10 Most Painful-Looking Wrestling Matches Ever
2. Shawn Michaels Vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin - WWF WrestleMania XIV
Think about how much of a prize ar*ehole Shawn Michaels was at the dawn of the Attitude Era.
This was a man who thought nothing of destroying career after career; in fact, he laughed about it with his Kliq buddies, and turned into an even uglier person when he was without them at the midpoint of 1996. He completely derailed plans to return the biggest favour ever paid to him by a fellow professional by refusing to drop the WWF Heavyweight Title back to Bret Hart at WrestleMania 13, while having the audacity also to seek sympathy. He had lost his smile. Most would have been happy to see it wiped off his face, were it actually. It wasn't. He cried crocodile tears.
And still, equipped with that knowledge, one couldn't watch his belated Title loss to Steve Austin at WrestleMania XIV without a degree of the empathy Michaels himself once lacked entirely. His back mangled following the Royal Rumble '98 casket bump once thought to have ended his career, he fought through searing pain to wrestle a match that by his standards was somewhat subpar. It was still very good, but it was more than that: it was a karmic rebalance in which he endured physical agony as penance for the psychological warfare he had waged against the locker room. Just look at that propulsive, thunderous bump in the above GIF, knowing the state his back was in.
If you don't wince, you're either inhuman, or Bret Hart.