In Your House 6 - Winner Gets WWF Title Shot at WrestleMania XII: Owen Hart vs. Shawn Michaels
Date: February 18, 1996
Link: N/A
Background: This one built since the Shawn Michaels collapse on Raw in November of '95 during a match with Owen Hart, which Owen took credit for. Michaels returned at the Rumble and won, but Owen and Jim Cornette were able to taunt Michaels into putting his WrestleMania title shot on the line at In Your House in order to get at him.
The Match: Before the match really gets going, Cornette seems to get Michaels's attention from the outside. Michaels then baseball slides to the outside, seemingly to go after Cornette, but then instead…he prances around daintily high-fiving the fans at ringside. What on earth. There can be no question as to why I just ****ing hated what the character of Shawn Michaels had become at this point. HBK circa 1996 was legitimately a significantly worse character than modern-day John Cena.
There is a pretty good chance that Owen and Shawn were the best two workers in the company at this point, with only Bret Hart really adding another voice to the conversation. And it shows that Owen and Michaels were at the top of their craft; as noted in November, they had really solid chemistry in the ring and were able to perform all of their offense and sell each other's offense effectively. I really enjoyed an early spot where both went down early in this match and both performed a kip-up simultaneously to get back into a wrestling position.
Gotta say: there's one spot that I see wrestlers do sometimes that I wish they would drop, because it never looks good from anyone. Shawn is standing on the apron, Owen attempts to suplex him back inside, but HBK blocks and instead suplexes Owen from the apron to the floor. This spot never looks good because you can't just slingshot a guy backwards carelessly, so it always looks super over-the-top obvious that the guy doing the move gently guides the other guy feet-first to the floor. So it doesn't look painful or impressive, it just looks phony. They redeem this spot nicely though, when Shawn goes for a running bodypress off the apron onto Owen on the floor and Owen reverses into a scoop powerslam.
Owen applies the sharpshooter, but Shawn gets to a rope break. Again, submission moves really suck as heel finishers go. After the rope break, Owen hits Shawn with the dreaded enziguiri that kayfabe caused his collapse in November, and it knocks Shawn to the outside where he's seemingly unconscious. It appears that Shawn is out cold and thus will be counted out, so naturally Owen goes full ****** and breaks up the count to go throw him back into the ring so he can pin him, which obviously gets kicked out of.
Final sequence comes when Michaels sets up for the superkick, Owen ducks it and attempts another enziguiri, Michaels ducks that and successfully superkicks his way to the win and locks up his title shot at WrestleMania XII.
Result: Shawn Michaels via pinfall (15:57)
Rating: This was great stuff. In terms of how their respective pushes were going, it was never very believable that Owen really had much of a shot here, but the action is still excellent. Even taking away a quarter-star for having Owen go full ****** and basically give up the win voluntarily in order to try for the pin, I'm giving this match
4.25 stars out of 5. Recommended viewing for sure.