Commissions continue again, this one coming from frequent contributor YB. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.
At the time, this was talked about as a bad match. Being fifteen at the time and just getting into ROH and the indies as a whole, it happened at, like, the worst possible time for me to like it. Years later, I think people came to it as like some great Shawn performance in the face of it, doing these over-bumping and over-selling bits as some kind of protest movement as if he didn’t do this shit all the time, the sort of thing I eye-rolled and used my hand to make a jerk-off motion about.
Years later, I can appreciate this entirely for what it is.
Pure spectacle, and the joy of seeing my least favorite wrestler of all time getting owned, in spite of every motion and attempt to claim that he wasn’t actually.
Before anything else, I want to say that Hulk Hogan is far from my favorite wrestler. Beyond the obvious very very very upsetting quotes, there are things like basically his entire WCW tenure, where he just about burns down the greatest wrestling promotion that there ever was in service of his own ego, in many ways and at many different points. Even beyond that, going into the far more direct and specific, there are things like what he did to Randy Savage in 1988 and 1989 or what he did to Goldberg a decade later or what have you. I like a lot of his wrestling, I think people who think he was bad have simply never seen the 1980s house show footage or maybe just have boring/bad takes, but I am not super invested in defending him, outside of a defense of why he might make my GWE ballot.
However, I have to say, that in the spirit of Winston Churchill once saying that if Hitler invaded Hell, he would make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons, there are greater enemies among us.
Which is to say that when Shawn Michaels goes after Hulk Hogan, I am here to make nothing but favorable references to Hulk Hogan in this, the public forum that I have.
This match fucking rules.
Before we get into everything else, it is a genuine spectacle. That’s not an easy thing to achieve all the time. It requires more than just great booking or performances, it requires a buy-in from the audience that not everything has, but that this does. It also requires the wrestlers to act, at every moment, as if this shit really really really fucking matters, and Hogan and Michaels do that.
I brought up Hogan and Savage earlier, and what this reminds me of most is Hogan and Savage at WrestleMania V, another historically underrated match because of the result.
Michaels is your big bumping heel against Hogan, eventually succeeding through a combination of hard work, intelligence, and skull-duggery, and it genuinely works. People point at this as some example of overbumping, but for most of the match, that is at bay, and it simply feels like a little guy bouncing around like he ought to for someone with supernatural strength before succeeding through pure force of will. Shawn is not exactly peak Randy Savage on any level, but he gets the idea right, being an athletic bulldog against the big buy, leaning a lot on punches and a larger plan to try to wear him out and hit and move.
Speaking of this on another level, so much of why I like this is because, like very few other matches in his comeback save the first Undertaker Mania match and the John Cena ones, it not only allows me to feel about Shawn Michaels the way I naturally do (hope he dies, fuck him, I take pleasure in every failure of his outside of those against Triple H, he may have genuinely ruined the art form, Bret forever, I am inherently on the side of anyone attacking him, the Hitler/Bin Laden/Toby joke from The Office but with Shawn Michaels), but encourages it. He is a mother fucker. Not only his stupid little jerk off sympathy play bumping LIKE HE HAS THE FUCKING RIGHT TO BE MAD AT ANYONE FOR REFUSING TO DO A JOB OR POLITICKING AT ALL AND ISN’T JUST THROWING A FIT THAT HE’S FINALLY WORSE AT IT THAN SOMEONE (IF SHAWN MICHAELS WAS ACTIVE NOW, HE WOULD PLANT A STORY ABOUT HOGAN GETTING COLT CABANA FIRED) but in constantly cheating and fighting dirty and being generally at a loss, it encourages my natural response to him in a way Shawn work rarely does, save the 97-98 heel run, which unsurprisingly, is my other favorite work of his as a singles wrestler.
To really bring it home, Hogan also does something in response to him that I really love.
Following Shawn taking the boot at the end off the Hulk Up by taking the bump, then standing up to take another, after a match full of stuff right on that border and Shawn making shovel motions before the bell, Hogan makes sure to rub that shit in. Hogan poses with the ears and pointing to the crowd for WAY longer than usual before running to the ropes for the leg, making Shawn look like a way bigger asshole than anyone I can ever remember him facing, as if it is completely and totally in response to what Shawn tried to pull on him.
Hogan himself is a piece of shit, but God damn, sometimes it is really really really fun to see someone get what they have coming like this.
Independent of the politics or what it lets me feel in response to either of the horrible men at the center of this great conflict, on a pure engineering level, it is also so well assembled and executed.
The idea of the WCW Super Match is thankfully not the province of Shawn Michaels, never having the courage to step inside God’s own wrestling promotion, but this feels closer to that ideal than even Hogan ever really got during his six years there. It achieves the feeling not only that every twist and turn matters as this attempt to move forward and win the match, but also feels important. Beyond that, it feels like a titanic struggle between styles of pro wrestling combat in the way that few wrestling matches do besides the best in this genre, along with the feeling that it is simply (relative) good against evil, with the former triumphing over the latter, following a match drawing the possibility of that outcome into question.
Shawn loses to the big leg, as God intended.
It’s a faith affirming sort of match, where the only regret that I have is that I didn’t see this for the first time as an adult, and thus was unable to achieve true joy by going onto any random message board to talk about how this is a better match than the Angle/Michaels one that came five months before it.
Otherwise, beautiful stuff.
Hogan vs. Shawn is not only a match that hits on a certain level and in a certain way that is both deeply impressive and unlike so many other pro wrestling matches, but also has a way of scratching an itch and being satisfying in a way that even fewer can offer up. Not only a genuine spectacle, but also one that gives me the greatest possible thrill, and one that really cuts to the heart of this entire genre (seeing the worst person in the world totally humiliated and beaten horribly).
The real shit.
HANDWERK 