What if Shawn Michaels had stayed on full time after Crown Jewel?
Last fall, Shawn Michaels did the unlikely when he returned from an over eight-year retirement to work a match at the Crown Jewel show in Saudi Arabia, teaming up with his old running buddy Triple H as DX to face off against The Brothers of Destruction, The Undertaker and Kane. No one expected for HBK to be back in WWE for years and years. There were, nonetheless, plenty of rumblings at the time of him working a few more matches and angles with hand-selected talents.
Wrestling has a way of grabbing a hold of its biggest stars. They get hooked and just one night back is rarely enough for a legend. After all, Michaels claimed in his book that when he came back in 2002, he only planned to work the one match against Triple H at SummerSlam, but he wound up hanging around for most of the years to follow, winning another world title and main eventing three more WrestleManias along the way.
So what if Michaels had stuck around full time following Crown Jewel? This article considers what might have been.
#5 Another WWE Championship reign
Daniel Bryan and AJ Styles spent much of late 2018 into early 2019 feuding over the WWE Championship. By WrestleMania season, there wasn’t a clear a path forward until Kofi Kingston’s unlikely rise to prominence.
Add Shawn Michaels to this mix, and there may not have been a question.
HBK vs. Bryan, Styles, or both would have the potential to be a lights-out WrestleMania world title match. And even if Michaels has lost a step, the story of him returning after eight years away only to add another world title to his resume at WrestleMania would have been way too appealing for WWE to have passed upon it.
By all rights, a final WWE Championship reign for Michaels should have been short. Even those reports that he was eyeing a more full-time comeback didn’t suggest he’d stick around for more than a few months. Nonetheless, it could have been exciting and set up Michaels to pass the torch in putting over a younger talent for the title afterwards.