WWE Star Who Previously Declined Hall of Fame Induction

The news came out on Monday. WWE released the name of the person who will be included in next year’s Hall of Fame class, an historic one since this is the very first group not be selected from Vince McMahon. Triple H has that honor.

The honor

The WWE executive team chose Paul Heyman for to be the first inductee. He is also likely to be headliner, since the ceremony takes place in Philadelphia which is the home of legends for ECW immediately following SmackDown on April 5 in the Wells Fargo Center on WrestleMania weekend.

On Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer pointed out that Heyman was averse to admission at times in the past.

Induction

“So this is a trivia note. But this will be the first Hall of Fame class that was chosen by Paul Levesque, and not chosen by Vince McMahon. So Paul Heyman is the first Paul Levesque Hall of Famer. That’s an interesting part of it. He’s been offered the Hall of Fame before and turned it down with the idea that, you know, he’s still active, he didn’t think he should be in the Hall of Fame until his career is over. But I think the idea of maybe being the first Paul Levesque inductee, and it’s in Philadelphia, where ECW was from and one of his main career claims to fame as ECW maybe his biggest in some ways. So there’s that. Maybe they just needed a main eventer, and he’s the guy and they, you know, whatever. There’s a lot of different reasons, but I mean, it’s like he has been offered this before. And I mean, as far as I can see, deserving, of course, he is, I mean, there’s a lot of people in the WWEHall of Fame, that you can say is questionable and he ain’t one of them.”