesque such as when he said CM Punk and Roman Reigns nearly throw hands backstage every week.

Quote from Paul Levesque

"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..."

Why The Marty Garner Spot Still Gets Mentioned

The Garner landing has lived on for decades because it is one of the clearest examples of how little margin for error there is on a move like the Pedigree. Levesque's version of the story also underscores how quickly a wrestler can end up with a reputation for a dangerous moment even when both sides talked through the spot beforehand.

For WWE fans, the anecdote also doubles as a snapshot of Levesque's transition period in 1996. He was still settling on the finisher that would become one of the defining moves of his career, which makes the Garner mishap a strange but important footnote in the development of the Triple H character.

Sources

Paul Levesque while speaking with Variety