https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUzUvqcGa_Q
Towards the 8-minute mark, HHH seems to be in poor shape. As the match continues, he’s unable to get back in the ring, eventually needing to go sit down and speak to an official, followed by stumbling and staggering when he tries to get up.
Does anyone know what happened, here?
Well, at the start of the match, they’d foreshadowed that Triple H almost wasn’t allowed to compete because of concerns about after-effects from his brutal match the prior night against Lesnar. So this could just be a complete work, with Trips miming the effects of a concussion, or it could have been a legit injury, and because they knew this was a possibility, they wrote it into the commentary to cover for it in case it flared up.
It was a work; they were pushing Axel as the Future.
Of course, a few weeks later he wasn’t over (“Mr. Perfect’s son…with a different last name!” was hard), so it wasn’t brought up again.