It might not be a surprise to some of you, but from 0 to 14 years old, all I ever wanted to be was a professional wrestler. The first thing my parents told my 4 or 5 year old self was that it was fake. That is was all a big scam, bulky men in ridiculous costumes playing vaudeville and lying to gullible children for money. So, I grew up with that knowledge, but it never deterred my enthusiasm for the product (shows you how much I always cared of what my parents though of my hobbies and interests). What I think back about that era of my life (0 to 18 years old, really. I kept being a fan long after I developed other career interests), one name always comes up to my mind first: Shawn Michaels.
I'm ashamed to say I know very little about the greatest pro wrestling superstar of the 90s, so I took the opportunity to get better acquainted with the man who showed me the gateway to a world larger than life back when I was just a child and sat through the WWE-produced documentary THE SHAWN MICHAEL STORY - HEARTBREAK AND TRIUMPH in order to perfect my knowledge. Turned out both the documentary and Shawn Michaels himself both stand for something more profound than they mean to and shed a new, interesting life on my own upbringing.
Some of you might know that *, but Shawn Michaels' real name is Michael Hickenbottom, he was raised in San Antonio, Texas and he's wanted to be a pro wrestler since he was 12 years old. It's a business he understood admirably well since day one. Not only he was teaching himself moves in his backyard like every other boy in America, but he was training wherever he went. He even trained himself to talk like Ric Flair in front of his bathroom mirror. Micheals says in the documentary that Flair was a huge influence on him, which makes sense on so many and soft of explains why they're my two favourite wrestlers. Of course, Shawn Michaels' style is way more athletic and high flying, but him and Flair to a lot of similar things in the ring. Just watch the way they flop and twirl around when they're getting their asses kicked.
One of the things about THE SHAWN MICHAELS STORY - HEARTBREAK AND TRIUMPH that blew my mind is how Michaels always lived up to the person he thought he was. It's human nature to think of yourself as aggrandized version of who you really are. To see yourself as better looking, more charismatic and most important, brimming with potential. Shawn Michaels has never really been just a silly dream to young Michael Hickenbottom. He wasn't playing a part by changing names, but rather he was letting the person he was inside taking over as it should've been. Wrestling was obviously a trigger even for the emergence of the Shawn Michaels identity, but good parenting and immense strength of character obviously played an important part in the creation of a sports entertainment icon. The inception of Shawn Michaels is the story of a self-made man.
The ladder match with Razor Ramon has become a WWE classic.
The fascinating thing about Shawn Michaels is that he was never my favourite when I was a child, Bret Hart and Stone Cold Steve Austin were, but every big moment I remember from the 1990s WWE somehow has Michaels in it and by the time I moved on from watching pro wrestling, he was pretty much the only athlete I cared about watching. The people interviewed in THE SHAWN MICHAELS STORY - HEARTBREAK AND TRIUMPH shed some light on how it actually happened. Shawn Michaels was an intoxicating mix of innovative in-ring performance and an absolute animal behind the mic. So basically, he has these crazy ideas all the time, sold them to the unsuspecting crowd and delivered every single time, whether he was injured or not **. His creativity, eagerness, generosity and sheer talent is why we remember him as the face of an entire era of pro wrestling.
A funny quirk of THE SHAWN MICHAELS STORY - HEARTBREAK AND TRIUMPH is that every person interviewed basically said he was an asshole at the apex of his glory days ***. He was at the top at the utmost stressful time, back when the Monday Night Wars were tearing pro wrestling fans apart (and was quite possibly the golden era of the sport) and it put tremendous strain on the entire WWE staff, trying to pull the company ahead of the competition. When the dust has settled though, Shawn Michaels is the guy we remember. Not because he was a great humanitarian, but because he was the absolute best and helped pro wrestling evolve into an absolute extravaganza before our very eyes. At the end, the silly heartbreaker gimmick was just a nice wallpaper to shrink wrap Shawn Michaels in. He was just the man. He was who every kid wanted to be.
* Pro wrestlers and hip-hop artists' real names were a popular subject to look up on early search engines such as Alta Vista and Yahoo, in the early days of the internet.
** Michaels wrestled with a broken vertebrae for several months.
*** Until he found God, really. Michaels' story is probably the least obnoxious Born Again Christian story I've ever heard.