Falls Count Anywhere

02-28-08

Man-crush #1

On the Matter of Shawn Michaels.
Everyone knows where I stand on the subject of Shawn Michaels. He’s one of the most important wrestlers of the last century. He was the best performer in America, bar none, from 1992 through 1998 and then came back and became one of the top performers again in a period when American wrestling had transformed and become even more demanding than it was in the previous decade.

There’s no question that Shawn deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, that his matches are around among the best that have ever taken place and that he’s been a controversial figure, often using his star to force promotions into giving him his way. The Shawn Michaels From the Vault DVD had three matches on it that really showed the changes in the business and how Shawn manages to remain one of the best performers in the world.

First off, there’s the match against Diesel, aka Kevin Nash, from April 1996. This was called Good Friends, Better Enemies and was one of those In Your House shows that was built almost entirely around the Main Event (though there was also Vader squashing Razor Ramon underneath) and they managed to deliver. The match was a No holds Barred match and it was great.

The key to it was three-fold. The first part was to take what ECW had been doing the previous two years and bring it to the WWF stage. After that, they had to make Shawn look like he was a world-beater and start his title reign with strong momentum and Kevin Nash worked very hard to make Shawn seem credible. That is a remarkable thing since Nash has never been known to be particularly helpful in getting guys over. The third reason this match worked so well was that Shawn was a human SuperBall. The guy took every bump huge and made even stupid things seem like they were fireballs from Ryu or Ken. That made the match feel important and the crowd heat was exceptional most of the way.

Man-crush #1

At the time, Shawn had been been chosen as the Next Champion with his big win over Bret Hart less than a month before. This match is best remembered for the fact that Diesel took on Mad Dog Vachon’s leg and used it as a weapon. That was one of the classic moments of that period of the WWF. The funny thing is this shows the troubles with the image of Shawn Michaels. Here, he gave every huge bump he could take. He got powerbombed through a table and went chest first into the rail off the apron (which was what broke Bret Hart’s sternum a decade and a half before). Shawn was so generous to Diesel, but really, he was working like he was showing off what he could do. There was a sense that he was saying ‘This is the best anyone can do with this guy’ and they were probably right.

The second match was my man Mick Foley from October of 1996. Mick says that this was the greatest match he was ever involved in. You have to remember that this was before the entire concept of the Hard Core match was reinvented by the Hell in a Cell matches of 1997 and 1998. This was the best brawling in the world at the time. There was the FMW stuff still going strong in Japan, but lacking the emotional content that this match delivered. ECW was doing really good stuff on PPV, but that style of brawling fit in with the kind of crowd that made it every time there was a show. The WWF at the time was giving us great brawls from Vader, The Undertaker and Mankind.

This match was both a brawl, a stunt show and a pure wrestling match. Michaels could brawl, but here it was Mankind taking the beating. Here it was far more give and take than in the match with Diesel. Mankind got put through the table trying to back suplex Michaels off the top rope. Mankind took several shots onto the concrete floor. Michaels got beat on a bit, but nowhere near as much as Mick. Here, this felt like Shawn using someone to elevate himself. That’s not to say he didn’t take some shots, but he was certainly the one dishing it instead of taking it.

The third match was the return of Shawn Michaels against HHH at Summerslam in 2002. This won my Match of the Year, and why not? It was a fine brawl, a bloody brawl, and the kind of match you want to get from two of the biggest names of the last decade. Shawn had been hurt at the Royal Rumble in 1998 (and I was there!) and then he stuck around and wrestled Steve Austin in the match that gave Austin his first World Title. Shawn wrestled one match, something to get one of his students over, but really he was out for more than 4 years. This match was so good because wrestling had changed and Shawn had not.

You can watch his matches from 1992 and 1996 and hold them against his return and see that he hasn’t changed. Shawn Michaels in the 1990s was wrestling the matches of the next decade. The strange thing is that he was doing them better than anyone is doing them today. Yes, Jeff Hardy, AJ Styles and folks took bigger risks, but no one connected with the audience to the same level as Shawn Michaels. He knows exactly how to make a crowd care about what he does. It’s something a lot of the high fliers never really learn.

When he does a big spot off the top, the crowd pauses, holds its breath and waits to see what happens (and for thebest example of that, just listen to the moment before he falls off the cage in the Hell in the Cell match). Even if he’s limited in what he can do (and the match with Austin saw him extremely limited), he can make it work.

Here, perhaps thinking that he wasn’t going to be a regular, he pulled out all the stops, bumped big and looked great. HHH was great too, having one of those matches where he'd settle down and make someone look good. The match shows that Shawn Michaels can do it all, even when he’s been away and everyone else has started to catch up with what he was doing years ago.

That’s all for this week. More next time!

Chris Garcia