Don’t Think Twice 10.04.08: My Back Pages, Part IV

Get back.
Get back.
Get back to where you once belonged.
Get back.
Get back.
Get back to where you once belonged.
– Get Back by The Beatles

In January 1969, Paul McCartney set out on a rather ambitious project – to prevent the imminent destruction of the greatest band in the world. The Beatles had gone down many a long and winding road over the course of the last seven years, but the animosity and strife unearthed during the recording of The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album) a year earlier had brought the foursome precariously close to the brink of collapse. In many ways, the resulting album was not the work of a cohesive band but rather of four increasingly disparate solo artists. The Beatles could easily have ceased to exist right then and there.

But in January 1969, the band came together once again to begin rehearsals for what was to be their first live concert in more than two years, and McCartney seized the opportunity to try and save the band. He believed that the group needed to move away from the groundbreaking experimental studio work that had defined them for the last two years and get back to what had made them great in the first place, the simple joy of playing rock ‘n’ roll music. He knew that all The Beatles had to do was get back to where they once belonged.

In the end, McCartney’s efforts were only enough to stave off the inevitable for one more year. But during that time The Beatles were still able to record the material that would later be compiled in Let It Be before producing one last studio masterpiece, Abbey Road. And then, as they seemed fated to do, The Beatles broke up, never to truly reunite. But besides the music that they were miraculously still able to produce during their dying days as a band, what has always stuck with me is the vision proposed by McCartney. When you’re lost, when you’re lonely, when you’re broken and beaten and unsure of who you really are, maybe all you need is just to get back. Get back to where you once belonged. But sometimes just getting back is the hardest thing you could ever do.

Three decades later, in the fall of 1997, I moved from suburban Chicago to Champaign and began my freshman year at the University of Illinois. It certainly wasn’t a long move in any sort of global sense, just less than one hundred and fifty miles. You can drive it in less than three hours, which is great for holidays but just long enough to prohibit weekly laundry runs. And it really wasn’t a drastic change in culture, the rural campus being literally inundated with thousands of new suburban transplants each fall. The University is sort of like a suburban embassy here in the midst of the sprawling corn fields.

But the real significance of the start of my freshman year was that it marked a decisive turning point, a departure from all that I had ever blindly accepted as true. I suspect that in this regard, my experience was none too different from that of college freshman all across the country and all across the world. The moment that we begin to question all that we have ever been told, all that we have ever been taught, and all that we have ever believed is, in fact, the most quintessential demarcation between childhood and adulthood, the most important milestone in the process of maturation and evolution that we all undergo at some point in our lives. It is a tale that has been told time and time again, the classic coming of age story lived by Holden Caulfield and Kevin Arnold and Peter Parker. The questions we ask and the answers we find define who and what we will be from that point forward. But that long and winding road is a difficult one for many. I know it was for me.

Of course, I knew little of the journey to come when I started my freshman year in the fall of 1997. Hell, I didn’t even know there was a journey to be made, let alone that I was already on the road. And so I tried to live my new life according to my old rules, to impose the rigor of high school on the chaos of college. I may not have known that the times they were a-changin’, but I fought against that change nonetheless. I went to class diligently, just like I was back in high school. I studied meticulously, just like I was back in high school. And I took a break from time to time to enjoy the things that I had enjoyed back in high school. Like watching professional wrestling. Like watching Shawn Michaels.

1997 was an incredible time to be in college and be a fan of professional wrestling. As if somehow in sync with my own life, the industry was changing into something new and different as I was doing the same. I still maintain that the Attitude Era did not officially begin until “Stone Cold” Steve Austin won the WWF Championship at WrestleMania XIV, but the company was certainly on the path to that momentous occasion by the fall of 1997. Austin was challenging authority, Bret Hart was challenging our notions of national pride, and D-Generation X was challenging good taste, decency, and the television censors. Shawn Michaels, the man that had captured my imagination two years earlier when I saw his match against Diesel from WrestleMania XI, had joined forces with Triple H to infuse the WWF with the kind of sophomoric humor that seemed perfectly designed to lure a college freshman back into the fold.

As I’ve said, at the time I had no idea just how much my life had already begun to change. But even then, even as I clung to all that I had once known, it seemed as though Shawn Michaels had already begun to serve as my guide on the journey, the Virgil to my Dante. Shawn had won the WWF Championship and found the greatest success of his career as a plucky babyface, the charismatic star living out his boyhood dream. It would have been easy for him to remain in that role, to play the part that his millions of screaming fans wanted him to play, to be the sun around which the Kliq would revolve. But it was time for Shawn to change, to grow, to evolve, and that, more than anything else, was what he was doing through the antics of D-Generation X. Never has juvenile humor been employed so effectively to the purpose of maturation.

And as I watched Shawn embrace change, I began to embrace change myself. If he could do it, then maybe I could, too. If he could choose the road less traveled, then maybe I could, too. If he could grow and change and evolve, then maybe I could, too. And so without even consciously realizing it, I began to draw some measure of strength from Shawn Michaels, from his ability to question that which he had been, from his courage to find that which he would be. My father died when I was only eleven, and some day some overpaid psychiatrist is probably going to tell me that I was just searching for a male role model. Just my luck that I should pick a guy with a propensity for dropping his pants on national television. Shawn and I were changing, and as strange as it may seem, I took comfort in the fact that we were on similar journeys. And then, like so many times in the past, Shawn Michaels disappeared from my life once again.

But this time was different. Yes, Shawn Michaels was gone again. But it wasn’t Shawn Michaels that had limped away. It was Michael Hickenbottom. During that first year at college, I had met a number of wrestling smarts, and they had opened my markish eyes to the true nature of the business. I learned that it was a work when Shawn Michaels’ career was in jeopardy due to post concussion syndrome in late 1995. Shawn’s retirement in 1995 was no more or less real than Edge’s banishment to Hell is today, and Michael Hickenbottom’s career was just as safe as Adam Copeland’s. But when Shawn Michaels retired after losing the WWF Championship to Steve Austin at WrestleMania XIV, it was because Michael Hickenbottom’s body was unable to continue. By the spring of 1998 I was able to draw the line between Shawn Michaels the character and Michael Hickenbottom the man, and losing them both at once was enough to make me walk away once more.

I lost interest in professional wrestling after WrestleMania XIV, but it was impossible to be completely oblivious to it while living in a dorm full of wrestling fans. There was usually a crowd in my room watching Raw as I tried to study polymer chemistry, so I remember seeing the beer truck and the Zamboni and Mankind winning the title. I was at a friend’s apartment when the Kat showed us her puppies on pay-per-view… and again a month later when Mae Young did the same. But even during that time, my relationship with professional wrestling still seemed to mirror that of Shawn Michaels’. We both kept in touch with the business and showed up from time to time, but it never really lasted or amounted to much. Our hearts just weren’t in it.

I graduated from college in the spring of 2001, by that time oblivious to the fact that the industry had just become a monopoly. My senior year had been rough. I’d had my heart broken for the first time, I drank more than I care to remember (which is convenient, given the fact that I can’t remember much of it), and I took at least two physiology exams that I swear to this day weren’t written in English. I’d asked more questions about life and love and the meaning of it all than I ever imagined I could, but I’d found few answers. I was scared and confused and convinced only that I wanted none of this whole horrible business of personal growth and maturation. I’d changed, but I couldn’t say with any sort of conviction that I’d changed for the better. What I didn’t know at the time, what many wrestling fans didn’t know at the time, was that Michael Hickenbottom’s life wasn’t going so well, either. He broke his body, burned his bridges, and lost himself in the drugs. He was, in many ways, a shell of the man that he had once been. I guess we both were.

I stuck around in Champaign and entered graduate school in the fall of 2001. I had a pretty sweet fellowship for the first few years, and so I had the chance to enjoy a small disposable income for the first time in my life. I still didn’t have cable or even a DVD player, but I began to pick up a few wrestling videos. Yes, I was still buying VHS in 2001. I’m not proud of that. I picked up WrestleMania 17, and after reading the back of the box I honestly thought that there was going to be a performance by the hip-hop group TLC in the middle of the show. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised to find otherwise. I bought InVasion and SummerSlam, but that more or less rounded out my wrestling purchases in 2001.

My interest in the industry continued to be rekindled bit by bit, and by early 2002 I had begun to discover the IWC. The first story I ever remember reading was that there was a possibility that the n.W.o. might reunite in the WWF, and I was intrigued. I had missed most of WCW, but I knew that the n.W.o. was a big part of their greatest successes. I anxiously waited for the results of WrestleMania X8 to be posted online, and I bought the video of that show to see the epic confrontation between Hulk Hogan and The Rock. And soon after that, I read the story that would send me down the rabbit hole for good. Shawn Michaels was considering a return. No one seemed to know what that return would or would not entail, but there was a chance that he might be ready to step back into the ring. There were, of course, many skeptics. I clearly remember one report saying that Michaels was thin in the body and fat in the face. I’m not even totally sure what that meant, but it certainly wasn’t complimentary.

I wasn’t watching Raw or Smackdown at the time, and the only wrestling matches that I actually saw were on the one or two videos that I bought every year. My only real-time access to the stories and angles in WWE was through the IWC, and so I experienced professional wrestling in a strange, abstract sort of way, reading about it online but seeing the action only in my mind. Hell, I read about the beast known as Brock Lesnar for half a year before I ever saw him in a match. Needless to say, the image in my mind wasn’t nearly as impressive as the man himself. But when I read that Shawn Michaels stepped into the ring one last time and had a fantastic match with Triple H at SummerSlam 2002, I knew that I had to see that match. At the time, that was to be Shawn Michaels’ final match, his way of saying goodbye to the fans on his own terms. All that I had read told me that this match had been something special, something that deserved better that VHS, and so the first DVD I ever bought was WWE SummerSlam 2002. Two hours later I bought a PS2 after getting home and realizing that I had no way to play the DVD. But that evening I was finally able to watch the match, and I saw Shawn Michaels steal the show one more time, and I said goodbye to him as he said goodbye to us. Over the years, I’d gotten very good at saying goodbye to Shawn Michaels.

I didn’t pay much attention to Unforgiven or No Mercy that year, but soon I found out that Shawn Michaels wasn’t quite as finished as we had been led to believe. In fact, he would be challenging for the World Heavyweight Championship at Survivor Series. Shawn won the title that night in the very first Elimination Chamber Match, and he held it for a month before dropping it back to Triple H at Armageddon. I bought both of those shows on DVD, the second and third DVDs that I ever bought. And the rest, as they say, is history. Shawn Michaels became a full-time wrestler in 2003, and I became a full-time fan that year as well. I still wasn’t ordering the pay-per-views, but I bought every one of them on DVD. Shawn was back, and as had happened so many times over the course of the last decade, he had brought me along for the ride.

But it was some time in 2003 that I began to realize that something was different this time around. Yes, I was still a huge Shawn Michaels fan. He was still incredibly entertaining, and more often than not his matches would still steal the show. But what really inspired me was the fact that he could return to the ring and still be the best after being away for more than four years. And that’s when I realized just exactly what had happened when Shawn Michaels retired in 1998. That’s when I realized that Shawn Michaels as we know him on camera is just an abstract concept, a fictional character ultimately no more or less real than Andy Sipowicz or Tony Soprano. He had disappeared in 1998 and returned four years later, but in the interim he was neither here nor there nor anywhere. Shawn Michaels had been lost in the ether for four years, and it was Michael Hickenbottom who was left to live his life in the real world.

That life had not been easy, and he had made more than his fair share of mistakes. He fell fast and he fell hard, and there were those that thought he might never get back on his feet. Michael Hickenbottom was, at one point, one of the most talented athletes and entertainers on the planet, one of the few lucky men who could honestly say that he was the absolute best there is at what he does, but for several years that all seemed like a distant memory. And yet unbelievably, almost miraculously, through the love of his family and the strength of his faith, Michael Hickenbottom found a way to stand up and begin to rebuild his life. He found himself, and he found his way back to the one thing that he had once done better than any man on the face of the Earth. He got back to where he once belonged.

And as I thought about all that Michael Hickenbottom had accomplished in order for Shawn Michaels to return, I finally realized that I wasn’t really cheering for Shawn Michaels anymore. I was cheering for Michael Hickenbottom. I was cheering for the real man behind the fictional character, for the real man that had fallen and risen and got back to where he once belonged while the fictional character was safely tucked away waiting for his chance to shine once more. As I’ve written in the past, the problem with fictional characters as heroes is that their ability to inspire us is finite, because their victories are always tempered by the cold hard fact that those victories never really occurred. Fiction can only go so far to inspire reality. And so while Shawn Michaels had always entertained me, it was ultimately Michael Hickenbottom who was able to inspire me.

Michael Hickenbottom and I had both seen success, and we’d both seen failure. His highs had been far greater than mine, but so had his lows. And so if he could find a way to get back to where he once belonged, then maybe I could, too. And that’s ultimately the bottom line. That’s why I watch. Because while the Superstars and Divas who step into that ring are some of the greatest entertainers on the planet, it is the real men and women behind those Superstars that inspire me, that shine a light through the darkness when I need one, that continually give me hope that one day I might find a way to get back to where I once belonged.