19 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Shawn Michaels

5. He Buried Vader During Their SummerSlam 1996 Feud

The plan was for Vader to come in to WWE as a former WCW World Champion that would dominate everybody in WWE including Shawn Michaels. Vader was originally booked to go over Michaels for the WWE Title at SummerSlam 1996 until Michaels had it changed. As Jim Cornette, the on screen manager of Vader and a part of WWE's creative team at the time, noted many times over the years, Michaels didn't like working with Vader due to the physical nature of Vader's in-ring style. The match at SummerSlam was okay, but not great. The chemistry wasn't there between them. At one point Michaels got mad at Vader because he was supposed to move out of the way of the Michaels elbow drop and he didn't. Michaels ended up yelling at him in the ring. Cornette tells that story at 1:35 in the video below... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLAGcp0wI_s In this video, Cornette mentioned that the Michaels/Vader story was supposed to go from SummerSlam to Survivor Series to the Royal Rumble. The idea was that Vader would win the WWE Title at SummerSlam, then they would have another match at Survivor Series and then they would have the blowoff match at the Royal Rumble 1997 in San Antonio, which is where Michaels is from. Instead, since Vader was buried by Michaels, they put Sid in Vader's place since he won the WWE Title at Survivor Series and then dropped it to Michaels at the 1997 Rumble. Vader was never able to recover after feuding with Michaels. He didn't become the main event level performer that he probably should have been.