Triple H and Shawn Michaels Shape the Future of Wrestling

My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?

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They just … agree to stop fighting.

In the middle of the ring on Monday Night Raw, one evening after an endless Hell in a Cell match, Jim Ross, a legendary broadcaster who knows the worth of a generation-defining rivalry, asks Triple H and Shawn Michaels to end what he calls one of the greatest rivalries in WWE history so they can “both move on with their lives.”

Their Mega Powers handshake is interrupted (just before they achieve full release) by Eric Bischoff, and Hunter abandons his great rival and former friend to an attack by Kane, but this is is it between the two of them, basically. They wrestle again at Taboo Tuesday 2004, but that’s four months later, and at the behest of a fan vote over Edge and Chris Benoit. This feud, possibly the greatest of all time according to a man who has witnessed an embarrassing number of rivalries better than this one, crumbles into so many Raw Tag Matches and Battle Royal Tension Spots until they reform D-Generation X.

It’s horseshit. So is the match that precedes it.

In this Hell in a Cell match, Shawn Michaels and Triple H pour on the sort of melodrama that, if they performed this way with anybody else, would make you think they were trying to bury their opponent. It’s something of an achievement that a match like this, between two legitimate friends who’d spent the better part of a decade sharing ideas and working together, with decades of in-ring experience, both avowed students of the game, with such a high stakes stipulation, feels as cold and clinical as Michaels and Helmsley’s effort here. At least it would be, except that the whole feud is this bad, no matter how many gimmicks they padded the feud out with, and no matter how many times the WWE insists that spending a few years on camera together telling everyone to suck their cocks constitutes one of the great friendships in wrestling. The only way you could possibly care about the stakes here is if Kliq lore was your “the Bloodline is cinema,” and in 2004, with WWE really just beginning to figure out 90s nostalgia, Kliq lore wasn’t worth shit. 

What’s interesting is that I think this match hits all of its marks. Michaels and Helmsley have a very clear sense of what they want to do and they execute it competently. This is the last match of this feud, and they give everything they can to make it an Epic.

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This ambition can either go one of two ways. In the epics that’ve come to define main event, arena-sized professional wrestling since New Japan Pro Wrestling broke through in America, it means “fighting spirit,” a clash of indomitable wills that refuse, utterly, to yield to an opponent until they have nothing left to give. Sure, these matches have their contrivances — strike battles, one-count finisher kickouts, and so on — but they are an attempt to create a sense of genuine importance, combining an innate knowledge of the beauty of combat, the genuine competitiveness that exists between wrestlers, and long-term, in-ring storytelling that is satisfying in the moment and upon repeat viewings, deepening the more you make connections to histories and characters. In an epic like this, the focus is setpieces — here is a chair, here are the stairs, here is the cage, here is a table, here is a ladder — all of which are meant to escalate stakes that should already exist, and which betray the flow of a match by compelling its participants to wrestle towards those objects rather than each other. 

Shawn and Hunter wrestle this match as if the audience for this year-long feud, with its origins stretching back nearly a decade, are people who’ve never seen wrestling before, a smart fan’s match for the smart fan who hasn’t read that one Barthes essay yet. They hit their marks, sure, but it’s for an audience that doesn’t exist. The one that does exist sits on their hands most of the time while Jim Ross keeps going back their days in DX for the home viewer, keeping to his usual vague mythmaking about the world’s most boring people to the extent that, at one point, he calls Triple H “the Pontiff of Pain.”

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On Twitter, I joked about the match’s finish, which sees Triple H slowly crawl over to Shawn to lift him up for a Pedigree, after which he slowly crawls over to drape an arm across Michaels, as being Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, only for the birth of NXT’s main event house style, which has also become a template for the main roster. It’s not hard to understand why — it’s the methodically paced style that Triple H has fetishized over the course of his career, cut through with the heightened melodrama that came to mark his 2000s return, but is also there in his earlier matches with The Undertaker, as well as his ladder matches with Razor Ramon.

Those matches, like this one, are wildly important to WWE, introducing the ladder match to a large audience, debuting Hell in a Cell, and putting together one of the company’s few good casket matches. I think they’re great because they’re not aiming for perfection — Shawn and Razor were still coming into their own, cementing their status with those matches, and he and The Undertaker went at it just as WWF crowds were coming alive, with the grit, masochism, and the company’s growing confidence in its powers at their back.

This match, like too many others from both Michaels and Helmsley’s careers, attempts perfection and fails. They had plenty of time to get the formula right, and with WWE basically running alone for the 20 years in which they solidified their power, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to get it right. The way fans regard Michaels’ WrestleMania matches against Ric Flair and the Undertaker helps, but really it’s the way they treated the fiefdom of NXT as a rebellion against Vince McMahon’s way of booking a wrestling show. Given where we are in this moment, it worked. You can see updated versions of Triple H vs. Shawn Michaels in main event matches in WWE, NXT, and AEW, which has more than a few wrestlers who learned under that particular tree during their time in the Performance Center, and because wrestling fans have had 10 years of conditioning, it works. 

Just not for me.

Rating: **