10 Wrestling Photos Taken Moments Before Disaster
6. Shawn Michaels Poses For The Crowd
It is inconceivable to view this image in the way the photographer intended.
The photographer was clearly not to know. It was his job to simply capture Shawn Michaels before he challenged Bret Hart for the WWF championship at Survivor Series 1997.
It was Shawn's job to pose, to play the Showstopper, to act as if there was absolutely nothing untoward going on ahead of the moment. On that: Shawn's reputation as a worker has diminished in certain circles over the years, a lot of which has to do with his influence over the melodramatic dreck cliché that followed. The staring at one's hands, the agonising of whether to hurt your opponent in simulated combat, the thespian aspirations.
But Michaels, back in November 1997, had to put on an incredible acting performance. He never gets credit for it, obviously. It was a sh*tty thing to do, and the performance was incidental to the very real story of the Screwjob (the white-hot brilliance of the brawl, Bret and Shawn's best display of chemistry, is also lost to time).
Looking at his face here, you'd think that Shawn was just playing the same, über-smug pr*ck - and wasn't a man hyping himself up to put Bret in the Sharpshooter and risk his second ass-kicking of the year.