Shawn Michaels is an American retired professional wrestler. He is signed to WWE, where he is the Senior Vice President of Talent Development, Creative, and oversees the creative aspects of the NXT brand, the promotion's developmental territory. Regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time, he is known by the nicknames "The Heartbreak Kid" (often abbreviated as HBK), "The Showstopper", and "Mr. WrestleMania".
Michaels wrestled consistently for WWE, formerly the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, renamed in 2002), from 1988 until his first retirement in 1998. He performed in non-wrestling roles for the next two years, resuming his wrestling career with WWE in 2002 until ceremoniously retiring in 2010. He returned for a one-off final match in 2018. In 2016, he began working as a coach at the WWE Performance Center, and was a producer on NXT in 2018, before becoming the Senior Vice President of Talent Development Creative for the NXT brand itself.
In WWF/WWE, Michaels headlined pay-per-view events between 1989 and 2018, main-eventing the company's flagship annual event, WrestleMania, five times (12, 14, 20, 23 and 26). He was the co-founder and original leader of the successful stable, D-Generation X. Michaels also wrestled in the American Wrestling Association (AWA), where he founded The Midnight Rockers with Marty Jannetty in 1985. After winning the AWA World Tag Team Championship twice, the team continued to the WWF as The Rockers and had a high-profile breakup in January 1992. Within the year, Michaels twice challenged for the WWF Championship and won his first Intercontinental Championship, heralding his arrival as one of the industry's premier singles stars.
Michaels is a four-time world champion, having held the WWF Championship three times and WWE's World Heavyweight Championship once. He is also a two-time Royal Rumble winner (and the first man to win the match as the first entrant), the company's first Grand Slam Champion and fourth Triple Crown Champion, as well as a two-time WWE Hall of Fame inductee (2011 as a singles wrestler and 2019 as part of D-Generation X). Michaels won the Pro Wrestling Illustrated "Match of the Year" reader vote a record eleven times, and his match against John Cena on April 23, 2007, was ranked by WWE as the best match ever aired on the company's flagship television program, Raw. Michaels has been a participant in several first installments of a number of WWE's signature gimmick matches—namely the first Hell in a Cell at the Badd Blood: In Your House, the first Ladder match during a taping of WWF Wrestling Challenge (and subsequent first pay-per-view installment at WrestleMania X), both the inaugural (as part of The Rockers tag team) and first televised (at WrestleMania XII) Iron Man matches, and Elimination Chamber at the 2002 Survivor Series.
