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

by Shawn Michaels

  The typical answer was “Pray about it, brother.” Now, let me say that “Pray about it” is probably the best advice we can give anyone facing any kind of decision. So I don’t want to come across as saying that’s not a good answer. It should be a part of every answer. But what I experienced as a very new Christian was that praying about it presented some difficulties for me. Mainly, I knew how to pray, but I didn’t know how I would hear God’s answer, especially to a question as specific as “Do I take this job or not?”

  How would God let me know? Would I hear a voice? Would I walk out my front door and see a skywriter leaving a “Yes” or “No” in the sky? Would someone hear God’s voice and give me the answer? And if the latter was the case, why were some Christians I trusted telling me I should go back to WWE and others were telling me I shouldn’t?

  I would go to my gym and pray there, sometimes lying on the floor and trying to be still and quiet. I would listen to Christian music, hoping I would feel something that would lead me to the answer. Nothing produced an answer.

  Until one Sunday when I was in church and my cell phone rang.

  It was Bruce Pritchard, a producer with WWE. I stepped out into the lobby and answered. Bruce asked if I could make it to Raw the next night. I said that I was in church and would have to call him back.

  Almost as soon as I had returned to my seat, Pastor Hagee said in his message that we can seek out wise counsel when we need guidance, but at the same time we could ask ten different Christians a question and get ten different answers. Boy, had I already learned that. But, Pastor Hagee continued, we should faithfully pray and God will answer our prayer. That’s the part I was struggling with. But then he added that God will always let us know what He wants us to do.

  God will let you know.

  I immediately thought about Bruce’s call and wondered what the chances were that he would call with that question during church and right before Pastor Hagee would make that statement.

  After church, I talked with Rebecca about Bruce’s offer and what Pastor Hagee had said.

  “It’s up to you,” she said.

  I called Bruce and told him I would be there the next day.

  I didn’t have to walk in the door and shout, “I’m a Christian now!” A few months earlier, I had taken part in an interview with part of the WWE media in which one of the main topics was the Montreal Screwjob — one of the biggest controversies ever in wrestling, which I just so happened to be squarely in the middle of.

  In 1997, Bret Hart was leaving WWE for WCW. I was to be Bret’s opponent for his final match which, to complicate matters for Vince’s plan that Bret drop his WWF Champion title on the way out, would take place in Canada, Bret’s home country. Leading up to the match, Bret had made it known that he would not give up the belt if he had to give it to me. (We already had a fierce rivalry in place before all this happened.)

  Vince arranged for what is known in the business as a “swerve,” or secretly setting up a match to turn out different from the prearranged result. Bret didn’t know what was coming, and when I defeated him to take his belt away in front of his fellow countrymen, he understandably became enraged. When he left for WCW, we didn’t exchange a single word for more than a decade, he took every opportunity to bash me and WWE publicly, and the Montreal Screwjob became the most hotly discussed topic in wrestling for years.

  In creating the swerve, Vince had told me to say I did not know it would happen because he wanted to take responsibility for it and try to keep my name clean in connection with the situation. That’s what I had done for all those years. But in my newfound status as a Christian, I didn’t want to lie. So when I was asked in that interview about the Montreal Screwjob, I said, “I don’t know if you guys know this, but I knew it was going down.”

  Judging by the shocked expression on the interviewer’s face, I would say she didn’t know!

  “Vince told me adamantly that I was never to talk about that,” I continued, “because he wanted to take responsibility for it. I’m not comfortable with that anymore. Can I just say it?”

  The interviewer — remember, she worked for WWE — seemed confused and said she didn’t know what to do and would have to ask headquarters.

  We stopped the interview, and I called Vince, but he didn’t answer his phone. So I told the interviewer, “I am just going to tell you the truth, and I will let you guys edit it out if you need to.”

  I then gave her the scoop on the Montreal Screwjob, and they ended up airing that part of the interview. Revealing the complete truth about what had taken place obviously made big news, and my faith came out as the reason for my finally telling the true story.

  So when I did return to WWE to be a part of Raw, my being a Christian was well known.

  In the four-plus years I had been gone, there had been a good amount of turnover among the wrestlers. But the ones still there who had wrestled with me — the ones who had been eyewitnesses to many of my old ways — said they noticed a complete change in me right away.

  The first time I saw Kevin Nash, whom I used to go out with and drink a case of beer with almost every night, he told me he could tell that I had come out of the water when I was baptized as “a different man.” Kevin would have supported me no matter what, but he could tell that I was a new man.

  Everyone at WWE was so welcoming of me and accepting of my Christianity, all the way up to Vince. I would say that most of the guys appeared thrilled for me. I knew there would be some who wondered if my change was for real — after all, we all worked in a business that relied on coming up with creative storylines — and if my new way of living would last.

  No one, including me, knew how long I would be back with WWE. I had undergone surgery to fuse my back at the L4 and L5 vertebrae and create more space between the L5 and S1. The surgeon also took a piece of my hip and placed it between the L4 and L5, then screwed everything together using a metal plate.

  While I considered it a miracle from God that I could even consider wrestling again, much less do so, there was no commitment from either side for anything beyond that one match. I wanted to see how my back would respond, and WWE had no interest in pushing me beyond that.

  The uncertainty of how long I would be with WWE again put a sense of urgency in my wanting to be a good witness. I felt that God had brought me back to that platform to do something positive for Him, and I did not want to waste the one opportunity I knew I could count on. I didn’t become a Bible-thumper, getting in guys’ faces and demanding to know where they stood with the Lord. But I knew that they expected me to be different, and I wanted to show them that the changes in me were real and lasting, that what God had done in my life was legit, and that He could make the same difference in their lives.

  In my earlier days in wrestling, I hadn’t known how many Christians there were among the guys. First, I wasn’t interested in knowing who was a believer. Second, the Christians, trust me, would not have been spending their free time where I was hanging out. Third, in the wrestling environment I was brought into as a youngster, we talked very little about our personal lives. There was this handed-down understanding that wrestlers did not let anyone else in the locker room see their weaknesses. It was like we were on guard all the time, dedicated to concealing any vulnerability. We wore tough-guy masks around each other because we were wrestlers.

  When I returned in 2002, I was surprised at the shift in the locker-room culture. While it wasn’t a completely new environment, there still had been enough of a transformation that guys could show insecurity or fear. It wasn’t a bad thing anymore to admit that a situation intimidated you. This all probably came along as part of the changes of that era in wrestling as an industry.

  Whatever the reason, guys felt free to come up and tell me about their faith, and I don’t believe that would have occurred before my retirement. I have to say that there were a few guys who really surprised me when they told me about their faith. I’m not the judgmental type, but I would not have
expected to hear from some that they had experienced salvation at some point in their lives.

  Kevin, my drinking buddy whom I knew about as well as any of the wrestlers, told me he had attended Fellowship of Christian Athlete meetings when he had played basketball at the University of Tennessee back in the late 1970s.

  “Really?” I asked him. “How come you never said anything about it?”

  “With the life we were living?” he replied. “Are you kidding me?”

  I laughed, because I understood his point.

  Chris Jericho, who had moved into WWE from WCW while I was away, was a Christian. We would pray with each other before matches. There was a six-man Elimination Chamber match out in Phoenix that Kevin, Jericho, and I were in, and the three of us were getting ready to pray before going out to the ring. Hunter, whom I had never known to make any profession of faith, joined us. Then while we were praying, Bill Goldberg came over, put his big arms around us, and prayed with us.

  Just as I don’t judge anyone, I also don’t try to claim that because someone takes part in a prayer he is automatically a Christian. But here were all these guys about to get into the ring together for a match, and they were coming together to pray at least for a moment in time, and the Lord was being glorified in that moment. To be able to look back on occasions like those and know that I had not previously seen such displays in wrestling provides special memories for me even now.

  When I returned to WWE, I became the “resident Christian” that guys could come and talk to whenever they had spiritual questions or were dealing with tough situations. Perhaps I was partly a token Christian, but heck, that was all right with me. That wasn’t such a bad gig. The way I saw it, at least they knew I was a guy they could go to because they could see that my faith was real and that I had a little insight to the Christian life.

  That was a time when we experienced far too many wrestlers dying far too young, and there were guys who would seek me out to talk whom I could tell had been suddenly forced to consider their own mortality. I would share what my faith had done in my life and answer whatever questions of theirs that I could.

  In 2005 Eddie Guerrero died in a hotel room from what was later determined to be a heart attack. I called Vince to let him know, and Hunter and I were allowed to go up onto the same floor as Eddie’s room. That happened on a Monday, and we had a Raw to shoot that night. In wrestling, the show always goes on as scheduled. While we were planning to make that night’s Raw a tribute to Eddie, Vince told me, “I talk to God, but I do it in my own way.”

  “That’s all right,” I told Vince. “Different guys communicate to Him in different ways.”

  “Well, look,” he told me. “Eddie was a Christian like you. I’m just thinking about getting everybody together, and what do you think about saying a prayer?”

  “That would be awesome,” I told Vince. “I think that would mean a lot to Eddie to bring everybody together. I don’t think that’s ever been done around here.”

  “I pray in my own way,” Vince said. “Do you mind doing the prayer?”

  “I’d be honored.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get everybody together. We’ll have a little meeting and let them know what is going on, what we are going to do for the show. And then I will just let everybody know that you are going to say a prayer and if they want to stay, they can. If not, they don’t have to.”

  The more those types of opportunities arose and the more conversations I had with wrestlers that I knew would not have taken place in my earlier days, the more I believed that God had wanted me to go back to WWE, and for a reason.

  The Christian friends who expressed hesitancy about me returning to wrestling did so out of concern for me. I have said that WWE is not as evil as it is often made out to be, but there obviously had been plenty of pitfalls there for me to fall into my first time around.

  Rebecca might have experienced a little bit of trepidation, but when I asked her opinion about me returning, she said she was at peace with it. When I went back, my old lifestyle had absolutely no appeal to me. I didn’t want to live in a way that would be detrimental to me or my family. For the first time in my life I felt that I could clearly see the lines between right and wrong.

  My salvation came with the realization that if you don’t live for something, you don’t live for much of anything. My something was Jesus, my Lord and Savior, and I no longer wanted to maintain a lifestyle that would disappoint the One who had given His life for me.

  With the change that God brought to my life, there was nothing about my previous lifestyle that I wanted to revisit for old times’ sake.

  The assumption was that before I became a Christian, I had fallen prey to the pursuit of fame and money associated with the wrestling lifestyle. Based on that assumption, I understood why some people were concerned about my going back to WWE. But the assumption was false.

  Fame and money and those pursuits were not a temptation for me. They were not a threat for me. They were not the reasons I had gotten into all the stuff I had before. I had drunk a lot, done drugs, and popped pills for two reasons: because of boredom, and because I was empty and lonely. My wife used to say that idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and that was true with me, because a lot of the destructive things I did were just a way to kill time.

  Our schedules back then were so busy that all there really was time for outside of wrestling was sitting in a hotel room watching TV until you fell asleep. That, to me, was torture. Plus, I didn’t like to be alone with myself, because I didn’t like myself. I went out and drank because that was a way to be with others. I did drugs to get high and took pills to get relaxed so I could get into a mental state where I wouldn’t have to deal with who I had become.

  I never had any withdrawals once I quit. I found Jesus, and I was done with the drugs and pills. Just like that. I have had surgeries since and have had no problems getting off the pain pills after I recovered. I took the pills exactly as prescribed and stopped exactly when I was supposed to.

  To me, the complete life turnaround was the strongest witness I could have as a Christian. Although there were a lot of new faces in WWE, I knew they had heard stories about me. The biggest reputation black marks against me were being difficult to work with and being a pill head. While some of the old-timers who were still around might have wondered if the change would last, I think they also hoped I had changed for good, because they remembered quite well how I had been before, when I had been hanging out in the bars, drinking, doing drugs, messing around with women, going off on people, and generally being disrespectful.

  When I had left the first time, the range of how much I was liked by the other wrestlers was probably little to none, with the exception of my best friend, Hunter. I guess one of the upsides to the hell of a life I had lived was that I had set the bar so low that it would not have taken much effort to not be as bad as what I had been. Trust me, that is not something to be proud of!

  I used to be one of the guys going to the strip clubs. I didn’t go to those places when I went back. Gosh, I didn’t even know if the younger guys were going to them. I didn’t know where they went. When I could, I brought my family with me. I did that so we could spend more time together, but one of the by-products was that the guys got to see me with my family and their mental images of me would be me with my family instead of in those other places. I think that simply not being seen in certain places I had previously frequented proved to be a pretty viable witness on its own.

  I had only one fear associated with my return: that I would not be as good a wrestler as before. I didn’t know how much my back could withstand, but I wasn’t as worried about my body as much as I was my wrestling ability. I was thirty-seven years old when I got back into the ring at the SummerSlam pay-per-view event, working an angle in which Triple H had turned on me. My knees and back felt years older than thirty-seven, but the fans ate up the Triple H angle, and when our match went over well and I didn’t experience too much une
xpected soreness afterward, I was back to wrestling.

  I didn’t wrestle full-time, managing my schedule so I could spend time at home and still be available for the run-up to and during the big events.

  The fans were receptive to the cleaned-up Shawn Michaels. I knew I would face the same challenges with them that I did with the guys. Namely, was this change real and would it last?

  I couldn’t blame the fans for being suspicious that the Christian story might be just another made-up wrestling storyline. In every personal interview I took part in, I made sure to include my faith in an effort to show that I had experienced a legitimate, real-life change.

  I also started incorporating Christian words and symbols into my wardrobe. I wore overt Christian T-shirts into the ring, such as shirts that included Jesus’ name or made a declaration such as “He Is Risen.” I was excited about the shirts, and I took a bit of heat from fans for wearing them and for talking about God so openly. But I had expected that and had determined I wasn’t going to let it bother me. I was genuinely happy and was telling folks long before I knew that “I shouldn’t.”

  Vince was fine with the messaged shirts, too, although he did come to me after a couple of months of me wearing them and said he wanted to ask a question about my shirts.

  “Do you have a problem with them?” I asked Vince.