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Last fall, Shawn Michaels did the unlikely when he returned from an over eight-year retirement to work a match at the Crown Jewel show in Saudi Arabia, teaming up with his old running buddy Triple H as DX to face off against The Brothers of Destruction, The Undertaker and Kane. No one expected for HBK to be back in WWE for years and years. There were, nonetheless, plenty of rumblings at the time of him working a few more matches and angles with hand-selected talents.
Wrestling has a way of grabbing a hold of its biggest stars. They get hooked and just one night back is rarely enough for a legend. After all, Michaels claimed in his book that when he came back in 2002, he only planned to work the one match against Triple H at SummerSlam, but he wound up hanging around for most of the years to follow, winning another world title and main eventing three more WrestleManias along the way.
So what if Michaels had stuck around full time following Crown Jewel? This article considers what might have been.
#5 Another WWE Championship reign
Daniel Bryan and AJ Styles spent much of late 2018 into early 2019 feuding over the WWE Championship. By WrestleMania season, there wasn’t a clear a path forward until Kofi Kingston’s unlikely rise to prominence.
Add Shawn Michaels to this mix, and there may not have been a question.
HBK vs. Bryan, Styles, or both would have the potential to be a lights-out WrestleMania world title match. And even if Michaels has lost a step, the story of him returning after eight years away only to add another world title to his resume at WrestleMania would have been way too appealing for WWE to have passed upon it.
By all rights, a final WWE Championship reign for Michaels should have been short. Even those reports that he was eyeing a more full-time comeback didn’t suggest he’d stick around for more than a few months. Nonetheless, it could have been exciting and set up Michaels to pass the torch in putting over a younger talent for the title afterwards.
#4 DX vs. The Shield
For as much as Shawn Michaels himself will always be a draw for WWE, the company was known to go back to the DX well whenever it could justify it, returning to HBK teaming up with Triple H. Particularly given that that was the tandem he returned to be a part of in the first place, it seems fair to assume WWE would go back to that well once The Game was cleared from the injury he incurred at Crown Jewel.
Whether DX worked face or heel, it feels like it may have only been a matter of time before they crossed paths with The Shield.
In various two on two permutations, with Michaels and Triple H bringing back someone like X-Pac or Road Dogg for a nostalgia pop, or enlisting a new third man to give the rub, DX vs. The Shield could be sold as an intergenerational dream match. While Michaels and Helmsley would be past their primes, they’re both smart workers and The Hounds of Justice could likely cover for them to deliver a stellar enough bout.
#3 Shawn Michaels vs. Kevin Owens
One of the rumored matches on Shawn Michaels’s wish list was an encounter with Kevin Owens. This pairing makes a good bit of sense given that, while Owens may not have always been pushed at the top of the card by WWE, he is a wrestler’s wrestler—respected for his in-ring performance and talents on the microphone. Of all the Superstars on the current main roster, Owens jumps out as one who could easily tell a compelling story with Michaels, and ultimately deliver a match that lives up to the hype.
As an added dimension that Owens is enough of a student of the game to introduce, he hails from Montreal and his gimmick last name is a tribute to Owen Hart. It feels likely he’d have brought the Montreal Screwjob into these proceedings, perhaps referencing how they taught him to hate Michaels from his teenage years.
#2 A heel run
Shawn Michaels is an all-time great baby face and the kind of legend whom a large swathe of fans can’t help but cheer at this point in his career. By the same token, there’s a very real argument that he’s even better at playing the heel role, as demonstrated by his work in the original DX era or his momentary heel turn against Hulk Hogan in 2005.
Michaels toyed with playing heel in a number of his recent appearances, which included siding with Triple H against Daniel Bryan and Sting. One last go-round as heel HBK could be very entertaining from a promo perspective. Additionally, the heel working style could afford him a natural opportunity to slow down his in-ring work to match his physical limitations as a man who is in great shape for his age, but is nonetheless now in his mid-fifties.
#1 One more retirement angle
Shawn Michaels is widely respected as one of the greatest of all time. That’s a narrative that WWE pushed at a number of points of his tenure with the company, and that HBK wasn’t known to shy away from. Accordingly, it made sense that the company would make a big deal out of his second retirement, working no less than a WrestleMania main event match opposite no lesser Superstar than The Undertaker, under the stipulation that if he retired, he’d hang up his wrestling boots.
If Michaels were to have come back full time for even a few months to a year, the odds are he wouldn’t go quietly, but rather in working another retirement angle. It’s unclear where it would fall on the spectrum of his previous retirement match with The Dead Man, a kayfabe stipulation that he would have to retire upon his next loss like Ric Flair, or in one final match announced in advance like Kurt Angle. Nonetheless, we could expect that at a WrestleMania, or perhaps one of the big international stadium shows, WWE would cash in on the prospect of The Showstopper’s last match one more time.
