Shawn Michaels has been working at the WWE Performance Center a lot as of late. Although he told us prior to WrestleMania that his official job title hasn’t exactly been nailed down as of yet, he’s been helping to develop the next generation of stars on NXT and eventually on the main roster.
It seems as though he’s running into some challenges, however, because he’s finding the younger stars to be (in his experience) reluctant to adapt and evolve as characters and performers.
When he recently appeared on Edge and Christian’s podcast, Michaels talked about how he had to evolve and change as a performer in order to achieve success, but he doesn’t see a lot of willingness to do that among the current generation of wrestlers. (Transcript via the Wrestling Observer.)
“I think my match with (Vader) was the first time I can recall stomping for the superkick. And you’re the champion, so you’re still figuring out new ways to develop and grow and evolve. It’s not a knock, but I don’t know how many people are doing that. People are sort of set in their sequence, their distinguished moveset of whatever, and heck, we were still trying to grow in a main event of a pay-per-view. Do you know what I mean? It was a constant effort for character development, so to speak, as opposed to being set in that and just moving forward.
“And again, it’s not to be critical of anybody. It’s just sometimes when I watch, it’s just people are pretty set on who it is they are and I don’t know if that’s the most positive way of going about doing it. You want to continue to grow as a character, to stretch out, to have more range and have more emotion and have more everything because once you do sort of get settled in it, then it becomes repetitive, right?”
In a bit of a strange trend, Michaels is the third veteran in the last MONTH to take issue with the mindset and mentality of younger wrestlers. Big Show complained about younger, pampered wrestlers on Talk is Jericho, and Brian Kendrick took exception to young wrestlers not seeking out advice on Steve Austin’s podcast. Or maybe all these podcasts are just having a “what’s yer gripe” month and we missed the promotional packages or something.
