RAW April 3, 1995 – Sid Turns on Shawn Michaels

Apologies are in your order, as it has been almost three months since the last installment of Federation Fridays which was of course meant to be weekly. Why it was gone isn’t important, the key thing is that the feature is back. And for this return installment, I can’t think of anything better to look back on than one of my favorite moments in Monday Night RAW history.

There are certain nights of wrestling that live in your bones a little differently than the rest, and this is one of mine. April 3, 1995. The night after WrestleMania XI. I was a kid glued to the TV set, who didn’t see WrestleMania XI and didn’t have Internet, and Shawn Michaels was my guy. Not Diesel, not Bret, not the Undertaker. Shawn. I tuned in hoping to see Shawn Michaels, the Royal Rumble winner, was the new WWF Champion. He was not. When this episode of Raw ended the way it did, it wasn’t just a swerve I appreciated as a smart bit of storytelling years later (though it is that too). It hit me right in the chest as a almost nine year old watching his favorite wrestler get destroyed on live television.

Let’s set the table. The night before at WrestleMania XI in Hartford, Diesel beat Shawn Michaels clean (well, clean enough) to retain the WWF Championship, with Sycho Sid at ringside as Michaels’ hired muscle doing everything short of interfering outright. Michaels had brought Sid in specifically to protect him from the locker room full of guys gunning for him after his Royal Rumble win, and it worked as a storyline device, but it also made Shawn look like he needed a bodyguard to survive, which isn’t exactly a strong look for the guy chasing the title.

Earlier in the RAW episode Vince McMahon interviews Diesel, who does the good sportsman thing and offers Michaels a rematch. Diesel tells him that Sid isn’t his friend, and for the rematch leave the big man at home. A fine interview segment. We have to wait until the end of the show to get Shawn’s response.

RAW’s final segment sees McMahon bring Michaels and Sid out to the ring, and this is where things get interesting fast. Michaels, doing his arrogant heel routine that the fans were already cheering anyway (that’s a big reason this turn happened when it did, the crowd wasn’t buying him as a heel anymore), accepts the rematch and then turns to Sid and basically tells him he doesn’t need him anymore. Doesn’t need a bodyguard. Doesn’t need Sid standing around at ringside. So he gives Sid the night off.

Now if you know anything about Sid Vicious, telling that man he isn’t needed is a mistake of historic proportions.

Sid wastes no time putting his finger in HBK’s chest and looks him dead in the eye and calls Michaels a stupid little puke. Doesn’t hedge it, doesn’t play it cute, just flat out disrespects the guy he’d been standing next to for weeks. And then he doubles down with the line that I think is actually more important than the puke comment, where he snarls “Let me tell you something BOY, you don’t give me the night off… you don’t give me nothing but respect!”

They cut to commercial, and when we come back, Michaels is laid out. Sid has powerbombed him and is standing over him barking at the camera like a man possessed. This is the moment (you can go watch it here if you haven’t seen it in a while, and you should) where Sid stops being Shawn Michaels’ hired muscle and becomes a monster in his own right again.

That’s the real turn right there. The puke line gets all the attention because it’s quotable and mean, but that respect line is Sid telling the entire audience who he actually is. He’s not a hired hand. He’s not anybody’s employee to be dismissed on live TV. He’s Sycho Sid, and if you treat him like a lackey he will remind you exactly how big a mistake that is. It’s a genuinely great heel promo delivered in about fifteen seconds of pure fury, and it reframed Sid instantly from “guy standing next to Shawn Michaels” into a legitimate threat that WWF could build an entire program around.

Diesel comes running out to make the save, which on its own is a beautiful piece of business, because it takes Diesel and Michaels (Two Dudes with Attitudes, if you remember that old tag team) and slams them back together as allies less than 24 hours after they’d been fighting for the championship. Michaels, the guy I’d been rooting for as a heel because I liked his work even when I wasn’t supposed to like him, was suddenly a full babyface, and I didn’t even have to adjust my rooting interest, because the story did it for me. That’s the mark of a good angle. You don’t have to convince the audience to change how they feel. You just give them a reason that makes the change feel inevitable.

What’s remarkable watching this back as an adult is how efficiently WWF built an entire summer’s worth of programming out of maybe two minutes of TV time. Sid and Diesel would feud for months off the back of this attack, and we already talked about how that culminated in the Lumberjack match at In Your House 2 back in July, with Michaels standing as one of Diesel’s lumberjacks and Diesel finally putting Sid away in front of him. This one segment on a random Monday in April is the domino that knocks over the entire chain. Michaels gets turned face and eventually chases the singles push that turns him into the guy carrying the company by 1996. Sid gets repositioned as a monster heel instead of a second fiddle bodyguard. Diesel gets a top level opponent to chew through during a title reign that desperately needed fresh challengers.

And selfishly, as a kid, I just remember being furious at Sid and thrilled that Diesel showed up. That’s the whole trick of wrestling when it’s done right. You don’t need forty minutes and fifteen run-ins to make people feel something. You need one guy in a ring telling another guy he doesn’t give respect, he demands it, and you need a crowd that believes him.

This is one of my favorite pieces of pure angle work from the era, and it’s aged better than almost anything else from 1995. Go watch it if you haven’t in a while. It still hits.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Let me know in the comments below.