The Shawn Michaels-Hulk Hogan match at SummerSlam in 2005 is legendary, not because it was a tremendous exhibition of wrestling skills but because of Michaels’ excessive selling of every Hogan offensive move. Michaels flipped and bounced around the ring, writhing in exaggerated pain with every Hogan maneuver, to the point that it became almost farcical.
It’s hard to watch that and not feel like Michaels was overselling everything, but he joined Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast recently and explained why he did what he did.
Michaels insisted that he wasn’t trying to oversell, but was worried that the match wasn’t going to be good otherwise (transcription via Wrestling Inc).
“Let’s just say, look, you could say I didn’t do a good job, but, I mean, you go and watch some of my work from, I don’t know, ’96, I bounced around all the time,” Michaels said. “You look at Ziggler now, I mean, if what I did in the Hogan match was overselling, then what Dolph does on a regular basis, or Billy Gunn, when Billy’s a heel, that’s just, a lot of it is how we worked. I was out there trying, obviously too hard, I guess, in some people’s eyes. I was just trying to make it a good match because I felt like it wasn’t going to be.”
It’s interesting that Michaels notes he didn’t think the match was going to work without him selling hard on each move, which says a lot about where he felt Hogan was in 2005 as a worker that he felt the need to do that. The Ziggler comparison is interesting — and he’s not the first one to compare some of Ziggler’s antics in the ring to his own — but when you look at the way he flew around the ring and through the ropes, it’s excessive even compared to Dolph.
