Why Shawn Michaels Completely Oversold For Hulk Hogan At WWE SummerSlam 2005

Hulk Hogan and Shawn Michaels have had much in common throughout their wrestling careers. Both are counted among the greatest champions and biggest stars in WWE history, and both have proven to be magnetic, over-the-top personalities. They've also each been accused of playing the political game, playing it often, and playing it well. 

Creative control, refusing to lie down, conspiring to hold others back, holding court at the ear of the boss, you name it - Hogan and Michaels have been cited as masters of the political game. But what happens when these two industrial stalwarts, each wielding sizable pull and egos, are matched up in a headline rivalry? You wind up with one of the more surreal matches that has ever main evented a pay-per-view.

At 39 going on 40, Shawn Michaels still looked every bit the "Showstopper" that fans knew before he began his four-year injury layoff in 1998. His 27-minute battle with Kurt Angle at WrestleMania 21 was (to the surprise of nobody) an instant classic. Though he now wore baggier chap-style pants to conceal his knee braces, which were required after years of dizzying bumps and harsh landings, the quality of HBK's work had astonishingly not dipped one iota.

Not only was Michaels still one of the best wrestlers in the entire industry, but his tremendous work was now augmented by a better attitude. The Michaels who returned to the ring in 2002 was now free from vices and demons, and appeared to have all prior insecurities eradicated. The superstar that inspired numerous unflattering stories in the 1990s no longer existed, replaced by a more responsible, more at ease, and more respected veteran gunslinger.

As Michaels was stealing one more show alongside Angle, Hulk Hogan was drawing ungodly reactions for yet another nostalgia run. At 51, The Hulkster entered WWE's Hall of Fame the night before Mania 21, his speech delayed by a wild, unending ovation from the assembled crowd. One night later at WrestleMania, Hogan made the save for Eugene, fighting off Muhammad Hassan and Shawn Daivari. As soon as the first two notes of "Real American" blared over the sound system, the roar of the crowd almost drowned out the music.

Hogan had demonstrated just a few years earlier how valuable nostalgia can be. After leaving for WCW, Hogan's name was trampled upon by Vince McMahon and WWE at every opportunity, crudely parodying their former top star since he was no longer helping their cause. Upon his return in 2002, with a little assist from the fans inside Toronto's SkyDome, Hulkamania was reborn at WrestleMania X8, and suddenly, McMahon couldn't fasten the belt around Hogan's waist fast enough. Fans mostly agreed - there was just something comfortably dated about Hulk that multiple generations could appreciate.

How ironic is it that after spending the Attitude Era building new star after new star, WWE's two most-talked-about acts in 2002 (besides Brock Lesnar) were the ear-cupping Hogan and show-stealing Michaels, each dusted off for a newer generation?

Though both were considered legends and icons, the two had never really crossed paths before. Hogan once made the save for The Rockers at a TV taping in 1990, but aside from that, the stars just didn't align for them to do anything together. Hogan was on his way out of WWE in 1992 just as Michaels was coming into his own as a singles performer.

A year later, during Hulk's mixed bag of a brief comeback run, Michaels was busy with his own endeavours in the Intercontinental Title scene. Michaels did, however, make the time after Hogan's WWE Title loss to Yokozuna at the 1993 King of the Ring to label the Hulkster a "dinosaur", saying he wasn't the calibre of star that Michaels was.

Fast forward to 12 years later, where Michaels found himself working with a man 16 years his junior, the very Muhammad Hassan that Hogan had just pummelled at Mania to a glorious response. Michaels, tired of the two-on-one beatdowns that Hassan and Daivari inflicted upon him, wanted a match with the two, only to be informed by Raw GM Eric Bischoff that he needed a tag team partner. Somewhat inexplicably, Michaels selected Hogan, with whom he had no prior on-screen connection.

The match took place at Backlash, an enjoyable showing that felt like something out of a 1986 Saturday Night's Main Event - lots of simple, crowd-pleasing spots, and Michaels playing face-in-peril while building to a Hogan hot tag. In the end, the good guys won, and Backlash did a respectable 320,000 buys, on par with the previous year's event.

The novel Michaels/Hogan team contrasted nicely with the usual Ruthless Aggression fare, and was used twice more - along with John Cena in a six-man tag on Raw at the end of that June, and a week later against Kurt Angle and Carlito on an Independence Day edition of Raw.

Following the win over Angle and Carlito, Hogan and Michaels went into the tandem posing routine that they'd cultivated, with Hogan employing his time-tested flexes and ear-cups, and Michaels doing a satirical, somewhat exaggerated version, kind of what a knowingly hapless sidekick might do for a laugh.

But the good humour ceased when Michaels superkicked an unwitting Hogan right in the mush, with zero provocation. As the confused audience booed, Michaels stared down at Hulk's crumbled body, with eyes so vacant that WWE would tell you that they were being held in abeyance.

Suddenly, Michaels was a heel, and at first a mostly muted one. He wouldn't give a straight answer as to why he blindsided Hogan, but what was clear is that he was challenging Hogan to a match at SummerSlam, a battle of the icons that WWE had never delivered before.

After displaying a brooding spirit for a little while, Michaels shifted gears into outright antagonism. He impersonated Hogan to comic effect on a parody of Larry King Live, and later masterfully trolled a Raw audience in Montreal, in what may well be the best one-person performance in the Monday telecast's multi-decade history.

While this latter-day version of Michaels as a treacherous and sarcastic villain earned rave reviews for the energy in his performances, it actually wasn't a road that Michaels wanted to go down.

He was initially expecting a battle of two babyfaces to see who was the bigger icon, and claims to have presented the idea as such to Hogan - that Michaels would broach the issue with Hulk and issue the challenge, because the competitor in him had to know who the better man was.

Sometime later, Michaels learned that Hogan didn't want to do it that way. He wanted it to be a face vs. heel dynamic, which meant that one of them had to turn. And it wasn't going to be the Hulkster.

Michaels was confounded by this arrangement, believing that if he went out there on the mic as a heel and lit into Hogan, with no sense of diplomacy or mercy, he'd, in his words, "...tear him to shreds." As Michaels remembers it, when he kept inquiring if Hogan was truly okay with the dynamic, the terse response from management was that it was "Terry's business."

Another bone of contention in the run-up to SummerSlam centred around how long the program was going to run for. In the end, we only got one match at the August spectacular, but there were apparent plans for the feud to run longer. Sources have differed on the exact number, but at the time, Bryan Alvarez of Figure 4 Weekly claimed that Michaels proposed a pair of bouts that the two legends were to split.

Alvarez wrote: "Shawn wanted two matches, the first of which he would win and the second of which Hogan would win. Hogan said no, one match only. Eventually, he said he would be open to two matches — if he won both. Shawn was not down with that. In the end, Hogan had creative control in his contract, so when he said he wanted to win clean with the legdrop of doom, well, that’s what happened."

Other sources (Shawn included) have claimed that Michaels proposed a three-match series between he and Hogan. They would split the first two bouts, before culminating in a steel cage finale where Michaels would put Hogan over. When those theoretical bouts would have taken place is unknown, but it's no matter - they weren't going to happen anyway.

In an interview years later, Hogan, speaking of the pre-match planning at SummerSlam, claimed, "When we went to the dressing room, Vince came in and said, ‘Okay, I want Hogan to go over.’ No big deal. And those were Vince’s wishes."

This is to say nothing of the other proposed matches. Phrasing it as he does, Hogan makes it sound as though Michaels was upset about having to lose a singular match to him. Although the other versions of the story claim Michaels would've happily dropped the rubber match to him, both the reported two-match and three-match runs were to begin with a Michaels victory.

In any event, once it were finalised that Michaels was losing at SummerSlam, it became abundantly clear that there would likely be no rematch - unless, of course, Michaels agreed to lose that one as well.

There is, of course, a quaint little irony in seeing Michaels, a man who got out of doing his fair share of jobs through the years, and made his reported refusal to "lay down" into a catchphrase, get hamstrung politically by somebody who had played that game far longer than him. Say this about Michaels, though, the man known as "Mr. WrestleMania" has lost 11 matches on that particular stage, and many of those defeats came in matches that were safely beyond the four-star threshold. If "The Showstopper" is going to lose, he's going to do so memorably.

SummerSlam 2005 was no exception.

It was a safe bet that Michaels, now 40, was going to be playing the pinball to 52-year-old Hogan's flipper arm, getting volleyed to and fro in order to make the match watchable. But few would've guessed how much motion Michaels was going to be adding to the main attraction.

As though he were partially possessed by the ghost of Curt Hennig, Michaels took the most exaggerated flipping bumps, spring-loaded recoils, and falls off of the most elementary of Hogan offence. Simply put, Michaels was clowning Hogan. Though Michaels later admitted that the display "wasn't professional" on his part, that didn't stop him from acting like long-haired Flubber that night in Washington, DC, for the better part of 21 minutes.

The rest of the match was extremely good, especially from a "Hogan can't really do a whole lot" standpoint, but nobody remembers Hogan bleeding like a stuck pig, or Michaels locking on a Sharpshooter to a chorus of boos.

What people tend to remember most is the particular bump Michaels took off of the big boot at the end. Actually, he took *two* bumps, springing up from the canvas after the first one, staggering around in some dizzying dance, before throwing himself back toward the mat in a comical barrel roll, before giving himself up to the giant-killing leg drop.

After the match, Michaels went back to playing nice, shaking hands with Hulk and affirming that he "had to know" who the better man was. That brought the whole thing back to the angle Michaels apparently had in mind when he envisioned a battle of two babyfaces, so while the gesture may have *looked* respectful, in another sense, it was perhaps Michaels getting his way through some innocent subterfuge.

After the match was over, both men moved on: Hogan went back to filming reality TV with his family, while Michaels continued on as a superstar on Raw, albeit as a babyface once more. But Michaels couldn't help but take a few more digs at Hogan, and with a live mic in hand on the post-SummerSlam Raw, we got Shawn at his most searingly sarcastic.

He credited Hogan for being too "catlike" and "agile" for a mere mortal like himself to keep up with, and spoke glowingly of Hogan as a superior wrestler, calling what Hulk did in the ring "catch-as-catch-can", with a mostly straight face.

After Michaels bade adieu to that chapter of his career, young Chris Masters hit the ring as Shawn's next nemesis, effectively telling us (as if the abrupt face turn weren't enough of a clue) that the Hogan deal was one-and-done, as Hulk apparently intended for it to be.

But that didn't stop Hogan from offering a contradictory take. The "Hogan Knows Best" star later claimed that he pulled the plug on the angle *after* Michaels' sarcastic promo on Raw the next night. Hogan's claim was that Michaels was supposed to deliver a business-like interview to keep the feud going, but after Shawn laced it with enough venom to kill a mythical creature, Hulk said he didn't want to continue if it was just going to be, "...a clown show", especially juxtaposed with Michaels' antics from the previous night.

Again, by the time Michaels *did* the promo, the feud had no more legs - it was all but over after Hogan won the opening salvo clean as a sheet, upon which the two respectfully shook hands in front of the cameras. Michaels was now moving on to Masters, leaving Hogan with plenty of time to regale others with stories of the time he apparently played bass for Metallica.

At 650,000 buys, the 2005 SummerSlam represents the second-most bought SummerSlam of all time, behind only 1998. One can only imagine how well one or two more matches between the multi-time world champions would have done if they could've just gotten on the same page. Alas.

Hogan's next WWE match came one year later, defeating Randy Orton at the 2006 SummerSlam. After that match, he never again wrestled for the promotion that he made famous (and vice versa), as the final 10 bouts of his career came either for TNA, or for personalised indy endeavours. His final match occurred for TNA in January 2012, working a six-man bout in Manchester, England.

Michaels wrestled for close to five more years after the SummerSlam shenanigans, headlining more pay-per-views, and adding more legendary bouts to a career already filled with them. He went out on a high note at WrestleMania 26, wagering his career against Undertaker's 17-0 event streak, riding off into the sunset following yet another epic clash. Of course, we know that eight years later, he worked one more match at WWE's Crown Jewel, but that's best left forgotten for reasons that are multifold.

That silly bit of business from almost 20 years years ago seems to be long in the past, however. Ultimately, it's a small part of each man's storied career, albeit one that's still pretty hilarious to watch today.

Surreal comedy aside, the match, and the entire ordeal leading up to it, is an interesting study in egos, power, pride, and spite, between two legendary figures with propensities for backroom dealings, and a tendency to always get their way. And when one *didn't* get their way, they still found a way to humorously muck it up for the other, while a large audience watched. That's just spite done right.