10 Most Inspiring Wrestling Transformations
8. Shawn Michaels
By the time Shawn Michaels was set to walk away from the job that few could ever do better in 1998, he was such a locker room pariah that he wasn't even missed by most of his colleagues. And the personal life fix to address how that came to be was still several years away.
An electrifying and gifted performer, Michaels' 1990s was a cocktail of match-of-the-year candidates and outside-the-ring excess. Drugs and alcohol were in enormously high supply for reasons of recuperation and recreation, but his bell-to-bell work was such that he was given pass after pass to do and say as he pleased in an organisation that needed him more than he needed it.
It was religious intervention and the need to set a better example for his first child that turned things around, and - impressively - for good.
Debate rages over which "version" of 'HBK' was better between the ropes, but that speaks to the scale of the divide between the man that left right as wrestling exploded and returned in 2002 as it entered gentle decline. With all the ability and much less of the attitude, Michaels mended fences and healed multiple wounds while offering a new generation of wrestlers an opportunity to have the match or angle they'd previously thought impossible.