Shawn Michaels Feels The Kliq Was Trying To Start The Attitude Era Three Years Before It Happened
Shawn Michaels saw that the wrestling business needed to evolve.
The latest episode of WWE Untold chronicles Shawn Michaels and Kevin Nash’s (Diesel) friendship and their respective journeys to superstardom. After being brought in as Michaels’ bodyguard, Diesel would eventually win the WWF Championship from Bob Backlund at a Madison Square Garden house show in November 1994. Achieving a dream Shawn had since he was a child didn’t cause a rift between the two, in fact, knowing that they would support each other no matter what happened solidified their bond.
The two men would start a feud in storyline, eventually facing off against each other at WrestleMania XI. Nash at the time was still very “green” but the countless hours spent working in close proximity and travelling with Michaels and Scott Hall (Razor Ramon) was akin to doing his “graduate studies” in wrestling. The match, and the program in its entirety, with a renewed post-Mania partnership, was a signal of what was to come just a few short years later. Michaels said the following:
“There’s a lot of shift and a lot of change going on in the wrestling business, and certainly, at that time, I felt like I was one of the guys leading that charge.
It’s an art, and the genesis of a lot of my trouble with everybody was [that] I felt we were transitioning from the traditional way the wrestling business has always been to what it needed to be. We were trying to tell them about the Attitude Era three years before it ever happened.”
Nash and Hall would eventually leave WWF for WCW in the spring of 1996, just weeks after Michaels finally achieved his childhood dream of winning the WWF Championship at WrestleMania XII. All three men would go on to play a pivotal role in the Attitude Era as founding members of the nWo and D-Generation X, respectively.
You can read Sean Ross Sapp’s review of the Two Dudes With Attitudes docu-special by clicking here.
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