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

by Shawn Michaels

  Fast-forward to 1998. I was watching the Monday night Nitro program of World Championship Wrestling (WCW) because I liked to see how friends in wrestling’s other major organization were doing. Plus, it was always good to keep tabs on what the competition was up to.

  Nitro featured dancers called the Nitro Girls. One in particular, who went by the name Whisper, stood out. I was telling a friend, Rich Minzer, about the dancer on television who had just about knocked my socks off. Rich ran a gym in California that wrestlers liked to visit when they were in his area, and a couple of weeks later he called to tell me that WCW was in town and that he had seen Whisper — and that she looked even better in person than she did on TV! I found that difficult to believe, but when Rich asked if I wanted him to try to get Whisper’s phone number for me, that was one of the easiest questions I’ve ever answered. It took a little convincing and the help of another Nitro Girl, but Rich got me the phone number of Rebecca Curci.

  I was reluctant to call Rebecca because I felt like a stalker. After a couple of days, Rich called and said he had received a voice mail from Rebecca saying that she hadn’t heard from me and she guessed it wasn’t meant to be. Only then did I get up the nerve to call her.

  The funny thing was that even though Rebecca was part of Nitro, she wasn’t a fan of wrestling and had no idea who I was. Likely because I felt nothing like the Shawn Michaels character on TV who was brash and supremely confident around girls, I liked that.

  We talked every night on the phone for two weeks. A few weeks later, Rebecca flew from her home in Atlanta to meet me in San Antonio. When she walked through the airport gate, I agreed with Rich’s assessment: She did look more stunning in person. Our first visit together went great. We met again a few weeks later in Los Angeles.

  I knew then that I had found the one for me. I had fallen in love with Rebecca the first time I met her and knew that I would never meet anyone else who could be a friend to me like her, because she was fun to be around and not hesitant in the least to get playfully silly. She was extremely funny and made me laugh, and those were the type of people I tended to gravitate toward. Surprisingly for someone who played a dancer on television, she was humble and didn’t carry herself like the unbelievably beautiful woman that she was. She was a traditional type of woman who enjoyed staying home and cooking. In many ways, we both were different in real life than who we were on television.

  When I told family members and close friends that I wanted to marry Rebecca, I think all of them became concerned that I was rushing into the marriage. Everyone who met Rebecca absolutely loved her, so who I wanted to marry wasn’t the problem. My mom expressed the most concern because of the place I was at in my life then. I hadn’t exactly been the bastion of good judgment. She wanted me to spend more time getting to know Rebecca, to make sure that Rebecca’s intentions were as pure as they appeared. Although my family and friends were supportive of me being with Rebecca, they weren’t supportive of us marrying yet. Their opinions weren’t going to sway me, however.

  Three weeks after our time together in Los Angeles, with an Elvis impersonator as our witness, we married at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas.

  Rebecca grew up Southern Baptist, and she was an example of someone who was raised in faith, fell away from it, came back to faith, and then would fall away again. I sensed that when we married, her spirituality meter was climbing. There were certain ministers whom she liked to watch on television, and she was doing her best to walk out her faith in a business that certainly didn’t make that easy.

  During our very first conversation, she had asked me, “Do you believe in Jesus?”

  “Yes,” I quickly answered. “I’m Catholic.”

  Rebecca has since told me that the question she should have asked was, “Do you know Jesus?” That’s a much different question. And it would have elicited a much different answer.

  Of course I believe in Jesus, I told her. I had gone to church every Sunday growing up, but I did not know Jesus.

  It didn’t take long into our marriage for Rebecca to observe that.

  It also didn’t take long for a big change to occur. We had planned on starting a family soon after we married, but not as soon as we did. Six weeks after the wedding, Rebecca learned she was pregnant.

  That’s the period of my life when, with two bad knees, a really bad back, and a hurting shoulder, I was taking thirty-to-thirty-five pills per day. I took them first thing in the morning, during the afternoon, and then again at night. I was a mess, often passing out on the couch. Rebecca would take care of me, making sure I was in a comfortable position for my back, and then go off to our bedroom and pray that God would help me stop the pills. When my mind was clear, she would tell me how much she hated going to bed alone and how much she missed her husband.

  “I’ll stop when our baby is born,” I promised her.

  Cameron was born in January 2000, and there was nothing I wanted more than to be a good father to him. I cut back on the pills, but I didn’t stop.

  Rebecca had made significant changes in her life. I think that learning that she would be a mother motivated her to get back to her faith roots. She persistently prayed that I would make changes too. Then when Cameron was about nine months old and I was still living in my old ways, she sat me down and told me she loved me, but that for Cameron’s sake, she would leave me if I didn’t change. She left that night with Cameron to stay at a hotel and leave me alone to think.

  The next day she came back home and reminded me that she loved me and knew that I loved her, informed me that she had not really been who she wanted to be in front of me, and told me that she needed to make her faith a priority.

  Rebecca began taking part in a Bible study, which I was fine with because I wanted to be a supportive husband. I definitely had my shortcomings, but I loved Rebecca more than I could imagine loving anyone, and I always wanted to support her. I took note of the differences I began seeing in Rebecca, especially how at peace she seemed.

  Even though she had always told me she loved me and backed that up by consistently showing me that she loved me, I knew I could not have been easy to live with. It wasn’t that she started overlooking my pill-popping and passing out on the couch; instead, it seemed as if she had gained a renewed hope that I could change and that it would not be up to her to make it happen.

  I had no plans of going down the path of faith Rebecca had chosen, but I was genuinely happy for her. Plus, it made me feel good about myself that I was being supportive of Rebecca’s spiritual pursuits. Frankly, at that point, I needed some things I could pat myself on the back for.

  One day I shared with Rebecca that I thought it would do me some good to read the Bible, but that its old language — all the ye’s and thee’s — made it difficult for me to understand. For Christmas, she gave me a Bible written in a more contemporary language, the New Living Translation Study Bible. The language was simple and made more sense to me than what I had tried to read growing up, and the accompanying study notes at the bottoms of the pages helped me better understand the meanings behind the Scriptures.

  She also gave me a couple of books that Christmas, and one of them really had a major impact on me. James Dobson’s Straight Talk to Men was the first book I had read that clearly defined from a biblical perspective what was expected of a husband and a father. The book challenged me to be a strong leader in my family.

  As I read through Dr. Dobson’s book, I recognized all the areas where I was falling incredibly short of what I needed to be. None of what was expected of a real man seemed overtly soft, either. The book never made my role sound as if I needed to be a wishy-washy, goody-two-shoes type of Christian guy. I was a wrestler. I was into tough, and it felt as if the book was throwing down the gauntlet on my manhood. That was important because I wanted to be a good husband to Rebecca. I also wanted to be a good father to our son. I loved them both and wanted to provide for them the best I could, and the realization that I was failing to do so both
ered me deeply.

  Another book that greatly affected me was an outdoors survival guide. It was a small, almost underground type of book that my brother-in-law had picked up at a gun show and given to me. Because of the back injury that had forced me to retire from the ring, I was making only a few appearances with WWE then. Vince was good to me, doing me a favor by using me here and there in a referee’s role or as a special commissioner. Being out from under the busy schedule of wrestling, for the first time I had the opportunity to explore hobbies and develop other interests, and I began getting interested in the outdoors.

  At the beginning of the book, the author wrote that he was a Christian and that if his readers did not have Christ in their lives, they would not be good at following the tips and advice he would be sharing in the book.

  That book was fresh on my mind when I took my first hunting trip, excited to finally have the time to do the hunting that I had been wanting to do for a long time. I was sitting alone in a deer blind, probably halfway incoherent because of heavens-knows-what I had taken before I got into the blind, and watching the stars fade as the sun rose to signal the opening of a crisp, fall morning in the Texas Hill Country. It’s difficult to explain, but it was a kind of serene scene that gave me the opportunity to decompress. Even now, I can’t really point to what specifically impacted me in that deer blind, but it was a spiritual moment such as I had never experienced before.

  I had wanted our son to grow up in church, because I knew from my childhood that church was a good influence on a family. More importantly, because of what I was reading in the Bible and other books, it was becoming increasingly important that I attend church. My parents had instilled in me and my siblings that the church was where you could go when everything fell apart. Thus I knew that there was something I needed in my life, and I would probably find it in the church before I found it anywhere else. I definitely hadn’t found it in any of the other places I had been.

  It strikes me that even though I had grown up in church without actually being aware of what it truly was, all those years later the church became a magnet drawing me back to where I needed to be.

  Church became like the note on a fire extinguisher in a hotel hallway: “In case of emergency, break glass.” No, I don’t consider faith an emergency-only option, because it is much more than that. But I recognized that my life had reached emergency status. My situation called for breaking the glass.

  We started going back to my Catholic church, but Rebecca didn’t like it there and said she thought we needed to find another church. I asked where she wanted to go, and she suggested we try Cornerstone Church. It was near our home, and Rebecca had watched the pastor, John Hagee, on television when she lived in Atlanta.

  I wasn’t excited about going to a “TV church,” but, again, aware that I had an opportunity to pat myself on the back for being a supportive husband, I said we could go to Cornerstone. At least Cornerstone was close to where we lived, so if it turned out to be what I expected, it wouldn’t have put me out too much.

  Our first visit was on Father’s Day, and we had Cameron with us in the service. I guess he was moving around or making noises or something, because the woman sitting in front of us kept turning around and giving us this mean look. That turned me off to the church.

  They’re just snobs here, I thought.

  After the service, I told Rebecca we could scratch that church off our list. The next Sunday, we went back to my church, but Rebecca again told me she wasn’t happy there. We agreed to look for another church to try.

  While trying to find a church to attend regularly, reading the Bible that Rebecca had given me and some books on fatherhood motivated me to cut my pill-popping to only Friday nights. I hadn’t quit, but I did feel that I was taking determined steps in the right direction.

  One day in April 2002, I was driving around with Cameron in his car seat and, without realizing where I was, pulled to a stop in the Cornerstone parking lot.

  “What are we doing, Daddy?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, son. We are just sitting here.”

  My cell phone rang just then, and when the call ended, I set out to finish our errands and return home. I relayed to Rebecca about stopping in the church parking lot for no apparent reason and that I felt that, based on what I had noticed take place in her life, I needed to find a Bible study I could belong to.

  The next day I returned to Cornerstone, parked the car, walked into the church office, and told the lady at the front desk, “I am looking for a Bible study.”

  I later learned that one of the pastors heard me from his office, recognized me as Shawn Michaels, and was suspicious that I had come into the church as some kind of wrestling story for television.

  One pastor did come out of his office and introduced himself as Keith Parker.

  “You can come to my Bible study,” he offered in a thick, Southern drawl. Keith gave me his address and told me to be there at 7:30 the next night.

  When I arrived at Keith’s home a little before the start of the Bible study, his wife, Priscilla, and a couple of other people were there. Keith asked if I was a Christian.

  “No,” I said. “I was raised Catholic, though.”

  “Have you ever been born again?” he asked.

  “No, I was born just the one time that I know of,” I answered.

  “Would you like to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and personal Savior?” Keith asked.

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Have you ever said the Sinner’s Prayer?” he asked.

  I spun through my mental Rolodex of Catholic prayers I had said and didn’t come across that one. Keith then led me in the prayer, and I wept like a baby.

  I could feel what I’ve heard others describe about the moment they accepted their salvation: It was like burdens were falling off of me and chains were being loosened. Up to that point I had been sensing numerous changes taking place within me. But still I had felt like there was one thing more I needed, even though I couldn’t identify what it was. After saying that prayer, I knew that salvation was what had been missing.

  I drove home quickly after the Bible study, all excited to share what had happened with Rebecca.

  “Oh my goodness, it’s Jesus!” I told her when I walked through the door. “I confessed Him as Lord and Savior!”

  Rebecca smiled and said she knew all along that Jesus was who I needed in my life.

  “But you needed to come about it on your own,” she added. “I didn’t want to force you. I didn’t want to push you.”

  Keith had told me at the Bible study that the next step for me would be to get baptized in water as a public proclamation that I had accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. A couple of weeks later, that took place. I came out of that water feeling very different on the inside. One of the interesting things for me in taking that public step is that I was still Shawn Michaels to a lot of people. It was a humbling process for me to go through the baptism in front of people, and I believe that God honored my obedience to Him. I’ve wondered whether being a public figure had kept me from humbling myself to take some of the obedient steps I had been needing to take for many years.

  I’m thankful that I had a wife who was praying for me.

  Throughout the entire time leading up to the night I went to that Bible study, Rebecca had never nagged me. But neither had she stuck her head in the sand, oblivious to the circumstances. As much as she had every right to nag me into changing my ways, she hadn’t. Instead, she showed me love, she let the transformation in her life serve as an example for me, and more important, she faithfully and persistently prayed for me.

  I’m telling you, that is a loving and godly wife, and I will forever be grateful for Rebecca.

  1 See John 3:1 – 3.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE GIFT OF WRESTLING

  “The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever” (1 John 2:17).

  I became a Christian in April 2002, a
little more than four years after injuries forced me to retire following the Steve Austin match. I made TV appearances for WWE for a little more than a year before dropping off the national wrestling scene.

  During that time away, Vince had called me up to headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, because he wanted to bring me back as an on-air personality. I explained to Vince that I felt strongly that God was working on something in my life and that I was afraid of missing what He was trying to tell me. I declined Vince’s offer, telling him that I didn’t think it was a good idea for me at the time.

  I had previously called Vince shortly after I got saved and baptized, told him that I had become a Christian, and added that if he needed me to return to WWE, I would like to come back and help. Vince said he didn’t have anything for me at that time but would want me back when there was a spot. About a month later, he called to tell me that he had found a place for me to work as an on-air character.

  Even though I had told him I wanted to work at WWE again, I wasn’t sure if I should, because so many changes had taken place in my life since I had left, including the double life-changing events of having a son and getting saved. My outlook on everything had changed 100 percent. As a new Christian, I was hyper-aware of my new status and feeling that I was not supposed to do anything that would be considered remotely suspect for a Christian. I was unsure how I could go back into a line of work where everything would end up in a fight, even if for me it was just playing a part. It intimidated me to think of trying to make those two worlds — being a wrestler and a Christian — co-exist. But then again, as a new Christian I was on fire for the Lord and felt that there was something I needed to be doing for Him. I just didn’t know what that something was. Perhaps, I wondered, I should try to get involved with a ministry instead of wrestling.

  I had quickly made friends in my Bible study and in the church, so I began asking some of them for advice. As helpful as they were to me in beginning my Christian walk, none of them could give me the specific answer I was looking for. On the one hand, they could see that I wanted to do something public with my Christianity and that wrestling offered an unbelievably large platform. On the other hand, because WWE had a black eye image-wise, some expressed concerns about me returning to wrestling and facing temptations from the lifestyle I had been living. I know what the public perception of WWE is, and I understand some of why it is that way, but WWE is far from the den of evil it is portrayed to be. I think that stigma could be why my friends couldn’t provide a clear answer as to what I should do.