Shawn Michaels once gave the sternest of backstage warnings to a WWE colleague after a mishap in the middle of a match.
Michaels is widely regarded as one of the finest professional wrestlers of all time after a decorated in-ring career that spanned decades and included multiple world championships.
Today, Michaels helps steer the careers of the next generation of wrestling upstarts. He heads up NXT, which effectively serves as WWE’s developmental division.
Alongside good pal Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque who serves as the company’s Chief Content Officer and Head of Creative, the duo make a popular and successful pairing in terms of creating a very watchable product.
If Michaels knows what he wants and what fans want to see, it’s understandable he’s imparted that wisdom unto others over the years, not least during the latter years of his career.
Former WWE Hardcore Champion Maven has detailed one run-in he had with the Hall of Fame star, who he insists didn’t care much for him when he first started wrestling for the company back in 2001.
“He was working with me and I was extremely green,” said Maven of his inexperience at the time. “ This was early in my career and I definitely didn’t want to make myself look stupid but, moreover, I did not want to make [Michaels] look stupid.
“At this point, I didn’t know he didn’t like me, and I had hoped that there could still be a level of mutual respect for one other. Those hopes were all dashed the night we stepped into Albuquerque, New Mexico.”
The wrestler turned YouTuber went on to detail a match during which he worked with Michaels in the city, which sits high above sea level – some 5,000 feet no less.
Explaining that wrestling in such conditions takes a very different type of conditioning, Maven said he was warned about the risks that night, and so it was perhaps with a degree of foolhardiness that he attempted one of Michaels signature moves – with disastrous consequences.
“I was on my back trying to do a move that The Rock and [Michaels] does, a nip-up,” he went on.
“It was pretty easy for me to do at this time, I could do it usually with or without hands, it didn’t matter, I was athletic enough that I could pull the move off – at sea level!
“Being at over 5,000 feet of elevation when I went to do my nip-up, I realised I had absolutely no air in my lungs and I got no lift… so when I went to pop up, I didn’t pop up, I landed on my butt [and] my back.”
Seeing Michaels, Rock and plenty of others nail a nip-up with aplomb had become a regular thing for fans over the years, so seeing Maven fail so badly with it apparently left the crowd that night most amused – and Michaels very much not.
“If you look back then, by association, he looked bad,” admitted the now 47-year-old.
“Once the match was over and once the crowd got a good chuckle out of a rookie not landing a simple move, we got backstage and Shawn laid into me.
“He told me: ‘If you’re not a hundred precent you can do and land a move, don’t do it.’
“I pretty much kept my mouth shut. I tried to spit out a reason, but he didn’t want to hear it.
“He wasn’t wrong, in this case, I was one hundred percent wrong.”
59-year-old Michaels boasts the experience of a wrestling career that began in the late 1980s, and came to an end in 2010, during which time he won the WWE and World Heavyweight title on four occasions along with a litany of other accolades.