Heartbreak & Triumph: The Shawn Michaels Story by Shawn Michaels & Aaron Feigenbaum

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Title - Heartbreak & Triumph: The Shawn Michaels Story
Author - Shawn Michaels and Aaron Feigenbaum
ISBN - 978-1-4165-2645-2

"At the time, the company was giving guys jobs as gimmicks. We had a garbage man, a dentist, and the pirate. Those aren't gimmicks. They are occupations. Also, we weren't doing any cool storylines. We had great talent like the Gunns, Bart and Billy, but we would just have them win the titles, lose them, and then win them back. There were no stories. It was as if we were still stuck in that era where the Rockers and the Rougeaus could get a six-month program out of me being hit once with the megaphone. This wasn't going to work in 1995. The perfect example is this angle Bret Hart was doing with the pirate Lafitte. The pirate stole Bret's jacket. That was the angle! Bret was like, "Oh my God! What am I supposed to do? I'm really angry now. He has my leather jacket. I want to kill him!" That stuff just wasn't cutting it."

Heartbreak & Triumph is the seventh entry in Project: Pro Wrestling and provides a sharp contrast to previous entries such as On Edge, A Lion's Tale and Have A Nice Day!. Heartbreak & Triumph is the autobiography of Shawn Michaels, reckoned to be one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, as told to a tape recorder and transcribed by Aaron Feigenbaum. Mr Michaels has appeared previous in Project: Pro Wrestling, talking into a tape recorder for Aaron Williams to produce Are You Ready?.

Heartbreak & Triumph is perhaps the most complicated book to analyse in Project: Pro Wrestling. On one level it presents another spin on the climb-the-ladder story of training, obscurity, hard work, upsets and success that On Edge and A Lion's Tale also tell. Considered apart from its fellows, Heartbreak & Triumph is a perfectly readable book, the kind of thing one might pass an afternoon with. It's a bit lightweight in most senses: there's little sense of depth to any of the anecdotes or tales, very little in the way of insight into the population of the pages, and a general sense of being constantly at one remove from events. This is most likely due to the tape recorder effect. There are several points, especially towards the end, where the text shifts from narrative to direct conversational voice, as if Mr Michaels were addressing Mr Feigenbaum directly and Mr Feigenbaum chose to leave that part in.

The quality of the writing in general is pretty poor. Mr Michaels uses quite plain language, and at times sadly comes across as almost simple-minded in his sentence structure and word choice. This is most notable in reported dialogue. Mr Michaels often retells conversations, but the language used, and the voices given to the people whose words he reports, are completely homogenous. Mr Michaels may as well be using hand puppets, and we're not talking Fingermouse here either. However, there is a very obvious reason for this over-simplicity. Having seen Mr Michaels' professional work, his narrative voice in text is - like all other pro wrestlers whose books I've read so far - very like the voice he uses in his professional work. The word choice and sentence structure are distinctly akin to Mr Michaels' speaking voice at his least excitable moments. However, Mr Michaels is - and the skeptics may raise eyebrows here - good at what he does because he gets a lot of shaded meaning from his expressions and inflections, which are totally lost in book format. Mr Michaels' ability to communicate is severely hampered by the transition from television to text, and it seems neither he nor Mr Feigenbaum were able to compensate for the change.

Mr Feigenbaum has rather a lot to answer for here. He has not done much, if anything, to compensate for his subject's communication style having a strong emphasis on body language and nuanced speech. He has not fully converted the conversations between himself and Mr Michaels into complete narrative text. He most certainly has not converted the conversational sentence structure into something that doesn't resemble a comma breeding farm. In terms of prose quality, Heartbreak & Triumph is sadly lacking. As straight-up reading material, Heartbreak & Triumph is very forgettable.

However, the purpose of reading Heartbreak & Triumph wasn't just to analyse it as a standalone autobiography, but to compare it to its fellows. It's definitely inferior to A Lion's Tale and Have A Nice Day!. The use of language is, at best, on a par with On Edge, but On Edge has a vivacious voice whereas Heartbreak & Triumph is a more chewy, cheap-white-bread sort of book. Under The Mat has stronger, harder content. Heartbreak & Triumph's closest comparison is The Death of WCW, in that there is no style or panache to the writing, little sense of individual spark. It is, as said, very cheap-white-bread.

Also like The Death of WCW, there is a distinct sense of data manipulation. Mr Michaels does not go into depth concerning just about anything. He spends the middle half of the book mentioning how many people he worked with hated him, but goes into very little detail as to why. He repeatedly avers that he was the victim of backstage rumours and lies, and gives a few examples of what these rumours were, but does not connect for the reader why people would say maleficent things, let alone these specific maleficent things, about him. Mr Michaels does not come across as a particularly insightful person, either concerning the world around him or his own behaviour, which may explain his lack of explanation for many things - one gets the impression he simply doesn't think about a lot of things. However, the sense of data manipulation cannot be shaken.

There are a few points in Heartbreak & Triumph where even a short-term watcher of pro wrestling such as myself can pick out clear errors in fact. In recollecting one match, Mr Michaels claims that he rolled over to pin his opponent, when in fact he did no such thing; he was rolled over by his close friend in tape recorders, Mr Helmsley. In another event, one of the more infamous in Mr Michaels' career, he claims that he saw Scott Hall and Mr Helmsley coming towards the ring, helped the already-present Kevin Nash to his feet, and then the four of them hugged. Events happened in a different order; Mr Hall and Mr Helmsley had already come to the ring and hugged Mr Michaels before he helped Mr Nash to his feet. These simple errors are from some of Mr Michaels' best-known moments, and are recorded on film. It seems neither Mr Michaels nor Mr Feigenbaum took it upon themselves to review these events before writing them down. This is either poor research or, at best, judicious self-editing.

There is some suggestion that Heartbreak & Triumph is a whitewash job. There are too many strange holes. Mr Michaels at one point recalls how he met Mr Helmsley, describes him as one of the best friends he's ever had, and then mentions him all of five times in the rest of the book. One has to wonder why Mr Helmsley was, in effect, written out of Mr Michaels' life like this. Surely they did things together that were worth repeating for the readers? In A Lion's Tale, Mr Jericho mentions that one Chris Benoit was a good, close friend of his, and then only mentions him about three times in the entire book, from which events you would be hard pressed to conclude that Mr Benoit liked Mr Jericho at all. However, this is because A Lion's Tale was published very shortly after Mr Benoit made his highly controversial exit from the mortal coil, and A Lion's Tale had to be hastily edited before being published on this account. Mr Helmsley is, at time of writing, still with us, so why Mr Michaels feels it appropriate to never mention him beyond the most occasional references is highly curious. It is almost as if a veil has been discretely drawn over their friendship for reasons unknown. On the one hand, Mr Helmsley may simply be a very private person.

On the other hand the sense of selective editing, of actual events being hidden behind careful silences, becomes highly suggestive at times. The eternally aforementioned Mr Nash gets an entire chapter of fond gushing from Mr Michaels and reappears at intervals as what can best be described as Mr Michaels' mobile comfort station. Mr Michaels portrays himself as the product of an emotionally distant father and an overprotective mother, who grew up adoring his elder sister and has a tendency to break down in tears at remarkably frequent intervals. He describes having a friendship with another young man at high school whom Mr Michaels felt close to because he was "comfortable in his own skin" but whom he grew apart from because his friend became "normal". Mr Michaels mentions his fear that people would dislike him for who he "really was" without ever specifying who that is or why people would hate him for it. He mentions how pro wrestlers live double lives, and how he was only ever comfortable in the wrestling ring, where the fans love him for who he "really was". When the reader pauses to consider that Mr Michaels was presenting himself in the ring as a discoball leatherboy with a tendency to twine himself around the bigger, older, tougher, meaner, highly protective Mr Nash, whom Mr Michaels at one point casually mentions kissing in public ... it is unkind and unjustified to draw conclusions based on such fragmentary data, but it's very hard not to do it anyway when Mr Michaels is reporting how he and Mr Nash had tender, intimate professions of mutual fondness in the shower.

The sense of whitewash continues in the portrayal of all those around Mr Michaels. Everyone either likes him and tells him how wonderful he is, or hates him for vague, rarely specified reasons. People who are on "his" side are faultless and caring - Vince McMahon is portrayed as sympathetic, super-rational, constantly giving and always righteously lenient - to the point that Mr Michaels seems to be trying to get Mr Nash nominated for a minor sainthood. It gives me a terrible temptation to put Heartbreak & Triumph on the shelf next to The Death of WCW to see if they'll fight.

Heartbreak & Triumph is, for the first three-quarters, a feel-good whitewash job, the life and career of a man who, if one reads between the lines, seems to have been prone to emotional explosions and ill-considered behaviour when placed under stress. The last quarter is where the whole things becomes unpleasant reading. Mr Michaels describes how he, having recently married and having a baby son, became a born-again Christian and everything became sweetness and light. His descriptions of his home life after he found God are so fluffy and happy as to strain credibility in a whole new way. I don't know about anyone else, but this left me wanting to crack Mr Michaels across the face with a cricket bat and set fire to his car.

This led me to some pondering. Mr Michaels' spirituality not what causes offence; not only am I close friends with a strongly spiritual pagan, A Lion's Tale also contained recollections on Mr Jericho's Christianity, which caused no such offence. It is not my strong antipathy towards organized religion; Mr Michaels concentrates on telling his spiritual changes rather than his adherence to a church, and likewise Mr Jericho's mentions of churchgoing caused no similar offence. It may possibly be attitude. Mr Jericho's presentation of himself was very "I did something very stupid, have a laugh at it with me" whereas Mr Michaels steers closer to "Woe, I am a worthless wretch". Considering this, I kept finding myself put in mind of a comment made by Alice Cooper to the effect that he was never cured of alcoholism, he just traded alcohol for golf. What makes the last section of Heartbreak & Triumph so uncomfortable to read is the strong suspicion that Mr Michaels, who describes his addiction to painkillers as stemming from a lack of a sense of identity and an inability to be comfortable with himself, has not overcome his addictions. He has simply traded the opiate from the pharmacy for the opiate of the masses.

All in all, Heartbreak & Triumph is a stunningly mediocre autobiography that glosses over a great many events in minimal detail, with a level of literary accomplishment I would have sneezed at when I was fourteen. If you want to read a climb-the-ladder tale of dreams, hardship and ultimate success ... read A Lion's Tale instead.

This book is:
* - mediocre
* - 50% whitewash
* - 25% nausea-inducing born-again Christian fluff

This book is not:
* - a good conversion of Mr Michaels' communication style from television to text
* - detailed in any sense
* - worth reading unless you're a colossal Shawn Michaels fan with no critical faculties whatsoever