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

by Shawn Michaels

  Using big Kevin as a bodyguard seemed like a creative way to make that happen.

  Rick Steiner had previously wrestled with WCW, so I asked if he knew Vinnie Vegas. They just so happened to be good friends. Rick called Kevin with my idea, and Kevin told him that he was under contract to WCW, but would see what he could do.

  The next day Kevin called Rick and asked him to have someone from WWE call him. Vince called, and the next week at Raw, Kevin debuted as my bodyguard under the name “Diesel.”

  Kevin and I had never talked until he came to WWE, but we hit it off right away. Kevin was a hysterically funny dude, and I love to laugh. His sense of humor filled a void in my life, because I was going through a time when I wasn’t happy with myself and needed someone to give me reasons to laugh.

  As with Marty, Kevin and I brought out the best of each other as wrestlers, but also the worst of each other outside of wrestling.

  We eventually became a tag team known as Two Dudes with Attitudes and had a couple of great runs together from 1993 to 1995, and then we reunited after my return when I joined the nWo stable.

  After Kevin, I partnered with Paul Levesque, who wrestled as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, or Triple H, whom I met at WrestleMania 11, in 1995, shortly after Hunter had joined WWF.

  Hunter started hanging around my circle of friends — Kevin, Scott Hall, and Kid (Sean Waltman). We were such a tight group that the other wrestlers starting calling us The Kliq. That name wasn’t always used in flattering terms, because some viewed us as a group that held and wielded political power to get our way within the organization. Admittedly, we did have Vince’s ear, we did exert influence, and what we pushed for was for the good of WWF.

  It was a crucial time for WWF. The business was changing, and we faced the potential of getting our tails kicked by WCW if we did nothing or if we did the wrong things, because WCW was on the rise. We were the guys who had earned our spots at the top of the sport and had strong opinions about the direction WWF needed to take.

  Hunter and I quickly became close friends, and we made up half of D-Generation X when it formed, along with bodyguard Chyna and Rick Rude. Not only did WWF benefit from what Hunter and I did in the ring, but it also was a good business move to keep us together because Hunter, who didn’t drink and party, practically babysat me.

  Hunter could still cause trouble professionally, which is part of what defined us as The Kliq. We made waves, but the bosses probably figured that we would make fewer waves if we were together. If I went off the rails drugs-wise — and that was a real threat — Hunter would be there with me. And then if we both went off the rails professionally, it would be easier to contain us if we were together.

  DX did make the company a boatload of money.

  Hunter stuck by me in the aftermath of the Montreal Screwjob. After the match, it was a little scary, because Bret Hart became extremely upset and started slamming TV monitors in the back, and I didn’t know who all would side with him. The match was supposed to end — at least the way everyone thought it would end — with Hunter coming to the ring and interfering, causing chaos and ending the match with a disqualification. But we found a way to end the match before Hunter could become involved.

  After the match, Hunter and Chyna were in my hotel room with me. It was one thing for me to talk about pulling a swerve, but it was altogether different to actually make it happen. We had no idea what the consequences would be, but the atmosphere behind the scenes in the arena afterward had been intimidating.

  “You want me to sit here with you for a while?” Hunter asked.

  “For a little bit, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  The next day we decided that we would walk into the TV event together. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for another wrestler or other wrestlers to jump us. It was that intense, with a pretend storyline becoming pretty real to those involved. Hunter and I decided that if anyone was going to get knocked out, it was going to be both of us. Nobody wants to get beaten up, but it is easier to get beat up with your buddy. Let’s put it this way: When your head gets put in a vise and someone else puts his in there with yours, you don’t ever forget what that person did for you.

  When I came back from retirement, we worked an angle with Hunter and me as rivals. Hunter turned on me, and I won the World Heavyweight Championship from him and then dropped it back to him. Then, of course, there was our DX reunion after our return.

  Hunter and I were the last ones from The Kliq still with WWE, because the rest had left for the rival WCW. We bonded even further over that. We feel that we sort of shared a foxhole together. We saw each other at our worst, and we saw each other at our best.

  We are still very tight. Hunter is now an executive vice president at WWE. He married Vince’s daughter, Stephanie (whom he had previously “married” as part of a storyline), and he eventually will be running that company.

  When I was selected into the WWE Hall of Fame, I asked Hunter to introduce me at the induction ceremony. It pained him greatly to have to say something nice about me in his speech, because he would rather show that he cares about me by busting my chops.

  Hunter was an awesome partner and remains an awesome friend.

  The only time a pairing didn’t appear natural in the ring, oddly enough, was with Jose Lothario. Early in my career, Vince thought Jose would spice up a storyline leading up to a WrestleMania, and he brought Jose in as my manager.

  Jose still felt like a mentor to me, yet I had advanced far beyond that nineteen-year-old he had trained in San Antonio. I was uncomfortable being the guy who would determine how to use my mentor.

  More problematic, I also had been playing a bad guy and then got switched to a goody-two-shoes character I didn’t feel real good about doing. My character had left the last WrestleMania as a cocky guy with an attractive woman on his arm, and then I flipped to become a more humble character with an older man as my manager. It took me a while to step into that new role, and that made it challenging to know how best to utilize Jose. I didn’t incorporate Jose enough, and the idea didn’t pan out the way we had hoped.

  Also, I didn’t have the ability then that I do now to get things out in the open with people, so I couldn’t ask Jose if he was upset with me or disappointed with me. Jose was from wrestling’s old school — poker-faced and tight-lipped — and I couldn’t get a read on how he felt about how we were doing.

  Jose and I had a good relationship when he was training me, and Vince wanted that real-life aspect of my story to come through in the storyline. But with the drastic changes in my character, and with me not doing a good job of acting out that transition, the chemistry wasn’t there with Jose’s character, and our real-life relationship just didn’t come through at all.

  Tag-teaming with a friend doesn’t guarantee chemistry, but I couldn’t imagine having a tag-team partner I didn’t become friends with, because you spend so much time together. I saw other tag teams who weren’t buddies outside the ring, but I don’t think I could have done that.

  Wrestlers share a common bond that it seems to me would be like what soldiers share: They can go their separate ways and then come back together years later for a reunion and sit there and share that understanding of what they went through together in a way that others in the room can’t understand. Wrestling, to me, feels like a body I am a part of, much like a church body.

  Now I can look back at all those relationships and partnerships and see a pattern, and that brings me back to God. We cannot see from beginning to end the way He does, but from what I can make out in my rearview mirror, I can see that each relationship I developed along the way was like a narrowing path bringing me closer and closer to being in relationship with Him. Each one of those people taught me something about myself, and I didn’t know it at the time, but reflecting on those relationships later would show me a lot about my ability to develop and maintain relationships.

  By far, the best partner I have ever chosen is my wife, Rebecca.


  I had been married once before. I don’t talk about it publicly much, out of respect to my ex-wife. I was twenty-three at the time, and she was nineteen. We were married a short time when we realized that neither of us had been ready to marry, and we got an amicable divorce. The problem wasn’t who I married, but my quick decision to marry and the person I was at that point in my life.

  I was thirty-four when I married Rebecca. She was heaven-sent and the catalyst for all the wonderful changes in my life.

  I can remember commenting very early in our relationship that even if I didn’t marry Rebecca, she was a person I would want to hang around for the rest of my life. She instantly recognized that I hadn’t had a lot of people like that in my life. She noted that because of my public career, I had to keep a guard up for people who wanted to be takers, whose motives I had to question to protect myself.

  “I can see where that would be an issue in your life all the time,” she told me. “What can I do to make sure I eliminate myself as being one of those people?”

  That one question meant a lot to me.

  She made it known that her goal was to be there for me. It’s hard not to dig that!

  Then, after we married, despite all the things I was doing, she never went down the nagging trail. She would have been well within her rights to nag, but she chose to go about it a different way.

  If she had nagged me, I don’t think it would have gone well. There were a couple of occasions when she had to set me straight, and I got defensive with her, even flat-out lying.

  When Cameron was a baby, and before my salvation, we bought a computer. As I was learning how to use it, a buddy showed me some web sites. Yeah, those kinds.

  Rebecca asked if I had been looking at porn.

  “Nope,” I said. I hadn’t learned that it’s possible to check the history of web sites that have been called up on a computer.

  Rebecca asked again, and I denied again.

  She called up the history list, and I had to admit what I had been doing.

  Rebecca hadn’t had many guys treat her as well as they should have. They all eventually seemed to disappoint her or hurt her. Because we hadn’t dated long before marrying, there was much I had yet to learn about her, including her history with relationships. And here I was doing something that had to make her think I might be just like all the other guys who had hurt her.

  She called my lawyer.

  “I want a divorce,” she told him.

  “Well, Rebecca,” he said, “I am Shawn’s lawyer.”

  “I don’t care,” she replied. “I don’t want anything. I just want a divorce.”

  My lawyer told her that they could talk more about it later. She left the house with Cameron for the night while hoping, I learned later, that I would come after her.

  I didn’t. I was stubborn.

  She came back home the next day, and we had an open and honest discussion in which she helped me understand how much I had hurt her. That was a pivotal moment in our marriage. We saw — especially, I saw — that we had some growing to do in our relationship.

  I was in the midst of all my bad stuff when that happened. In addition to the mental fogs I was in and out of because of the pills, I also didn’t know as much about my wife as I should have. I didn’t know enough about the human heart, either. I failed to recognize that I was hurting Rebecca.

  It’s embarrassing to admit that I was looking at pornography, but I know that porn is often a major issue for men, whether they’re Christians or non-Christians. For me, the porn was just a curiosity, and my curiosity was no reflection on Rebecca. The problem was completely with me. That didn’t change the fact, however, that I broke her heart. It certainly was unintentional, but I did.

  I love Rebecca — always have loved her — and not wanting to break her heart again motivated me. I think she saw that even though it had to be a scary time for her. I told her I wouldn’t look at porn again, and in the fifteen years since, I have stayed true to my promise. From that moment, we started down the road to strengthening our relationship.

  There’s one story about Rebecca that blows my mind when I think about it. Many of those nights when I was passed out on the couch, after she had rearranged my body to make sure my back was in a comfortable position, when she would go to our walk-in closet to pray that God would help me stop taking the pills, she would sense the Holy Spirit telling her these words: “You change. You be the woman you are supposed to be, and he will be the man he’s supposed to be.”

  It still amazes me to think that instead of nagging me to make the obvious changes I needed to make, she set out to get her heart right with the Lord. Instead of pushing me into what she thought I needed to become, she handed me a study Bible and a couple of books so that the Holy Spirit could begin reshaping me into what He wanted me to be.

  We had been married seven years when I wrote my first book. We have more than doubled that now. We’ve had more time to withstand the challenges married couples go through. We’ve had more time to struggle and to make mistakes. We’ve had battles to endure. (Does anyone want to buy an empty building in San Antonio?)

  If I had continued to love Rebecca the same way as I had before I got saved, I don’t think our marriage would have survived what we’ve endured over the years. I would have probably bailed because I didn’t understand the importance of the family and what my role was as husband and father.

  To love Rebecca the way she needed to be loved, I had to become a better partner to her.

  It took me a while to figure out what makes her tick. That’s not to imply I know everything about her. Gosh, no. But I do have a better grasp of how she thinks and what is important to her.

  About ten years into our marriage, I learned through The Five Love Languages book written by Gary Chapman that Rebecca is a service-oriented person. If I want to show her that I love her, the best way is by doing things for her. I could buy her a dozen roses, and I don’t think she could care less. But when I unload the dishwasher, then I’m the man!

  I am not a service-oriented guy. I don’t like unloading the dishwasher. It’s not a natural response for me to see a full dishwasher and go put all the dishes in the cabinets. I don’t equate unloading a dishwasher with an expression of appreciation. But Rebecca does. So when I want to show Rebecca that I love and appreciate her, I need to unload the dishwasher. (I have the feeling that previous sentence is going to get read back aloud and used against me frequently!)

  We have both read enough books to understand that maintaining a joyful, positive environment in our home is one of the best things we can do for our children.

  The best book — the Bible — contains what is known as the “Love Chapter.” It’s 1 Corinthians 13, and in that chapter Paul defines love this way:

  Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.7

  I’ve heard that in that biblical description of love, there’s not much mention of feelings. What love does is more prominent that what loves feels. That’s opposite of the way our society tends to define love. The reasons that Rebecca and I married have evolved into something much bigger and greater, even though the path has included bumps and pitfalls.

  Knowing biblical truths has kept our marriage solid no matter what we have encountered. Obviously, it helps when we see some fruit from those biblical truths, because if you don’t get some glimpses of hope, it’s hard to keep going.

  I’m pretty good at handling just about anything if I have a little bit of hope. I’m a lot like Jim Carrey’s dim-witted Lloyd Christmas character in the movie Dumb and Dumber. He asks the wealthy and attractive Mary Swanson, played by Lauren Holly, if there’s a chance that a guy like him would end up with a girl like her. She says the chances are not good.

  �
��You mean, not good like one out of a hundred?” he follows up.

  “I’d say more like one out of a million,” she responds.

  Lloyd pauses a few seconds before saying, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance? Yeah!”

  That’s me. As long as there is any kind of chance, that’s all I need to soldier on.

  Rebecca and I can see fruit in our children. They are respectful. They recognize right and wrong, and they recognize sin. They openly and comfortably talk about God in public, and they think it’s only natural to do so. That’s nice to observe as a parent.

  We can see fruit in our individual lives and in our marriage, too. We have been married for fifteen years now, and our relationship still is based on friendship and includes a lot of humor and a lot of joy. We still have love and dedication and passion for one another. That helps our faith, and it helps with our strength and endurance. It keeps us pushing on, moving on, and continuing to walk with God like Abram (before his name changed to Abraham), when the Lord appeared to him and said, “Walk before me faithfully.”8

  The Lord’s instruction was not to run. It was to walk, and to do so faithfully. It was just step by step. I can reflect back on my marriage to Rebecca and see that we have grown together step by step through both the good and the bad. And I think that is an awesome kind of love to share.

  7 1 Corinthians 13:4 – 7.

  8 Genesis 17:1.

  CHAPTER 12