I hear you guys all the time talking about Daniel Bryan, trained by Shawn Michaels. One curious thing to me is, how come you guys never mention William Regal? William Regal did the real work with this young man. Shawn Michaels took $3,000 from him, that's all he ever did.
Going into work and seeing Shawn Michaels - someone I watched growing up - how many people can say that? That they get to see people like Shawn Michaels at work and that they get to learn off Shawn Michaels. To me that's insane.
I was getting loads of tweets from people saying that Shawn Michaels had talked about me on Chris Jericho's podcast and then I got to meet Shawn Michaels when I was over in Florida.
I lived, ate, breathed, slept Shawn Michaels. I wouldn't call it pro wrestling back in the day when I was a kid. I just called it Shawn Michaels.
Shawn Michaels I just think the world of. I would love the opportunity to be in a meaningful match with him.
On my wish list, a guy I would have loved to work with in our prime would have been Shawn Michaels.
I tried to imagine how I would have felt as a kid if Shawn Michaels or any WWE superstar would have come to my school and came to my assembly and had given a speech that we would have had to listen to I would have lost my mind.
Triple H and Shawn Michaels and all those guys are more than happy to let me be myself. They want me to do my thing.
If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.
I worked seven years in territories in Japan and Puerto Rico and worked my way up to the main events on those cards, then went to the WWF and spent a little while there before I got into the Intercontinental run and a main event runs with Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash.
I would walk into my office, and I would close the door, and I would say, 'I won't cry, I won't cry, I won't cry'... At least, I wasn't going to let them see me cry.
When I was young, a lot of the guys could sell themselves to me on the way to the ring with the way they acted and their mannerisms. Guys like Shawn Michaels, who I loved growing up. They were just loud. They didn't even need to say a word because they came out and had this crazy ring gear on.
If we're talking about guys who set the tone, you've got to go way back. But if we're talking about guys who made it possible for guys like A.J. Styles, Shawn Michaels kind of opened that door, along with Daniel Bryan.
When I was a kid, I got to meet Shawn Michaels at the Continental Airlines Arena, and I showed Shawn that picture.
I'm out in the ring, Shawn Michaels turns to me and says, 'Hey, I got a couple of vertebrae out. Would you mind puttin 'em in with that chair?' He turns his back, I whack him and all of a sudden I'm a bad guy.
There are many things you can point to as proof that the human is not smart. But my personal favorite would have to be that we needed to invent the helmet. What was happening, apparently, was that we were involved in a lot of activities that were cracking our heads. We chose not to avoid doing those activities but, instead, to come up with some sort of device to help us enjoy our head-cracking lifestyles.