Alors voila à Noël j'ai eu la joie de recevoir l'autobiographie de Shawn Michaels !!! Alors pour remercier la quasi-totalité des membres de ce forum de tous les excellents moments passés en votre compagnie, je vous offre ce cadeau de Noël qui s'étendra donc sur une bonne partie de 2006.
Je dédicace ceci à tous les fans du Heartbreak Kid présents sur le forum !!!



Winning and losing. Heels and babyfaces.and Curtain Calls. Tearing down house house shows and tearing up hotel rooms. Ladders and cages. Vacated titles and unwarranted suspensions. Works and screwjobs. Heartaches and backbreaks. Forced retirements and redemption. Rock ‘n’ roll and Graceland. There are two sides to every story; for Shawn Michaels, there is Heartbreak & Triumph.
World wrestling Entertainment fans think they know “The Heartbreak Kid”. He’s “The Showstopper” who pushes his high-flying abilities to the limit in the squared circle, on ladders, and in steel cages. He’s the company’s first “Grand Slam” champion. And of course, he’s forever the guys who conspired with WWE Chairman Vince Mc Mahon to screw Bret “Hitman” Hart out of the WWE Championship in Montreal at Survivor Series on November 9, 1997.
But that’s side “HBK” has allowed you to see... until now. Heartbreak & Triumph: The Shawn Michaels Story introduces us to Michael Shawn Hickenbottom (“Everyone call me Shawn”), the youngest of four children whose “reallyconservative upbringing” made him shy and “afraid that people wouldn’t like me if I showed who I really was.” But upon discovering Southwest Championship wrestling (SWCW) on TV one Saturday night, the preteen Hickenbottom realized instantly what he wanted to become, and years later would convince his father –a colonel in the US Air Force- to let him drop out of college and pursue his dream.
From there, Hickenbottom fully recounts the events that led to “Shawn Michaels’s” tutelage under Mexican wrestler Jose Lothario; working matches at Mid-South Wrestling under the guidance of Terry Taylor and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Express’s Robert Gibson & Ricky Morton; flying high with Marty Jannetty as “The Midnight Rockers” in the American Wrestling Association (AWA); and how a barroom confrontation in Buffalo almost prevented the tandem from ever joining the World Wrestling Federation. “The Rockers” would drop the “Midnight” and climb to the top of a tough World Wrestling Federation tag-team division in the late 1980s, though Michaels confesses how a “fear of abandnment” stagnated his desire to participate in singles competition, pressured him into a marriage he wasn’t ready for, and drove him to drinking heavily and downing pills “just to get through the day.”
With the impact of some “Sweet Chin Music” (Michaels’s Superkick finisher), Heartbreak & Triumph expresses the “sour note” that dissolved Michaels’s partnership with Jannety and started his transformation into “The Heartbreak Kid”. You’ll learn firsthand of the “unfair” allegation that brought about HBK’s classic Ladder match with razor ramon at WM X (“I lost the match, but I made my career”); the incident in Syracuse that the stage for Shawn’s unbelievable “comeback” victories at Royal Rumble 1996, and in the Iron Man WWE Championship match with Bret Hart at WM XII; and how his escalating backstage feud with Hart inadvertenly built toward the formation of “D-Generation X”, as well as teh first-ever “Hell In A Cell” contest against The Undertaker at badd Blood in October 1997.
Beyond the squared circle, Michaels clears the air about his days running with “The Kliq” –Kevin Nash (“Diesel”), Scott Hall (“Razor Ramon”), Paul Levesque (“Triple H”), and Sean Waltman (“The 1-2-3 Kid”)- their contributions to WWE’s wildly successful “Attitude” era, and the consequences of their uncharacteristic Madison Square Garden “Curtain Call” in May 1996. And for the first time anywhere, Michaels shoots completely straight about his role in “the biggest scandal in wrestling history”, the infamous “Montreal Screwjob” at Survivor Series 1997.
While reviling the crippling back injury that forced him to retire in his prime following his WWE Championship loss at WM XIV, Michaels credits the new loves in his life –his second wife Rebecca, his children, and his newfound faith- with giving him the strengh to kick his habit, recover physically, and make a jubilant return to the ring at Summerslam 2002 (in a Street Fight against best friend Triple H, no less). Now back on top and doing what he enjoys most, the WWE Superstar regards Heartbreak & Triumph as the perfect means “to review my life, and attempt to figure out how I became the person I am.”

Merci beaucoup HBK, ça parait annodin pour certains, mais pour moi lire ces lignes me donnent un plaisir incomensurable...Merci HBK jene saurais comment ta remercier !

Et la traduction ?

Je plaisante, merci beaucoup de nous faire partager ce livre

est-ce que tu pourrais nous ecrire tout le livre au complet? lol

Dante : de rien mon brotha'
Mike : j'avais oublier de te dire que tu étais chargé d etraduction ??? désolé d'avoir oublié ...
Jon : c'ets le but mais faut patienter lol


PROLOGUE

November 9, 1997
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The day you win the World Wrestling Federation Championship should be among the happiest days of your life. It’s a reward for all the hard work you’ve put into your job and recognition that you are one of it not teh best at what you do.
A little over a year and a half ago, i won it for the first time. After all the public celebrating was done, I had a few moments alone in my hotel room. I sat on my bed and stared at the championship belt. I had never felt so good in all my life.
Ten months later, I won my second championship. This time I did it in front of more than sixty thousand people in my hometown of San Antonio, Texas. When I started out in this business, I dreamed that someday I would come home and have people recognize me when I walked through the local mall. It’s safe to say that this had more than fulfilled that dream.
Tonight, I was going to win the championship for a third time. Only this time, I knew there would be no celebrating, no happy or peaceful moments, and no dreams fulfilled. There might be some angry words, a fight, or maybe even a riot might break out. Whatever was going to happen, I knew it wasn’t going to be good.
Something big was about to go down in Montreal, and I was going to be at the center of it. Vince McMahon wanted Bret Hart to drop the World Wrestling Federation Championship to me. Bret, a native of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, didn’t want to. Bret Hart elieved he was a hero in his country and that if he lost a wrestling match in Canada, the country’s collective psyche might shatter –I am being totally serious here. He also didn’t like me, or more accurately, he hated me. I didn’t care for him either.
Normally, these issues would not have caused any trouble. Vince was the boss, and whatever he said happened. Vince had a problem though. Bret was leaving to wrestle for our archrival, World Championship Wrestling (WCW), and had a creative control clause in his contract that basically allowed him to do what he wanted in his last thirty days. If Bret didn’t wan’t to lose the title, Bret wasn’t going to lose the title –or so he thought.
The night before, Vince, myself, my friend and fellow Superstar, Triple H (Paul Levesque), and Jerry Brisco –one of Vince’s associates- met to confirm that we were going to swerve Bret out of the championship. He had left us no choice.
There is a time-honored tradition in his business that when you leave one wrestling company to go another, you “do the favor” –lose- on the way out. It’s a sign of respect and gratitude for those who have put you on top in the first place. Bret was leaving, but he was refusing to lose. For all we knew, he might take our championship belt down WCW and make a mockery of it and us. We couldn’t afford to take the chance.
It may not seem like much to an outsider, but in the wrestling world, what we were going to do was the equivalent of a mafia hit. And I was going to be Jack Ruby. It may have been Vince’s decision to swerve Bret out of the title, but I was going to be the one in the ring that everyone would see do it. Vince was going to try to do everything he could to put the focus and responsibility for the swerv on himself, but both he and I knew that I would catch most of the heat.
I already had an awful reputation within the industry because guys had been spreading rumors and lies about me for years. There was, and is, a wrestling subculture that lives off of gossip. They print newslettere –dirt sheets, as they are commonly referred to- post stories on Internet sites, and record telephon hotlines. I was not very popular in this subculture and had been targeted by them for years.
Soon after I began to be vilified in this world, I made the decision that I wasn’t going to respond to the lies and half-truths. I wasn’t going to play my detractor’s game of “he said, he said.” I’d been brought up to believe that if you had a problem with someone, you told them to their face, and that’s what I did. This didn’t win me many friends, but I had realized long ago that friends were a rare commodity in this business.
I knew most of my peers, and the small percentage of fans, who read the gossip were never going to like me. I didn’t care. My philosophy was, “ou may not like me, but I am going to be so good at what I do, you are going to have to respect me.” So I poured everything I had into my craft and rose to the top of my profesion.
I succeeded because I could wrestle. No one ever had any plans to go with Shawn Michaels. I was a small guy with a hateable gimmick. Ric Flair was cool. Hulk Hogan made you feel good. Steve Austin gave you the chance to be a rebel. Me, The Boy Toy? The heartbreak Kid? What redeemable qualities did I have? Who really wanted to be me?
When I was just beginning my rise through the ranks, Tully Blanchard told me that the key to making it in this business is simple: you make them yell the loudest for the longest. And that’s what I tried to do every time I stepped into teh ring. It didn’t matter if I was wrestling a champion or some no-name jobber –a wrestler hired to lose. I gave it everything I could.
Through my work, I ended up earning the respect of my peers. They may have been saying bad things about me behind my back, but they wanted to wrestle me. They knew I would bring out their best. I didn’t care about doing something in the ring that would make me look “weak.” I figured if I had a great match, I would get over anyway.
The fans could tell how much effort I was putting into my craft, and they rallied behind me. I became their darling, the one they wanted to see at the top. When I beat Bret Hart for my first WWF Championship at WM XII, they celebrated with me.
Soon, however, things changed. My world came crashing down. Everyone and everything seemed to turn against me. The gossip and the lies increased. I tried to block them out, but I couldn’t. The world was changing too. I was a white-meat babyface, the kind of good guy that was popular in the seventies and eighties but was fast becoming hated in the rebellious nineties. Despite my successes in the ring, many fans turned against me.
I was devastated and responded by lashing out at just about everyone. I pushed buttons and became a real lightning rod. If someone started spreading rumors that I was refusing to put people over, I’d walk into the lockr room and start shouting, “I’m not doing any jobs!” When I was hurt, it was often reported that I was faking the injury. So when I’d come back from my injury, I’d do something in the ring that no one else in my condition could possibly have done.
I’ll be the first to admit that I was no saint, before, and after, my first title run. I could be obnoxious, cocky, and rude, but I never did anything malicious. I never spread rumours about other people. And, I always owned up to my shortcomings. If I did something wrong, I accepted the punishment I received. If I was punished for something I didn’t do, well, that was a whole different matter, as you shall see. You could call me a lot of things, but you couldn’t say I was a hypocrite. Most of people who were spreading untruths about me where.
Business also fell off during my time. WCW was putting the clamps on WWE, and quite honestly, they were more with the times during this period. As the champion and the face of the company, the blame fell on my shoulders. I responded by doing the only thing I could do. I worked my tail off and put on great match after great match. It didn’t matter though. Our product was not connecting as well as WCW’s.
The doxnturn in business fed my detractors’ seemingly insatiable desire to destroy me. Unfortunately, I let them get to me and lashed out even more. I’d yell at Vince and his right hand man, Pat Patterson, who had always been so good to me. It was a horrible cycle that was destroying me inside.
As if all this wasn’t enough, a whole series of crazy things started happening. The power would go out at a PPV, a doctor would tell me that my knee was so badly damaged that I could never wrestle again, and then of course, there was Montreal. I tried to escape it all by taking vast quantities of painkillers. They could mask the pain for a short time, but in the long run, they nearly ended my life.
Two years after I first became champion I was completely broken –emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Randy Savage had once told me to slow down in the ring because he thought I’d never last. “i’m Superman,’ I told him. “I can do anything.”
I wasn’t Superman anymore. I was a thirty-two-year-old man with a back so messed up that I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning without taking pain pills. All I ever wanted to do, all I knew how to do was wrestle. And now, I couldn’t.
I retired from the ring, went home, and allowed in my misery. I was angry, confused, and wrecked with guilt. So many bad things had been said and written about me that I wasn’t sure who I was anymore. I was raised in a decent family, and I always thought I was a decent guy. I wasn’t sure of that anymore. Part of this feeling came from taking too many pills. Was I a bad guy because I was taking drugs? Or, was I taking drugs because I was a bad guy?
One thing I did know was that I was not a quitter. I never had been. Sometimes my never-say-die attitude led me into trouble, but I was never one to say, “I give up.” I wanted to be a better person. I wanted to kick the pills.
Eventually, teh darkness subsided. I met the woman of my dreams, my wife Rebecca. We had our firts child, our son Cameron. To the outside world, I had everything: a loving, gorgeous wife, a beautiful son, and a lot of money in the bank? But there was still something missing.
I had never been a very spiritual person, but I began to feel that teh Lord was calling out to me. I began calling out to him. He opened my heart and I became born again. I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior and I began living a spiritual life.
There was now an unspeakable joy in my life, and I became the man I should have always been. Thanks to the good work of doctors and the healing power of the Lord, my back healed. I thought about wrestling again, and four and a half years after I was forced to give up what I love doing more than anything else, I returned to the ring.
When I came back, I apologized to Vince and Pat and everyone else who I had wronged or made life difficult for. The old-timers who were still there saw I was a different person. The young guys had probably read about me and weren’t quite sure what to make of me at first. It wasn’t long, though, before they saw that I was much different from what they had heard about me in the past. From the moment I came back, work has been nothing but fun.
The fans too have seen that I am a better person. They have been nothing short of wonderful. They have been cheering me nonstop for the past three plus years despite the fact that my gimmick is more hateable than ever. I repay them the best way I know how. Every night I go out, I try my best to make them yell the loudest for the longest.

I suppose history will ultimately judge my place in this business, and I’m sure nearly every time my name is metioned, Bret Hart, Montreal, and the match that changed the course of this industry will come up. (And I’ll get back to Montreal, I promise.) But there is a lot more to my life and career than my relationship with him and that day in 1997.
You’ve never heard my side of the stiry, but now here it is. It has Kliqs and Curtain Calls, vacated titles and unwarranted suspensions. I’m going to tell you about tearing down houses and tearing up hotel rooms. You’ll read about Vince McMahon, Marty Jannetty, Kevin Nash, and a whole lot of people you may not have known who have helped me along the way. I’ll take you inside a Ladder match, a Hell In A Cell, and a bloodbath in Vega. I’ve even tossed in a little rock ‘n’ roll and Graceland. You’ll also learn about my family and friends, and how cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus Christ changed my life.
Trust me, it’s been one crazy ride. Then again, what else should I have expected? I wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place. And right after I was born, my mother didn’t even want to see me.

Allez mike on attend la traduction ... joke prend ton temps si tu le fait vment ... lol et merci d'avance

YES! Vraiment ça fait plaisir! Merci HBK, c'est un très bon cadeau de noël!

ROLL CALL
part 1

My mother didn’t want to see me ... at least that’s the story she loves to tell.
Now before you start thinking bad things about my mom, or wonder how she could say something like that, you really have to know her. She is and always has been very aver-the-top, and even though she sometimes pretends to be an angry lady, she’s incredibly sweet, and I don’t know if more than two weeks have gone by in my entire life that I haven’t spoken to or heard from her. I am, and have always been, a momma’s boy.
The truth is, though, I was not supposed to be here. I wasn’t planned. My parents already had my older brothers Randy, who is ten years older than I am, and Scott, who is six years older, as well as my sister Shari, who is four years my senior. They were a happy family and didn’t plan on having a fourth children. But, I came along.
My mom wasn’t angry that she became pregnant with me, she was more like, “Unbelievable! I’m having another child!” Plus, if she was going to have another child, she want it to be a girl. After all, she already had two boys.
Well, she got another boy, and I ended up being born Michael Shawn Hickenbottom on July 22, 1965, at Williams Air Force Base in Chandler, Arizona. And no, my mom didn’t want to see me. Shortly after I was born and taken to the nursery, the nurses asked her, “Do you want to see the ba-by?”
“No,” she replied, “because he’s not supposed to be here.”
They were a little taken aback by my mom’s comments and couldn’t quite figure her out. A little while later, they figured they could break her down and told her this story about a beautiful ba-by in the nursery who was all alone because his mother didn’t wan’t to see him. “Can you believe that?” they asked her.
My mom couldn’t. “Who is the woman who would do such a thing?” she asked.
They just looked at her for a second and then said, “You!”
She left awful, of course, and asked the nurses to bring me to her. They brought me in, and try as she might to pretend that she didn’t love me, she couldn’t keep up the façade for long. As I sat there cooing and looking up at her she fell in love with me, and I’ve been spoiled by her ever since.

My dad was an officer in the air force at the time, and it wasn’t too long after I was born, just six months in fact, that he took part in an exchange program with the Britsh Royal Air Force. So Mom packed up the family, and we moved to England. It was the first of many moves I would make as an air force child.
We lived near Reading, Englanf, for two years. Then Dad volunteered to go to Vietnam, and Mom took the family to Storm Lake, Iowa. This was where she grew up and where her mom, my Nanna, still lived. We move into a house down the road from Nanna’s and lived there until my dad came back to the States a year or so later.
I was just an infant when we lived in England and only three when we were in Storm Lake, so I don’t really have any recollection of time spent there. I do have great memories of Iowa, but those are from years later when our family would vi-sit Nanna for a few weeks during the summertime. I was Nanna’s little and we would spend time together in the kitchen making grebles –fried dough and sugar. I also got a glimpse of farm life, driving the tractor and being outdoors a lot. It was always a lot of fun, and I looked forward to visiting her every summer.
My first real memories start when I was four and my dad came back from his overseas tour. Besides being a pilot, he was also an expert on the Middle East. He began working at the Pentagon, conducting research and preparing position papers for the Defense Department, the State Department, and evn the president of the United States. We moved to Camp Springs, Maryland, which wasn’t far from the Pentagon.
I don’t remember the actual move, but I do remember my first impressions of the house we move into. To me, it seemed like the biggest house in the world. At four, everything seems big, and looking bak now as an adult, I realize that it wasn’t a mansion or anything, but at the time, it just seemed huge.
One great thing about our house was that it was situated in a really neat neighborhood. At the end of our block, the neighborhood ended and it was all woods and forest. For a little kid who liked to run around and play, we couldn’t have lived in a more perfect place.
When I turned five, my parents threw a birthday party and set up a treasure hu-nt for ma and all my friends. It may have seemed like a small thing to them at the time, but it’s one of my fondest memories. My parents placed clues all around the house and up and down our street. We would find one clue, my older brother Randy would read it to us, which would lead us to another and then another. They put clues under rocks, on trees, anywhere that five-years-olds would like to look. At the end of it, there was going to be this great treasure that we would find.
The clues took us up and down the block and into the woods where there was a big oak tree in which the local kids had put a tree house. We followed the clues past the tree house and then along a stream that ran nearby. At one point, we thought we had spotted the treasure. We ran across the stream with great big smiles on our faces, thinking we would soon be opening a secret chest. It turned out to be a bunch of rocks, but that didn’t deter us one bit from continuing the hu-nt.
We kept collecting clues and eventually made our way back to my backyard. And there, sitting before us, was a big trunk stuffed full of toys. We were all so happy. We have found the treasure and there was something there for all of us.
I’ve lived a pretty crazy life and been trough a lot of stuff, but I’ve never forgotten the treasure hu-nt. Now as a father of two beautiful young children, I’d like to be able to put together a treasure hu-nt for them on one of their birthdays. I only hope it will be as fun and as memorable as the one my folks gave me.

Football played a big part in my childhood and teenage years, and it was in Camp Springs that I began playing. My older brothers played, and I thought it seemed like a neat thing to do. I started out by playing with my brothers in our basement. We had this little rubber grip tot that we used as the football. I would start with the ball on one side of the basement and have to fight my way through them to get to the other side and score a touchdown. I think they had a blast picking me up and tosing me about. Unbeknownst to me, I was already learning how to take bumps and fly around.
I started playing organized ball, Pop Warner, when I was six. I was a stocky little boy who liked the physicality and contact of the sport, so my coaches started me out as a fullback. I was pretty good, but I did have one major problem that limited my enjoyment of the game. I had a hard time telling my right from my left. When they called a play that went right, I often went left, and when they called a play to go left, I often went right.
You might me thinking that a kid my age ought to know the difference between his right and his left, but there’s a reaon I had a bit of difficulty with this. I’m ambidextrous, and while this can be advantageous in many ways, for a six-years-old trying to learn his right from his left, it can be quite a source of frustration.
When a coach explained a ply where I was suppose go to right, he would tell me to run between the guard and tackle on that side. When I asked which was right, he would tell me it was the side of my writting hand. When I asked another coach, he would tell me it was the side of the hand I drew with. Well, I wrote with my left and colored with my right, si I’d get confused. To try and help matters, one coach had seen me placekick, and he’d tell me it’s the same side that you kick the ball with. Normally this would have helped, but while I kicked teh ball off teh ground with my right foot, I punted with my left. Unfortunately, his instructions only confused me more and I became very frustrated.
The coaches told my parents that if I wanted to play I needed to work on knowing my right from my left and where the holes I was supposed to run through were. So my dad and my brothers went to work to straighten me out. In our yard, they set up trash can lids where the offensive lineman would be and pointed out where all the holes were. We practiced a lot, and thanks to their patience I learn where to run.
Once over the right/left hurdle, I started doing pretty well. Then, I ended up hurting my leg. I’d like to say I pulled my hamstring, but I’m not sure if that’s possible for a six-years-old to do. In any event, I hurt my leg somehow. We were at practice running laps. I was limping, crying, and just traying to make it around the field as best I could. I could hear my dad yelling, “C’mon Shawn, you’re not hurt. You can do it!” So, I gutted it out and kept running.
I can also remember my mom then turning to my dad and really laying into him for pushing me like that when I was obviously injured. She couldn’t stand to see her ba-by hurting, so she really gave my dad a piece of her mind? She also went over to my coach and told him in no uncertain terms, “You get him off the field!”
Well, Coach came over to me, picked me up, and carried me over to my mom. She took me right home. The next year, I played defensive lineman. Not so much running, and plenty of contact.
There were no great lessons that I learned from getting hurt, but this is a good example of how my parents related to me as I was growing up, my dad forcful and pushing, telling me to gut it out, and my mom not wanting to see me hurting at all.

At the time, I didn’t really understand what my dad did for a living. He was always in his uniform, and he looked sharp all the time. He was very clean, very strict, and very proper. People saluted him a lot, I remember that. It seemed like a pretty cool thing to have people salute you. He worked a lot and wasn’t home much, but if one of us was playing sports, he was usually there.
Later on, I would find out that he was a pretty good athlete in his day, and a great amateur wrestler, having wrestled for the University of Iowa, one of the top programs in the country. As a kid, though, I didn’t really talk that much with my dad. He was from the generation where the father went to work and came home, had something to eat, and then relaxed on the couch. He basically kept to himself and would go to bed pretty early. I can’t remember many intimate conversations I had with him as a kid.
My mom, on the other hand, took a very active role in raising the kids, and she was always very protective of me. She could get angry lije all moms do, but when push came to shove, I was her ba-by and she almost always sided with me. On thing I learned very early on was that being a full-time mom is a real job, worthy of as much respect as a husband who works full-time outside the house.
My brothers were a lot older than me, and we didn’t really have much of a relationship until recently. Both are college graduates and both are smart men. I always felt a little inferior to them, first because they were so much older than me, and then later on because they went to college and earned degrees. I felt they were smarter than me and that we would never have anything in common. I especially felt that way about Randy because he was a real brain. I was more of a jock, and because of my insecurity, I felt like a dummy around him. It used to drive him crazy, and that more than anything kept us from having a real relationship until very recently.
These days, because I’ve lived such a different life than my brothers and have gone through so much, I find myself giving them advice. For the first time, even though I’m their little brother, they make me feel their equal.
While I had a distant relationship with my brothers, I was real close to my sister, Shari. I thought she was the cat’s meow and I just loved her so much. With my brothers out doing their own thing, we grew up together. She used to comfort me all the time and watch over me. Every night I would snuggle in bed with her. She provided a great sense of comfort.

part 2

We lived in Camp Springs until I was eight years old and there was really only one aspect of my life that I didn’t like: school, or at least teh first day of school. Not my actual first day in kindergarten, but every first day after that until seventh grade. It wasn’t the classes that bothered me, or even meeting new kids when I name would be called. Witha name like Hickenbottom, it’s not hard to figure out why. It is a funny name, and kids would make fun of it and me all the time.
I also didn’t like the name Michael. My parents thought about naming me Shawn Michael Hickenbottom, but they decided Michael Shawn rolled off the tongue a bit better, so that was my official name. Everyone who knew me, though, called me Shawn.
I can’t honestly say that I remember my first day of kindergarten at Middleton Valley Elementary, but I have no doubt that I cried leaving my mom for the first time to go to school. I also know that I got over leaving Mom real soon when I met my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Musgrave. She was spectacular and I adored her. She was my first love. When I went to first grade, she became my first grade teacher, and I couldn’t have been any happier. My only disappointment with her was when she got married. I was heartbroken, but somehow I pulled it together and managed to move on with my life.
Be fore long, the local school district started a busing program. Rather than put me in a bus and have me attend school in a different neightborhood, my parents decided to enroll me in St. Joseph’s, a private Catholic school. This was where I had my first of many uncomfortable experiences of being the new guy in school.
The very first day I was there, the teacher called out my name during roll. “Michael Hickenbottom?”
Everybody in the class started laughing. I can’t remember teh kids at Middleton Valley laughing at my name, perhaps a few snickers, but I sure remember these kids doing so. I felt terrible and if I had had one wish in the world at that time, it would have been to get out of that classroom. At Middleton Valley, I would yell out “Shawn” when they called my name and I would be called Shawn from then on. I felt so uncomfortable here that I didn’t even tell the teacher to call me Shawn instead of Michael. For the rest of the year I was called Michael, and I hated every minute of it. I don’t remember making one friend during that year at St. Joseph’s. Thankfully, I still had the kids in the neighborhood that I played with.
By the time third grade rolled around, we had moved to Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas. My dad had been transferred there to be the base commander and once again the Hickenbottom family was on the move. Even though we had moved two thousand miles, my next first day at school would be just as bad.
That fall, I started at another Catholic school, Sacred Heart. This time the laughing and teasing would lead to the first of many fights I would get into. I was by nature a pretty shy boy, and I think I fought mostly out of fear. I can’t ever recall wanting to fight. I fought because I thought I had to. It was just that I got picked on and picked on and picked on some more. I got so tired of it. It takes a lot to make me mad, but once I get mad I have a pretty bad temper, and I was about to unleash it on kid who teased me a Sacred Heart.
During my first day there, a bunch of us were outside by the basketball courts and a boy starting making fun of my last name. I didn’t like it and I went do much damage, but I did pretty well for myself. We scuffled for a bit before we were separated and marched off to see the principal. Although they gave out spankings at the time, we weren’t spanked. We wer reprimanded and shown the paddle, but that was it. The punishment certainly didn’t scar me or deter me from getting in fights in the future.
I stayed at Sacred Heart through the fifth grade. Then, my dad was transferred to Randolph Air Force Wase right outside San Antonio. He went to live there where the rest of us stayed in Del Rio. At the time, my brother Randy was already off in college. Scott, however, was going to be a senior in high school. He was a real good football player and had been at the same school for three years. Starting anew as a senior would have been tough and a bit unfair to him. Shari also had a lot of friends in del Rio and didn’t want to move either. So my parents decided that my mom would stay with us in Del Rio for one more year while my dad lived at Randolph, 150 miles away.
My dad made a pretty good living as a colonel in the air force, but maintaining two homes, sending a son to college, and sending me to private school was a bit much. So for sixth grade, I went back to public school. Sure enough, I got in a fight the very first day.
It was the same old story. The roll call “Hickenbottom,” the snickers, and then later the teasing. This time it was a boy named Steve who was doing the teasing. He was lipping off to me at recess, and I really let him have it. By this time I was big enough to do some real damage, and I bloodied him up pretty good.
I must admit that my pugilistic prowess got me over with my classmates right away. They were pretty impressed with how I beat the tar out him. I think it was a respect thing, the other kids were like Whoa, don’t mess with Shawn, he’s real tough.”
We were taken to teh principal’s office, but just like at Sacred Heart, we didn’t really get into any trouble. Back in those days, schools wouldn’t immediately call home and tell your parents that you were in a fight, so teh only reason my folks ever knew I was in fights was if I told them.
Steve and I quickly made up. We soon became friends and ended up being teammates on our football team. Later in the year, he died in a tragic accident when his mother ran him over by accident while he was on his bike. I ended up being one of his pallbearers. The whole football team wore our jerseys to the funeral. This was my first experience with death and just a really sad moment.
Now that I have kids, and I’m not saying you have to have kids to realize what a tragedy that was, but nonetheless knowing what it’s like to have kids and just thinking about them dying in such a manner, it’s almost too much to imagine. My heart still goes out to his mother and family.

As you go back and review your life in the attempt to figure out how you became the person you are and why you acted in certain ways at various points in your life, you often come upon episodes that simply indicate: I was as I was, or, I just always was this way.
This is certainly true for me when it came to being punished for something I did not believe warranted punishment. Later in life during my wrestling career I would often be accused of doing awful things and/or breaking rules. I’ll be the first to admit that I pushed buttons and could be difficult. But one thing I did do was own up to my shortcomings. If I did something wrong, I admitted to it and did not fight the punishment. When I was disciplined for something I did not do wrong, though, I fought the punishment and often made life as miserable as possible for those who I thought were wrongfully punishing me.
My internal sense of justice could be seen shortly after we moved to Laughlin. I hed gotten in trouble for something –something that wasn’t that serious, like forgetting to tell my mom where I was going that afternoon. If you ask my mom today, she’ll even tell you that it wasn’t that serious. But that day for whatever reason, maybe Mom was in a bad mood, I was going to get “the swithch.” My parents didn’t spank us with their hands, they did it with a riding crop. It was my mom that called the crop “the switch.”
Now I was a good kid for the most part and didn’t get the switch very often. I learned real quick that it didn’t pay to get in trouble where the switch was concerned. And more importantly, I was a sensitive kid and it bothered me to do something wrong to my parents or my family. It really hurt my feelings.
On this day, whatever I did, I didn’t think I deserved to get it. My mom thought otherwise. She started getting on me, and despite my telling her that I was sorry and it would never happen again, she was adamant. I meant what I said, but the words were not good enough. I pleaded one more time with her.
“I’m sorry. I promise I won’t do it again. Please don’t,” I said.
“Put your hands on the counter,” she replied as she readied the switch.
I did exactly as she said. But still defiant and believing I didn’t deserve the switch, I bolted out of the kitchen before she could hit me.
My mom couldn’t believe I had run off. None of my siblings ever had the gumption to run from her. She was yelling at me to come back, but I just kept running and running and running. I ran past the officers’ area, past the noncommissioned officers’ area, through yards and down streets. I ran by the pool and all the youth fields.
Meantime, my mom and my sister had jumped in our truck and started following me. My sister could run like a deer and periodically my mom would pull up close to me and my sister would jump out and try and chase me down. She couldn’t catch me on this day, though.
Eventually, I ran all the way to the end of the base. I was way out in the desert with only another big fence separating me from a vast, endless wasteland. My choices were either to stop and confront my mom, or try and climb the fence and head to Mexico or Del Rio. As I stood next to the fence, thinking what to do, my mom stepped out of the truck. I could tell by her expression that she was no longer mad, only concerned and a bit amused by the entire episode. She quickly said, “Baby, come here.”
“I won’t do it anymore,” I said, obviously exhausted and a bit scared.
“I know you won’t,” she answered.
Then my sister came over and gave me a big hug. Later, my mom told me that Shari was really sticking up for me, pleading my case and telling her that I would never run like this if I had really done something bad. I think my sister standing up for me softened up my mom, and knowing this made me love Shari even more. That was the last time I was ever threatened with the switch. It wouldn’t be the last time I ever ran from a punishment that I felt I didn’t deserve.

Shortly after we moved to Laughlin, I was spending nearly every day at the pool. I was a big diver and spent hours diving off the boards. I wasn’t afraid to jump off either the low or high boards, and before long I could do flips and even a backflip.
My dad took notice of my diving and one day told me to go up on the high dive and do a two and a half. I had never done this big a dive before, but I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I climbed up the diving board and gave it my best shot.
It turns out my best shot wasn’t good enough. I didn’t make it and landed straight on my face, about knocking myself out. I was crying and selling my pain like nobody’s business. My poor dad, he must have felt awful. And these are the memories I have of him! In any event, it didn’t deter me from getting back on the board. Before long, I was back up jumping for all I was worth, although it’s safe to assume that I didn’t try another two and a half.
I also made friends with a boy who lived near us named Andrew. We were into superheroes and played together all the time. He ended up leaving the next year, and I remember being real sad when he did. Before long, however, I was making new friends and starting to experience the Texas lifestyle. We had moved off the base and I started hanging around with Donny Fletcher and the Sullivan boys. Donny and his family wore boots and Wranglers and drove pickup trucks. They were real country folk. As I made my way through elementary school I was becoming a full-fledged Texan. I spent a lot of time riding dirt bikes and going to the 4-H club and watching the kids there raise animals. I also tried chewing tobacco for the first time. I really didn’t like the taste of th etobacco, but older kids chewed it and I just imitated them.
As far as academics were concerned, I was an average student who didn’t try very hard and wasn’t that interested in any of the subjects we studied. Nowadays, I read a ton of books, but back then, despite my parents’ wanting me to, I wasn’t into reading. I earned mostly C’s and a few B’s. Every now and then I would get a D and be told that I had to “bring those grades up.” My parents never said that my future would depend on my education, and I never felt pressured to do well in school.
One other thing that I discovered in Del Rio was girls, or more exactly, that there was something pretty cool about them. Of course, I had no idea how to act around girls. I was shy and totally unsure of myself. One time in the sixth grade, we were at a party playing truth or dare and I was dared to go into the a closet with this girl. We went, but we had no idea what we were doing. We just stood there ad stared at each other, completely innocent and completely clueless.
A couple of weeks later I was at another party and a game of spin the bottle broke out. This night I turned out to be very “suave and debonair.” A lot of the girls picked me to kiss them. Again, I had no idea what I was doing, and truth be told, I would have no idea all throughout junior and senior high school and really for a long time after that. But at this moment, it felt pretty darn cool to get picked to be kissed.

part 3

The summer between sixth and seventh grade we moved to randolph and were reunited with Dad. By this time, moving was no big deal. Everyone in the air force seemed to do it, and I found it easy to make friends at Randolph. I had the summer to settle into life on the base, and by the time school started things were going pretty well. I met a new friend, Tim Roubelard, and was having a good time playing with him. Then it was time for school to start, and I began to brace myself for roll call. My last name was an albatross I couldn’t get rid of.
The first day in seventh grade, I was nervous and dreading the moment when the teacher would call out my name. Fortunately, someone intervened and saved me the agony of a full-fledged heckling. He had black hair and the biggest buckteeth you ever saw. His name was Darren Sutterfield and he liked to go by the name of Scooter.
“Darren Sutterfield?” our teacher called out the first day.
“You can call me Scooter,” he replied.
I guess we all thought that was pretty funny because the whole class broke out laughing. Whether they were laughing at him or the name I’m not sure, but by the time the teacher came to me there was already a bit of levity, and I definitely felt better. I got a few chuckles when my name was called, but it was nothing like the past. I guess Scooter took the heat off of me.
Junior high school turned out to be a really good time. I spent a lot of time riding bikes and skateboards with my friends and hanging out at the base youth center where we would play pool or Ping-Pong. I played football for our base team, the Randolph Rangers, during the fall, and I played baseball in the spring.
This was also about the time I started feeling peer pressure or at least realizing that it existed. There were different cliques, so to speak, at school. There was the “cool” group, the “nerd” group, the “goth” group, and then there were “the others.” I didn’t really run within any one circle. I was sort of an in-betwenner, which was fine for me.
Some of my classmates liked to talk about what they were doing with girls. Rumors would start flying around about so-and-so and so-and-so. I assumed they were true because I didn’t really know any better. Later on I realized that there was a lot of lying going on, but at the time I just took what people said as the truth.
Elizabeth was the name of my first girlfriend. She lived off base and didn’t go to Randolph. This sort of raised my profile at school. I was “going with” someone from the outside. In our small world, I had gone big time.
I met her at an arcade, and we spent a fair amount of time there. Sometimes my mom would give me a ride to her house and we’d hang out and be awkward with each other. I certainly liked her, but I was so intimated around her. I was afraid of doing something that she didn’t want me to do. My shyness made me feel awkward, but in a strange way, I think she and other girls kind of liked me for that.
It’s funny because later on in my career I was known as such an egotistical brash guy because that’s what I put out there for everyone to see. Inside, I was stil the shy little tweve-years-old who didn’t quite know how to act and who was afraid that people wouldn’t like me if I showed who I really was.

C'est vrai que c'est vraiment sympa.
Grand merci HBK

WoW !! merci à toi HBK, je viens de lire tout ce que tu as déjà mis d'un coup (ça m'a pris un bon moment) vivement que je puisse voir la suite