Week 8 Blog

Ok, so we are going to return to the Shawn Michaels autobiography, "Heartbreak and Triumph". And I'm going to start with one of the saddest chapters in his career (at least to me LOL), the breakup of the Rockers and the beginning of his singles career.

Shawn talks about how the Rockers were screwed out of the tag team titles in these chapters and how that pretty much started the issues between him and Marty Jannetty. That may not be a fair statement but it was shortly after that, that Shawn started to think about going singles. The Rockers had been together for 5 years which wasn't that rare back in the late 80's, but nowadays it's almost unheard of. About the only teams I can think of that were together that long now are the Hardy Boyz, the Dudley Boys, and maybe Edge & Christian. There are some others but it's still a long time for one team to be together. The book then goes into the whole debace of how the Rockers got screwed on a deal to appear on a Wheaties box and how they found out they were only getting paid half of what the other wrestlers there were getting. This set off Marty calling Vince McMahon and quitting, telling Shawn they could get a deal in rival WCW. This was not the case yet however and that's when Shawn starting talking to Vince about going singles and breaking up the Team of the '90's.

From there, he talks about the famous "Barber Shop" incident that officially broke up the Rockers. The incident where Shawn throws Marty through the window on the set and he is off and running. He goes into how he took the initiative to walk in ahead of the other guys and marched into Vince's office at a TV taping and demanded to be a larger part of the company's future. Shortly after that, he won the Intercontinental Championship and his career starting taking off from there.

Again, winning the IC belt back then was a huge deak for a wrestler. Nowadays, it seems like they put it on guys to see how they will do with a title. Back then, it was not something you received because there was nobody else to put it on or as a way of finding out how good you are. It was a title that was given because you earned it. So it was a huge deal when Shawn beat Davey Boy Smith to win the belt. Especially since you consider that Smith won it in a classic match two months earlier from Bret Hart. Now, Shawn may have won the belt from Davey because Davey was injured. I've heard that and it would make sense but I don't think there was a doubt that Shawn would have won it eventually anyway. He was thrust into the IC belt race pretty much from the outset of his singles career and he was in the main event of the Survivor Series event with Bret Hart a month after winning the IC belt.