What if Shawn Michaels had stayed on full time after Crown Jewel?

#1 One more retirement angle

Shawn Michaels would surely get one more big-time send-off from WWE.

Shawn Michaels is widely respected as one of the greatest of all time. That’s a narrative that WWE pushed at a number of points of his tenure with the company, and that HBK wasn’t known to shy away from. Accordingly, it made sense that the company would make a big deal out of his second retirement, working no less than a WrestleMania main event match opposite no lesser Superstar than The Undertaker, under the stipulation that if he retired, he’d hang up his wrestling boots.

If Michaels were to have come back full time for even a few months to a year, the odds are he wouldn’t go quietly, but rather in working another retirement angle. It’s unclear where it would fall on the spectrum of his previous retirement match with The Dead Man, a kayfabe stipulation that he would have to retire upon his next loss like Ric Flair, or in one final match announced in advance like Kurt Angle. Nonetheless, we could expect that at a WrestleMania, or perhaps one of the big international stadium shows, WWE would cash in on the prospect of The Showstopper’s last match one more time.