Heroes are strange things. They are, by their very nature, something you have a very personal relationship with while remaining at a massive distance. Well, unless you were one of those kids in school who answered the homework question 'Who is your hero' with the answer 'My hero is my Mum/Dad'. For the rest of us, no matter how close we were to our parents, our heroes are celebrities.

You noted the word 'personal' in the previous paragraph, I hope. That was your warning that I'm going to be using my own experiences throughout this column. My apologies in advance.

I got into wrestling when I was eleven years old. My family had just moved to Ireland, and I had a lot of adjusting to do. One of the first things I saw was a recap of the action from the previous week - the most important being the breakup of good-guy tag-team 'The Rockers'. Marty Jannetty had trusted his partner when he had said that, despite recent communication problems between the two, there were no problems. The Rockers were here to stay.

And then Marty's partner, Shawn Michaels, kicked him in the face and threw him face first through a window.

It was one of the things that hooked me. Even though it went on with a bunch of people with bad hair and a man with a truly disturbing pair of frayed tights in the background, I was hooked. Even though, and I'm fully prepared to admit this, the acting is not necessarily the best on the planet...I was hooked. Utterly.

Looking back, it is perhaps not that surprising that I found Michaels immediately interesting. I had been a fan of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, and he was the wrestler with the long hair, earrings and outrageous leather jackets. On, perhaps, a deeper level, his character was taking a dramatically new path, naming himself the 'Heartbreak Kid' (often shortened to HBK) and it struck home with me a little bit - although that's one of those points that is probably reading far too much into it with the benefit of hindsight. However, it does strike a chord with me looking back.

When you look at the clip above (and I urge you to do it, as it encapsulates all that is terrible and brilliant about professional wrestling in the space of seven minutes), you will probably be struck by the fact that it is desparately uncool. And it was. And Shawn Michaels went on to become even more uncool.



Yes, he dressed like that. Yes, even though he looked that astonishingly uncool, I was so much less cool as a twelve year old that I thought that was cool.

Now, here's the thing. From 1993 onwards, Shawn Michaels had a legitimate claim to the title 'best wrestler on the planet'. I don't mean 'champion', as it's a predetermined, fake sport. I mean he went out there, week in and week out, and had the best match on the card each year. He later became a good guy, and somehow more easily mocked by anyone who watched.

I didn't go through an easy time at school. It was an all-boys school, and I was the English kid with long hair. I wasn't going to fit in as it was, but my tendancy towards hobbies like drama, music, comic books and (yes) pro-wrestling probably didn't help too much. I probably could have made more of an effort, but my attitude was usually to push against that kind of conformity. I could handle being unpopular. I couldn't handle changing who I was, or denying who I was in order to be popular.

Yes, I'm making that link. A bit like Shawn Michaels. You've probably worked out where this is all going.

But then, to quote Roddy Piper, just when you think you have all the answers, I change the questions. By the time 1997 had come around, Michaels' character had changed again - he was now the cocky, arrogant reprobate, pushing the envelope as far as it would go as far as good taste went. He and his partner-in-crime, Hunter Hearst Helmsley (Triple H), even pushed the boundaries of comfort amongst wrestling fans as far as homophobia went, by making veiled references to the idea that they were bisexual. Michaels also spent a lot of time pointing to his crotch and generally behaving like a complete cock.

God, I was captivated. Shawn Michaels as a complete asshole was one of the single most entertaining things I'd ever seen. Also, it was confusing. The suggestion that one of my heroes was somewhat other than utterly heterosexual was an interesting one for me. After all, the hair, interest in drama, music and wrestling meant that the suggestion that I was gay was a pretty common one to hear, especially in as homophobic a place as a boys school. It led me to do some pretty deep questioning as to my own sexuality. It was difficult for me - not because I was scared of being gay, but because it turned out that I wasn't. I felt at the time that it would have been somewhat easier for me if I had; I was still the recipient of a lot of homophobic bullying, after all. I eventually figured out that I actually didn't care what my fellow students thought about me. I was going to take my own path.

So, I moved to England for university to study drama. This is probably the time that I should have lost track of wrestling, as I didn't have access to SKY television to watch it on. Also, for the first time in my life, I had a busy social life and even fell in love. But, really, you should know better than that by now. Shawn Michaels was being the most entertaining bell-end on the planet and the best wrestler on earth to boot, and by 1997 that 'best wrestler' tag was no longer questioned. He was having great matches every week. Of course I was going to keep track of what was going on. How could I not?

Plus, it was a bit easier, due to the fact that I had access to the university internet facilities. Every Tuesday, I used to log on to read the results of the previous night's show. A few of my friends were very into it as well, and we all used to log on at the same time and then talk about what was happening.

Of course, this led into finding out a little more about the man behind the character. Who was the person behind the immature prick that I watched on television? Well, it turned out that the real-life Shawn (actually Michael Hickenbottom, but in the business, he's generally just known by his stage name, in the same way that nobody dares call 'The Undertaker' Mark Calloway to his face backstage) was...an immature prick. Instrumental in the doublecross of Bret 'The Hitman' Hart his real-life enemy, it's common knowledge amongst fans that Shawn Michaels was something of a cancer in the backstage area. For more of this, I refer you to this documentary It's called 'Wrestling with Shadows' and covers this period in wrestling rather brilliantly.

How bad was Michaels backstage? Put it this way. In 1998, he broke his back during a match with The Undertaker, when he landed badly on the edge of a coffin. The prognosis was that he would never wrestle again. Backstage, nobody was sad to see him go. He was a coked up ego-monster.

Obviously. I was devastated to see him go. But, at the same time, he had obviously peaked. Finding out that he wasn't the nicest guy in the world meant that I may have found him more difficult to enjoy as time goes on. Perhaps it was all for the best.

Four years later, he returned. By all accounts, he had 'laid his demons to rest', having cleaned himself up, healed from his injuries and found God. The Shawn Michaels that came back was very different to the one that had gone, but he still had amazing matches. But he was calmer, more sedate. More at peace with himself. He even made fun of himself a lot for not being cool, getting older and losing his hair.

This worked for me. My twenties were a turbulent time, but I was slowly coming around to the idea that I was pretty comfortable with myself as a person. I no longer needed, nor sought, the conflict that I had previously thrived on. In my late teens especially, I carried myself around with a chip on my shoulder. I'd managed to put that away. Of course, I do not draw any parallells about hair loss, and anybody that says differently will receive such a slap.

This past week, at Wrestlemania XXVI, Shawn Michaels lost a match to the Undertaker in which he had put his career on the line. In the best match of the year, filled with drama, Michaels left the ring with tears coming down his face and a look of happiness and relief.

He's been trying to retire for a few years now. However, by all accounts, he feels a sense of obligation to the company he works for, and each time he gets dragged back because somebody else gets injured or they need the extra help with ratings. But now he has a wife and kids, and wants to spend some time with them. And one of the things he did in his retirement speech? He thanked Bret Hart, who he's recently made peace with.

Chances are that he'll be back down the line, but I'm fairly confident that he's finished doing this on a full-time basis. However it goes, it's rare that you get to watch somebody blur the lines between reality and fiction in the way that wrestling does. I've watched this man for eighteen years, and while he's the same guy I watched, somewhere along the lines, I stopped watching the character and I started watching the real person. That retirement speech wasn't a character speech - that was very sincere, and it was somebody who's finally found some peace for themselves. He worked hard at it, and he overcame a lot to do it.

So, yeah. I'm thirty years old, and Shawn Michaels is still my hero.