Shawn Michaels Reflects on 25 Years of “Raw”

WWE Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels was recently interviewed by USA Today in preparation for the 25th Anniversary of “Raw” this coming Monday. He discussed a number of topics, including the first episode of “Raw,” what he is looking forward to the most about the show, the DX invasion of “Nitro” and more.

Below are some questions, along with the “Heartbreak Kid’s” answers:

What gets you excited about Raw 25?

Shawn Michaels: Seeing everybody, to be perfectly honest. I think for a lot of us, it’s like a big reunion, and it would almost be like a high school reunion, darn near, because that’s about the maturity level of all of us.

Having an opportunity to sit in the locker room and and visit with everybody, and also to take a moment and sit there and reflect on this whole big thing. 25 years… I think there are a lot of us that are going to be sitting there thinking like ‘my goodness, who’d a thunk it,’ that all these years later we’d still be here.

Once you got a few episodes in, what was your feeling about Raw? At the time, did you think ‘this is the future for wrestling’?

No… I don’t think, there’s no way. I know I didn’t. I can’t say that in that time in my life I had the maturity or the vision to understand what it was we were doing.

You could look back now and easily say that that Raw was the genesis, was the nucleus of everything that was the huge expansion and globalization of the WWE. Because without Raw, you don’t then move into WCW starting and then the Monday Night Wars and the huge outcome of that, and then the WWE winning and taking over and becoming this unbelievable global franchise that it has become today. I think all of that starts with that very first Raw at the Manhattan Center.

Let’s put it this way… I’m sure if you would ask Vince McMahon, that was his vision. But certainly for the guy that was out there in the zebra stripes with the Intercontinental Championship and a really bad mullet, I had no idea. So to fast forward all these years later, it’s a pretty amazing thing.

DX invades WCW: Raw April 27, 1998

WWE.com put out a list of the 100 biggest moments on Raw throughout the years, and you’re involved in quite a few of them. One I wanted to go back to was when DX invaded an episode of Monday Nitro. What kind of impact did that moment have?

I was a guy, at that time, watching that as a fan. That was after I had hurt my back and left, and so I was home watching that as a fan.

I have to tell you, as a guy sitting there at home watching it, not calling anybody and finding out what’s going on, it was huge. I can remember sitting there thinking ‘oh my goodness, that is genius.’ And that they were doing that… for me it was absolutely one of the greatest moments, I think, in wrestling history, period. And ooh, it almost stings a little bit to say that because I wasn’t a part of it.

That was just something you didn’t see. You could talk about it all day, you could reference somebody on TV. Think of it [like], it’s no different at the Oscars if somebody says something mean about the president. It’s a whole other thing to, during the State of the Union, you walk up on stage while he’s talking and say something do him. Nobody does that.

That’s what these guys were doing. They were going to the back door of the competition and knocking on the door, and they weren’t answering. It was absolutely huge.

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