- Faith: Christian
- Career: Athlete
- Birthday: July 22, 1965
Michael Shawn Hickenbottom is a retired professional wrestler, better known by his ring name Shawn Michaels. He’s signed to WWE, where he’s the Senior Vice President of Talent Development Creative and oversees the creative aspects of the NXT brand, the promotion’s developmental territory. Michaels is known by the nicknames “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Mr. Wrestlemania,” and “The Showstopper,” and is regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time.
Michaels wrestled consistently for WWE, formerly the WWF, from 1988 until his initial retirement in 1998. He also performed in non-wrestling roles for the next two years, resuming his wrestling career with WWE in 2002 until his final retirement in 2010. Michaels returned for a one-time final match in 2018. In 2016, he started working as a coach at the WWE Performance Center and, from 2018, as a producer on NXT before becoming the Senior Vice President of Talent Development Creative for the NXT brand.
In WWF/WWE, Michaels headlined pay-per-view events from 1989 to 2018, main-eventing the company’s top annual event, WrestleMania, five times. He was the original leader and co-founder of the successful stable D-Generation X. Michaels also wrestled in the American Wrestling Association, where he founded The Midnight Rockers with Marty Jannetty in 1985. After winning the AWA World Tag Team Championship twice, the team continued to the WWF as the Rockers and had a public breakup in January 1992. Within the year, Michaels twice challenged for the WWF Championship and won his first Intercontinental Championship, signaling his arrival as one of the industry’s premier singles stars.
Michaels is a four-time world champion, winning the WWF Championship three times and WWE’s World Heavyweight Championship once. He’s also a two-time Royal Rumble winner, the company’s first Grand Slam Champion and fourth Triple Crown Champion, and a two-time WWE Hall of Fame inductee. He won the Pro Wrestling Illustrated “Match of the Year” reader vote 11 times, and his match against John Cena in 2007 was ranked by WWE as the best match ever aired on the company’s television program, “Raw.”
Michaels has participated in several first installments of several of WWE’s signature gimmick matches, namely the first Hell in a Cell at the Badd Blood: In Your House, the first ladder match during a taping of “WWF Wrestling Challenge.” Michael Shawn Hickenbottom was born in 1965 in Chandler, Arizona. He has an older sister, Shari, and two older brothers, Scott and Randy. He was raised in a military family and briefly spent some of his early years in the English town of Reading, Berkshire, but grew up primarily in San Antonio, Texas.
What religion is Shawn Michaels?
Michaels became a born-again Christian in 2002. He was raised Catholic but became a non-denominational Christian because of his wife. His latter ring attire often used cross symbols, and he made a praying gesture on his knees during ring entrances. He attended a televised service of John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in his hometown of San Antonio, where he’s also a Bible teacher. In 2008, he appeared on a Trinity Broadcasting Network program with fellow wrestler StingBack to the Celebrity Faith Database
