The Heartbreak Kid
Let me tell you a long story.
John Michaels.
Real name: Michael John Reckenbottom.
The Heartbreak Kid.
A man whose nickname itself was 'Main Eventer'.
The Best of the Best.
The Headliner.
Called by countless epithets — and by my own personal standards, the greatest performer of all time.
His career was utterly unlike that of your typical wrestler.
The usual path went like this: you debuted in your early-to-mid twenties, ground through life as a Low Carder, and if the office decided you had something, you got a push and were funneled into tag team competition.
Then, once the tag team broke up, you split off as a face or a heel and carried on a solo career. That was the standard route.
Of the wrestlers who walked it, only a precious few ever climbed through the secondary championships to reach the world title.
Under normal circumstances, a wrestler who received a push would become a main-event champion at around thirty years old.
John Michaels won his first world championship in 1996.
He was thirty-one.
Wrestle Imperium 12.
A fearless young pup who dared to challenge the reigning champion, Greg Hart — a undersized Texas boy with a pretty face.
That was John Michaels.
His measurements were inflated for the public, of course, but in truth he stood around 180 centimeters tall and weighed about 90 kilos — positively slight for a professional wrestler.
People said he'd never make it. They dismissed him as a 'Boy Toy', a pretty face sold to the female audience and nothing more.
Boy Toy.
Translated literally, it means a boy's plaything. Loosely, it's what you'd call a trophy — the way people talk about 'trophy wives'.
At any rate, Michaels refused to bow to those prejudices. He kept working, and eventually the recognition came.
He chased the footsteps of his senior, Greg Hart — a man who, small like him, had climbed all the way to the world championship.
The match was built on that backdrop. Greg mercilessly steamrolled the fearless upstart.
……Here, a quick word from reality: back then, Greg was reportedly the only senior wrestler who believed in Michaels at all.
At any rate.
After a grueling sixty-minute Iron Man match, the Texas pretty boy seized the victory and fulfilled a dream he had chased for years.
And then he collapsed.
Not even fit to be WWF's main-event champion — that was the verdict the world passed on him.
Striving to live up to it, he threw his body into every match as if it were his last.
To numb the pressure and the pain, he leaned on painkillers and pills, and little by little he came apart.
But the reaction only dwindled.
Because at the time, Bart Maxen had ordered Michaels to run the same 'invincible babyface' gimmick as Captain Logan.
For Michaels, who was drawing crowds with his Sexy Boy persona, it was like being stuffed into clothes that simply didn't fit.
And so, as world champion, Michaels failed — catastrophically, miserably failed.
He shouldered every ounce of the blame in Bart Maxen's place, and the belt was taken from him.
The day that face, once beloved, lost his wings like Icarus and came plummeting down —
Bart Maxen played the cruelest kind of Daedalus, pretending not to see.
And the crowd watched Greg take the belt back, and smiled like the sun itself.
On the very next weekly show, John Michaels turned heel.
And then he began flaunting, without restraint, the talent that Bart's grip had kept hidden from view.
Together with his best friend Triple H, then still a Low Carder, he formed a stable called Degrade X.
They drew thunderous reactions from the audience overnight.
I still remembered it.
Green light and pyro erupting over a deafening crowd chant.
They stole the entire show.
Through every brat act imaginable, they became heels the people loved anyway, and Michaels' stock climbed right back up.
That was where the trouble began.
Greg was a man who revered the traditional values of professional wrestling.
He had broken his body, again and again, trying to be a role model for the young boys coming up behind him.
Michaels, the polar opposite, wrote storylines that trampled those very values.
He dragged Greg's personal life into the mud and insulted him with it, and the rivalry between the two men bled past the script and into reality.
And the company took Michaels' side.
Michaels' DX, alongside EZW, was the herald of the Bad Attitude Era.
So Greg — the man Michaels had taken the belt from — was no longer someone the company needed.
Michaels became the company's top guy once more, and thrived as the 'beloved heel'.
Now, most of you are probably wondering something at this point.
The poster boy of the Bad Attitude Era was Rockcold Stevie Steen — so why is Michaels the protagonist of this story?
The answer lies in the catastrophic back injury Michaels suffered after winning the championship.
A Casket Match against The Undertaker.
A match where victory comes from sealing your opponent inside the casket beside the ring — and Michaels, thrown over the top rope, crashed spine-first into the casket's edge.
The result was gruesome.
Years later, reminiscing in his autobiography, HBB would write:
'It felt like someone pressing a red-hot blade into my spine, over and over. I leaned on the pills harder than ever before.'
— HBB, Heartbreak & Triumph
Frankly, it would be no exaggeration to say that John Michaels' career as a wrestler ended that night.
So the company decided to push Rockcold — the man who had grown up tall and mighty under Greg Hart's wing.
And so the unfortunate Michaels handed the era over to Rockcold and retired.
By the end, he'd deteriorated so badly that even Triple H, his closest friend, turned his back on him — leaving behind nothing but an ugly spectacle.
……If the story had ended there, even I wouldn't have named Michaels the wrestler I respect most.
The problem was what came after.
Wrestle Imperium, 2005.
The moment Greg retired, Michaels returned to the ring as though he had been waiting for exactly that.
Even though that devastating back injury had never fully healed, he went on to wrestle another seven years and carved his name into legend.
His character improved beyond recognition, too.
With the birth of his son, he quit the pills for good and devoted himself to Protestant Christianity. John became an entirely different man.
He became an example for the younger generation, and he was loved by the fans.
'Though from what I remember, he and Greg never did reconcile.'
Because when Greg saw him come back the day after his own retirement, Greg closed the door of his heart for good.
But — unlike my previous life — this time, Greg took the first step.
It was the smallest of changes. And yet it felt like everything might turn on it.
If I was the cause of it, then something truly enormous was happening.
In fact, everyone's reactions said as much.
Tiffany, first of all.
[……Greg, reconciling with John?]
"So it would seem."
[What on earth are you doing over there?]
"Honestly? I'm not sure myself."
[John Michaels and Greg Hart, making peace? The two of them brawling in the locker room is still burned into my brain!]
"Greg's probably reached the age where retirement starts weighing on his mind."
[……You truly never cease to amaze me.]
"It's that big a deal?"
[Yes. I actually saw the days when those two got along, so I've always thought it was a shame. Every insider in the business is probably dying to know what you did to Greg.]
She wasn't wrong.
Word must have spread in no time, because a flood of people who remembered the Greg and Michaels of the old days reached out to me.
[I thank you, kid. You really have pulled off something extraordinary.]
Nick Flair.
[If you can get those two to make up, I reckon you could broker peace between Iraq and the United States.]
Simmons.
[Michaels was a piece of work, but Greg wasn't innocent either. You've had your work cut out for you, son.]
The Undertaker.
The reconciliation of Greg Hart and John Michaels, in other words, was something everyone who had survived that era had longed for.
The WWF of the steroid scandal days had been brutal — a stretch when the show only stayed afloat by making Greg and Michaels its two faces.
So I could easily imagine how heartbroken the wrestlers of that time had been over how things ended between the two men.
I was no exception.
As I said, as far as I knew, Greg and Michaels never reconciled — not to the very end.
Which was why being able to play the stepping stone between them in this changed life of mine felt, personally, like a tremendous honor.
As I said — we are family. We are brothers.
All of us worked together to thrill the fans and make the money.
'Greg and Michaels must have been the same.'
And so I, too, wanted — on a deeply personal level — to see those two make peace.
Pro wrestling in that era was a hard time for everyone. But even so, it was undeniably magnificent.
Dragging it to an ugly ending did nobody any good.
Once filming wrapped, I headed straight for Texas.
Russell Hart — who, in Greg's stead, had taken on the role of messenger of love(?) alongside me — told me over the phone:
[I gave him a call, and he said he understood. But he seemed to be hesitating, if you ask me.]
"Can't blame him. The older people get, the harder reconciliation becomes."
[Let's never fight, you and I.]
"……?"
What is with this kid.
Anyway, that was the plan.
I would go to Texas, collect Michaels — who was presumably drowning in his own feelings as well — and bring him along to Canada.
And so I drove for a good long while.
Far in the distance, a cowboy herding cattle watched the camping bus roll past.
Michaels, I'd been told, was running a wrestling dojo out here these days, spending his time with his family.
'What a heartwarming sight.'
Past plains straight out of a spaghetti western, I arrived at the address Russell had passed along.
A white, sprawling mansion.
The neighboring houses were all set far, far apart.
That was the American countryside in a nutshell: wide, desolate, and empty.
A few dying trees, a windmill cartwheeling lazily in the distance.
That kind of landscape.
Stepping off the bus, I felt a flicker of nerves as I walked up to the house and slowly pressed the doorbell.
The voice that answered…
…sounded somehow ominous.
[Who is it?!]
Like a paranoid old man besieged by delusions. I introduced myself in the friendliest tone I could manage.
"This is Sin, calling on Russell's introduction. Mr. John Michaels, sir—"
BOOM!
A deafening blast tore through the air.
A shard of wood whistled past my face — my hand still frozen on the doorbell — close enough to feel the wind of it.
The buffalo, the cowboy, and the single most powerful weapon in the Texan arsenal.
The shotgun.
[GET OFF MY PROPERTY!!]
Are you kidding me?!
You found God, didn't you?!
Stunned, I stumbled back out of range of the mansion.
Then, heart hammering, I called Russell.
"Hey! You absolute lunatic!!"
[Wh-what's wrong?]
"You said you talked to him! I just about got shot out here!!"
[……No, he definitely said he understood on the phone.]
"So what do I do?!"
[H-hold on. Let me ask my uncle. ……Uncle? Uncle!]
Russell shouted into the other end of the line for a moment, then came back.
[No good. He's barricaded himself in his room ever since your phone call. Won't come out.]
"Are you serious? He's not some pimple-faced teenager — what is this?!"
[Haha, teenagers don't throw hockey sticks at their nephews.]
"……"
What on earth was I supposed to do with these old men?
I was still racking my brain when —
Far off, the mansion's front door opened and a middle-aged woman stepped out.
Noticing me, she made her way toward the camping bus.
"Are you — are you all right?"
"Who are you?"
"Oh, I'm Rebecca Reckenbottom — John's wife."
Reckenbottom. So that really was John Michaels' actual surname.
"I'm so sorry. He took that phone call and suddenly turned all prickly. Like he was terrified of something…"
"Yeah, like the Nazis were invading."
As I blurted out my disbelief, Rebecca wore a guilty look — and held up the frying pan in her hand for me to see.
"Well, I did manage to knock him out. Please, come inside before he wakes up."
"……"
I distinctly saw that the edge of the frying pan was bent.
So this was Texas.