Wrestling for My Life: The Legend, the Reality, and the Faith of a WWE Superstar Read online

  Then twelve years later, everything had changed.

  Oh, my body still hurt. Still does, even five years after I packed up my wrestling gear for the final time and tossed the bag into the attic. Injuries were not the reason I was leaving this time, however. I retired because of my wife and kids, who had come to Arizona with me to watch my final match.

  I had discovered a new life since my first retirement. I was close to failing as a husband and on my way to failing as a father when I found that new life. I never would have imagined that I could feel so at peace with leaving wrestling. I certainly hadn’t felt this way the first time I retired.

  That is why I felt engulfed by peace as I sat alone on the end of the bed, appreciative for the wrestling career I had been given and grateful for the second chance I had received as a husband and father.

  “Thank You, Lord,” I prayed through my tears.

  The thought that it was time to leave the ring for good first came a year earlier, after WrestleMania 25 in 2009. In the first of three main events at Houston’s Reliant Stadium, I took on The Undertaker. From a pure wrestling standpoint, it was an intriguing matchup: me — Mr. WrestleMania — against the wrestler with a 16 – 0 record in WrestleManias.

  When we met to start setting up how the match would play out three days before WrestleMania, Pat Patterson and Michael Hayes — who produced matches for WWE — told us we would not be one of the last two matches on the schedule and would wrestle for fifteen minutes.

  “How long you been with this company?” Taker asked me.

  “Lord knows how long, but it’s been a while,” I told him with a laugh.

  “I’ve been with this company longer than some of my marriages combined!” Taker said.

  Not being the main event or semi-main event motivated Taker and me to put on a match that would be a tough act to follow for the rest of the night. (We also wound up wrestling for thirty minutes, well past our allotted time.)

  To add to the anticipation of the match, because I had been a Christian for seven years at that point and had made sure the changes in my life were evident inside the ring and out, we employed a light versus darkness theme. I entered the ring first, wearing white and descending to a brightly lit stadium floor via a platform enveloped in white smoke. Then The Undertaker, dressed in his customary black, rose from below the stage floor and, in a darkened stadium, defiantly strolled toward the ring to his ominous theme music. WWE puts on good productions, and that one was really cool.

  Taker and I turned in what I still consider a near-perfect match, despite one scare. About fifteen minutes into the match, we had planned for Taker to do a “dive.” I would be lying outside of the ring, “hurt,” and referee Marty Elias — a good friend whom I prayed with before every match we did together — would be checking on me to see if I would be able to return to the ring and continue the match. After I made my way to my feet, Taker would run across the ring and dive at me headfirst over the top rope. But I would see Taker coming, shove Marty out of the way, and pull a “cameraman” into my place. The cameraman would appear to take the hit instead of me, reaching out to catch Taker in the process and breaking Taker’s fall.

  Of course, with our old-school mentality, we weren’t about to practice Taker’s dive, or anything else for that matter. Nowadays it’s different, but our mindset back then was that if we were going to miss a move or if anything would go wrong, it would happen during the pay-per-view when it was for real. When it came time for Taker’s dive, the “cameraman” set up a step too far from the ring. I shoved Marty aside as planned, grabbed the cameraman, and tried to pull him closer to where Taker would land. But I couldn’t get him to where I wanted. He dropped his camera and reached out toward Taker, but barely got his hands on Taker, who hit the padded floor headfirst.

  When we had set up the match, both of us had instructed Marty that if for any reason neither of us was able to make it back into the ring after the dive, Marty was to go ahead and proceed with the referee’s ten count as usual. If Taker or I couldn’t make it back into the ring before the ten count, the match would be over right there. So after Marty and I returned to the ring, the referee started his ten count — but slowly and dramatically to play it up — while Taker remained flat on his back on the floor. I didn’t know if Taker would get up. I was on the far side of the ring and didn’t have a real good view of where he was, but Taker managed to crawl under the bottom rope and back into the ring right before Marty reached ten.

  Taker was hurt, but we were able to finish out the match as planned. About fifteen minutes after the failed dive, the planned finish came when I performed my moonsault — a backflip off the top rope — and Taker caught me and dropped me with his Tombstone Piledriver for the pin.

  A perfect match isn’t possible, but that one came close. At one point, the more than 70,000 fans had started chanting, “This is awesome! This is awesome!” I already sensed inside the ropes that we were putting on a good show, and the fans’ spontaneous chants confirmed my feelings.

  Marty and I left the ring before Taker. When we walked through the curtain into the backstage area, the other wrestlers and crew members were standing and applauding. When Taker came through the curtain, he hobbled directly into the trainer’s room and fell to the floor. I went in there with Marty while the trainers looked at Taker. Other wrestlers started coming in and out, checking on Taker and raving about our match.

  “How am I going to go out and top that match?” asked Triple H, my best friend, who would be wrestling in the final match of the night.

  Michael Hayes came into the room. “Oh my!” he exclaimed. “What did I just witness?”

  The answer, as wrestling fans still say, was one of the best matches in the history of professional wrestling.

  Because that WrestleMania was in Houston, I was able to ride back home to San Antonio with my family the next day. Usually after a WrestleMania, it was off to the airport for the next night’s Raw live television broadcast. “WrestleMania was great,” Vince liked to tell us, “but that was yesterday and we have Raw tonight.” Even after our biggest event of the year, it was right back to work to start building toward the next year’s biggest event.

  But that year, I had arranged to take a few months off following WrestleMania. At age forty-four, I wasn’t wrestling full-time anyway. With a nine-year-old son and a daughter nearing five, I already was cutting back on my time away from home, and I was taking a break to think about how much longer I wanted to wrestle.

  Rebecca and I had discussed how soon I would quit the sport, and that day, while she was driving the four of us home, I still managed to surprise her.

  “You know,” I told her, “that may have been the one to end it on.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Yeah! I just don’t know if it can get any better than that.”

  “Well,” she told me, “that is a decision you’re going to have to make pretty quick.”

  “I know,” I answered. “We’ll see.”

  I felt the satisfaction of a job well done after a great many of my matches. After the Taker match in Houston, though, I felt something different: a complete peace.

  In some respects, wrestling can be like a drug addiction. Putting on a good match gives you a high, and you keep chasing that high. Or as my good friend Mark Calaway likes to say, “chasing the dragon.” But I think for the first time, in the break I took after WrestleMania 26, I realized that I no longer was pursuing that high.

  The contentment, the peace, and the completion that remained with me after we returned home were unlike anything I had felt in the business.

  As I contemplated the possibility of never gearing up for another match, I was fine with it. And although it had been my public identity since I was nineteen, even the idea of not being identified as Shawn Michaels the wrestler didn’t bother me.

  Being okay with not feeling that high in the ring anymore, with not being that Shawn Michaels anymore, signaled to me that I was
ready to retire. My four months off gave me the opportunity to practice being retired, if you will, and none of my feelings changed during that period.

  Confirmation came when the time neared for me to return to WWE. Michael Hayes, the former wrestler who helped produce matches, called with an angle for the next WrestleMania. (An “angle” in wrestling is essentially a storyline or gimmick.)

  “We have never done this before, but what do you think about this?” Michael began. “That match that you had with The Undertaker was amazing. I don’t know how we can top it, but what if we do a rematch, and we put your career on the line?”

  He even brought up the idea that it wouldn’t be a true retirement, that we could bill the match as I would have to retire if I lost, yet come up with some creative way of getting around it if that’s the route we wanted to take.

  I told Michael I would think about it.

  There was a lot to consider.

  The Taker match would be a difficult one to follow, but the jock in me responded positively, not only to the possibility of that challenge, but also to being part of a storyline that WWE had not done. Having my career on the line would move what I had been thinking about, praying about, and believing that I was ready to do into a place where, publicly, there would be no turning back in my mind. If we were to say I would leave if I lost, I would leave if I lost.

  I came back for the SummerSlam pay-per-view in August for a partial, mini-reunion of D-Generation X with Hunter (Paul Levesque). Hunter (also known as Triple H) and I, along with “Ravishing” Rick Rude and our female bodyguard, Chyna, had formed DX, as we were called for short, in the late 1990s. We and “Stone Cold” were the ones who had ushered in and then fueled the “Attitude Era” of what then was still known as the World Wrestling Federation. That was in my pre-Christian days, and we embraced the role of being the bad boys and girl of WWF.

  Our characters were crude and broke all the rules. We didn’t care whom we offended. I doubt wrestling has ever had a more controversial group than DX.

  Hunter and I had reunited as a two-man DX for a short while in 2006, and we did so again when I came back from my time off after WrestleMania 25. Our storyline then was that after losing to Taker, I had become chef at an office cafeteria in Texas and Triple H came down to convince me to return and reform DX with him.

  In December 2010, on a Raw episode taped in Corpus Christi, Texas, I was to receive the WWE’s Slammy Award — think Oscar or Grammy for wrestling — for Match of the Year from the WrestleMania match with The Undertaker. As Vince can attest, it’s never too early to promote WrestleMania, and with the next one four months away, I started asking around to find out if we were going to go through with the rematch idea at WrestleMania 26. I was told a decision had not been made.

  On the night I was to receive the Slammy, just a few minutes before I was to go out into the arena, I followed up with Vince and Michael to find out whether we had an answer yet on the rematch.

  “Why?” I was asked.

  “Because if we are,” I replied, “why don’t I go out there and accept this award from that match and then say to Taker, ‘Match of the Year is not good enough. I do that all the time. I know I can beat you,’ and then lay out a challenge to him.”

  That sparked a hurried discussion, but the consensus seemed to be that we shouldn’t rush into a decision.

  Before I became a Christian, I had been difficult to work with, making demands based on how I thought storylines should go and such. I had strong opinions on how we should do things and was no-holds-barred on expressing them. I was the source of a lot of Vince’s stress. Jim Ross, the WWE announcer, used to tell me, “It wasn’t what you were saying, it was your presentation.” Jim was spot on.

  So I had a reputation for holding the decision-makers’ feet to the fire. I was still going to do that as a Christian, but in a much more respectful and unselfish way.

  “Come on,” I told them. “What else am I going to say out there? What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Vince said. “What are you thinking?”

  “Well, if I go out there and say it, we have to do it, right?”

  “Geez,” Vince said, “don’t do that.”

  “Well, we need to make a decision,” I announced. “Either we are going to do this thing or we aren’t.”

  “I think we ought to do it,” Michael said.

  “What about the career and everything else?” Vince asked. “What are we going to do there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have some ideas.”

  Having some ideas didn’t seem to convince them of anything.

  “I don’t know,” Vince said. “It’s your call. I’m just not sure if we go there.”

  By this point, the announcement for the award was being made.

  “We are going there,” I said.

  “Are you going to do it?” Michael asked.

  “I think I am. I will just lay the challenge out there, and we’ll see what happens.”

  “I guess we’re going there then,” Vince said.

  I went out and, after making my acceptance speech, stepped away from the microphone, then went back and issued the challenge for a rematch.

  The fans in Corpus Christi ate it up.

  Mark Calaway was sitting at home, watching on television.

  “What?!” Mark asked his television.

  Like many events in my career, the decision to set the retirement plan in motion came down to a feeling.

  In the lead-up to WrestleMania 26, we brought in the retirement aspect. The discussions continued to include the possibility that it would not be a true career-ender for me, suggesting I could take a year off and then make another comeback. After all, I had taken four months off after the last WrestleMania, so they figured I could be happy with an entire year off and still be available for them to use here and there on a part-time basis. They seemed to prefer a farewell tour over an abrupt retirement. Michael Hayes knew I was seriously considering walking away, although I don’t think anyone in WWE knew how much I was looking forward to a permanent retirement.

  But I knew that would be my last match. My career was ending.

  My match with The Undertaker was the final match of WrestleMania 26. With Taker putting his unbeaten WrestleMania streak on the line and my retirement at stake, the match was billed as “Streak vs. Career.”

  We didn’t top the previous year’s match — I still don’t think we could have — but as far as sequels go, we put on a very good show.

  When I was being trained to try to make it in the sport, longtime wrestler Jose Lothario had convinced me to learn how to do a backflip off the top rope. Jose had seen only one wrestler master that move. When an opponent was running toward me in the corner, I could scale the turnbuckles and backflip over my opponent and land on my feet so that when the opponent turned around to look for me, I could surprise him with an elbow or bust his chops some other way.

  The backflip helped me quickly rise with the reputation as an athletic wrestler in the early stages of my career. It also led to my later developing my “moonsault,” a different type of jump, in which I would flip backward off the top rope and, instead of landing on my feet, come down headfirst and stomach to shoulders with my opponent so he could catch me or break my fall to help me slide into finishing the move.

  The night before WrestleMania, Rebecca and I were at University of Phoenix Stadium going over the match with Mark and Michael. There was an announcer’s table outside the ring, and I brought up the idea of The Undertaker lying on that table and me moonsaulting onto him and both of us crashing through the table. I had never attempted the move like that.

  I looked to the table. It was probably twelve feet from the ring.

  Geez, I thought, that’s a long way.

  I climbed up on the top rope to get a better idea of what the flip would look like.

  “That’s a long way,” Michael said. Then he looked to Rebecca and asked what she was thinking.
r />   Rebecca looked at me on the top rope, looked to Mark, and looked back at me.

  “He’ll make it,” she said.

  During the match, when I moonsaulted out of the ring and onto Taker on the table, the crowd went absolutely nuts. I loved it that in my very last match I was able to pull off something I had never attempted. Taker won the match when he pinned me after a third Tombstone Piledriver. (I had kicked out after the first two.) As good as the match was, to me the best part came in the ring afterward.

  I need to back up here to my first retirement, back in 1998. I had been wrestling for several years with a hurt back among other injuries, but I really messed it up further in a match against The Undertaker, of all people, when I got tossed over the top rope and out of the ring and then hit my back on, of all things, a casket sitting ringside as a prop.

  A few days later at home, I woke up with my back in such pain that I had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. An MRI revealed that I had two herniated discs and one crushed disc.

  Vince had me visit a doctor in New York, who told me that I would never wrestle again. I wanted to wrestle in WrestleMania 14, and I returned home to San Antonio to be treated by my doctor, who affirmed that the risk was too great for me to get back into the ring even one more time. I was supposed to drop the WWF Championship to Steve Austin in the main event, so I told my doctor I had to wrestle and I needed him to help make it happen.

  I underwent two months of therapy to get my back as ready as it could be for the final match. I wasn’t in good shape when I went to WrestleMania, but I was good enough to put on one more show. Steve asked me before the match what we needed to do to make sure I made it through, and he set up a match my back could handle.

  Mike Tyson, who was then on a forced leave from boxing after he had bitten off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a fight, was brought in to serve as a special ring-side enforcer. The match was set up so that the referee would get knocked out, Steve would drop me with his Stone Cold Stunner, and then Tyson would take the referee’s place and count me out. Afterward, I would get up and begin protesting to Tyson, who would land a knockout punch to my jaw.