The ‘Wiseman’ is headed to the Hall of Fame.
Longtime professional wrestling icon Paul Heyman will be the first inductee into the WWE Hall of Fame 2024 class, the Associated Press first reported Monday.
The honor is an achievement that’s been decades in the making since Heyman first got into the business as a teenage photographer in the 1970s.
In the 1980s, Heyman broke through in wrestling by becoming a manager in World Championship Wrestling, aligning himself with some of the profession’s biggest stars like Steve Austin, Arn Anderson and Rick Rude. But Heyman’s career didn’t really take off until he was fired from WCW, and in the 1990s, he launched Extreme Championship Wrestling, a violent and intense company that became a hit promotion and would be an inspiration for WWE’s ‘Attitude Era’ that emerged years later.
‘The innovator took ECW from public access to national pay-per-view by endorsing brutal bouts showcasing the rare combination of misfit warriors alongside cutting-edge athletes,’ WWE said.
After managing ECW through the turn of the century, Heyman joined WWE as a commentator but would manage the ECW ‘Invasion’ of the company. In 2006, WWE held one of its most iconic pay-per-view events in ECW One Night Stand, which helped relaunch Heyman’s promotion within WWE. However that same year, Heyman left the company amid disputes with the company’s leadership.
Heyman would come back to WWE as the manager of Brock Lesnar in 2012, and being the companion of other WWE stars that became ‘Paul Heyman Guys,’ like CM Punk, before only siding with Lesnar in 2014. For years, Lesnar and Heyman were at the top of the company. Lesnar had several WWE championship reigns and ended The Undertaker’s WrestleMania streaks in one of the biggest moments in company history.
Heyman continued his success as a manager in 2020 when he aligned himself with Roman Reigns, becoming his ‘special counsel.’ Together, Reigns would eventually become the Undisputed WWE Universal Champion ― a title he still holds today ― while forming ‘The Bloodline’ faction with family members the Usos and Sola Sikoa. In the role, Heyman became known as the ‘Wiseman’ as the group has held its spot at the top of WWE. Heyman will be by Reigns’ side at WrestleMania 40 against Cody Rhodes, but the soon-to-be Hall of Famer is far from done.
“I consistently feel like I’m just getting started, and I’m just figuring this out,” Heyman told the Associated Press. “To me, what is an incomplete body of work, because there’s still things I want to accomplish, I never felt comfortable accepting that is a reflection upon an entire career.”
The 2024 WWE Hall of Fame ceremony will be April 5 at at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia after ‘Smackdown.’