As noted, Shawn Michaels was the recent guest on Jim Ross’ “The Ross Report” podcast, and when JR asked HBK how close he came to joining WCW during the Monday Night Wars, HBK had the following to say:

“I thought about it, but there’s two things. I went to Vince and said ‘Let me go. I’m miserable here, I wanna go down and be with my buddies.’ He just said no. I’m under contract under WWE, so I couldn’t. But there was a time I wanna go.

He said ‘You’re a creative guy. Once you get past being angry and it comes to working, you want to do things your way. They won’t let you do that down there, and that’s going to kill you. They’ll [kill] the one thing about this business you enjoy.’ I think he had some validity there.