Shawn Michaels At WrestleMania 14 & 9 Other Injured Wrestlers Who Put On Classics
Wrestling through an injury is generally considered a badge of honor to Superstars. There has been a long standing philosophy in all of show business that the show must go on. In the wrestling world that means that seldom is an injury so great that you don’t have the booked match in the ring.
The cardinal rule in wrestling is to get the match in the ring. It’s why Vince McMahon acquiesced to the Ultimate Warrior’s demands are SummerSlam 1991. It’s also why all of these wrestlers gritted their teeth through injuries and either began the match with an injury or received one during. Nevertheless, they still found the willpower to get through it and still deliver a marquee performance.
10 Shawn Michaels - WrestleMania XIV
Shawn Michaels final match before his grand return four years later at SummerSlam 2002 might not have been the match he wanted to put on. But the then-WWE champion still marched into battle in all of his DX glory against Stone Cold Steve Austin at WrestleMania XIV. The Heartbreak Kid’s back was so severe that Triple H and Chyna were practically carrying him around backstage all the way to Mania. There have been several interviews over the years where both Shawn and Austin said it wasn’t their best match, but even injured, HBK showed why he was Mr. WrestleMania.
9 Triple H - Monday Night Raw May 21, 2001
Triple H is the most diabolical man in wrestling. Who else would able to find a way to sit out the entire entirely abysmal Invasion Angle? He just had to injure a quadricep muscle to do it. During one of the best tag team matches in the history of Raw, The Game took a slight misstep, literally.
Related: 5 Times Triple H Was The Best Member Of DX (& 5 Times He Was The Worst)
It was all he did, stepped wrong and tore his quad in the process. Rather than leave Stone Cold to finish the match by himself, Triple H worked very hard to make sure that Chris Jericho looked amazing as he put The Cerebral Assassin in the Walls Of Jericho on a table.
8 Bayley - TakeOver: Brooklyn
The Golden Role Models recently had a horrifyingly messy breakup, which will lead to an inevitable match between Sasha and Bayley. But it won’t be the first time these two met. Their match at the first Brooklyn TakeOver was a match for the ages, kicking the door down on the Women’s Evolution. The Huggable Superstar had headed into the event recuperating from a busted hand, the same hand that Banks would target to keep Bayley from reaching the ropes trapped in The Bank Statement.
7 Daniel Bryan - WrestleMania XXX
The Yes Movement reached its epic, emotional crescendo at WrestleMania XXX when Daniel Bryan, the American Dragon defeated all three active members of Evolution in one night to breath fire atop of the WWE. Unfortunately his title reign was cut short and his career was nearly ended due to a string of injuries suffered throughout the years finally piled up to an insurmountable mountain. At WrestleMania XXX, Bryan was dealing with the effects of a broken neck.
6 Mankind - King Of The Ring 1998
When you’re a hardcore wrestler, you tend to always wrestler a little injured. But when you’re Mick Foley, those injuries can only compound during a match like Hell In A Cell. The infamous match immediately overshadowed everything Mick Foley did or would do in his career. The first mythical fall knocked him out and dislocated his shoulder. Yet he still climbed back up for more. The second fall knock him out and his tooth up through his nose. After the match, Foley had apologized to Bruce Prichard for forgetting to use the thumbtacks, which were still pouring out of his person.
5 Shawn Michaels - Royal Rumble 1998
While fans remember Shawn Michaels gutting through a back injury to help facilitate the Austin Era, lest we forget the match that the injury first occurred. In their final encounter for over a decade, Shawn Michaels successfully defended the WWE title against The Undertaker in a casket match, thanks to the interference of Kane.
Related: 10 Wrestlers You Didn't Realize Shawn Michaels Faced
But during the match, HBK took a nasty backdrop onto the casket. If fans thought the pain on Shawn’s face was real that’s because it was 100 percent real. That bump would cost him four years of his career.
4 John Cena - SummerSlam 2013
The Cena Sucks, Lets Go Cena chants in some ways just became commonplace as opposed to how some fans really felt about Cena and more how they felt about the WWE’s insistence of pushing him at the top of the card. He also knows a thing or two about working injured. At SummerSlam 2013, Cena was hellbent on making sure Daniel Bryan got over in the grandest way possible. He worked the match with a humongous elbow pad on covering up the fact that it was the size of a baseball.
3 Stone Cold Steve Austin - WrestleMania XIX
In 1997, Stone Cold was inadvertently dropped on his neck, severely injuring him and altering his working style until the end of his career. That injury, several others, plus huge swaths of coffee, energy drinks, and liquor made the Bionic Redneck completely and uncontrollably twitchy. The night before the third and final encounter with The Rock, Austin was quietly admitted to the hospital and was pumped full of fluids that helped him get through the match, which at that point only a select few people knew it that it was the last round for incomparable Toughest SOB in the WWE.
2 Kurt Angle - WrestleMania XIX
To be fair, Kurt Angle won an Olympic Gold medal with a “broken freakin’ neck,” so a silly thing like wrestling worked matches couldn’t be too difficult for the wrestling machine. He spent most of the career working with that same neck.
Related: Kurt Angle: 10 Final Matches Of His Career, Ranked From Worst To Best
It all came to a head during the build up to WrestleMania XIX, Angle reaggravated his neck injury and was living on a steady diet of pain pills to muscle through the hotly anticipated match between he and Brock Lesnar.
1 Finn Balor - SummerSlam 2016
SummerSlam 2016 was supposed to be the dawn of a new era. The WWE machine was solidly behind making sure Finn Balor was going to be crowned the first ever Universal Champion and get solidly behind him being one of the faces of the company. But an errant buckle bomb into the ring guards would deter that plan. Instead, fans got to see one of the best in the world grit his teeth and work more than half the match with one arm to claim his spot in history as the first ever Universal Champion.
Next: 10 WWE World Heavyweight Champions Who Never Won A World Title In Another Promotion
