Here we go, Jim Cornette thought. The manager was standing on the apron of the ring in the Richmond Coliseum, an earl '70s construct with the interior décor of a UPS warehouse. Cornette draped his left arm around Owen Hart's neck, trusty tennis racket in hand in case he needed to swat a few overexuberant fans. Across the ring, Shawn Michaels was lying face down, left arm shielding his face. A minute before, Hart had nailed Michaels with a kick to the side of the head. The Heartbreak Kid responded spectacularly by sending his foe to the arena floor with a clothesline, then flipping himself over the ropes to get back in the ring. He preened for a few seconds, put his right hand to his right temple, and collapsed as though he'd been flattened by some GIs. Which he had been five weeks earlier.

Michaels got the snot kicked out of him outside Club 37 in Syracuse, New York in the early morning hours of October 14, 1995. While WWE claimed ten vicious thugs attacked Michaels without provocation, most accounts say he was in a less-than-coherent state and had been hitting on the wrong woman. Michaels staggered outside to a car and passed out in the front seat when the tough guys -- five is a commonly accepted number -- dragged him to the ground, stomped on his face, and shoved his head into the bumper. The assailants nearly ripped off his right eyelid; Michaels said he didn't recall the assault and declined to press charges. Unable to wrestle in the aftermath of the beatdown, Michaels forfeited his Intercontinental championship to Dean (Shane) Douglas a week later. But the fallout from the Syracuse incident was just starting. Maybe Michaels could fool the fans and create a little water cooler buzz in the pre-Internet days by fainting dead away in the middle of a match. "It was my idea and the reason for it was we had played up so much about Shawn's concussion and there was a lot about this post-concussive syndrome," WWE producer-turned-podcaster Bruce Prichard said in 2018.

In wrestling jargon, it is called a "worked shoot," an angle that has some basis in real life but is engineered to trick an audience. It is a script that seeks to come off as unscripted by preying on fans' knowledge of events like the one-sided skirmish in Syracuse. To be sure, Michaels' collapse was hardly the first fictional wrestling blackout. Just a few months after brothers Mike Von Erich committed suicide and Kevin Von Erich legitimately passed out in the ring, their father-promoter Fritz collapsed on Christmas night 1987 in Dallas and was "critically hospitalized," according to the promotion, which tried to pass off the flop as another Von Erich family tragedy. The Michaels faint -- call it the Richmond Swoon -- had more going for it, though. Unlike Von Erich's caper, it occurred in primetime on Monday Night Raw in front of about 2 million viewers. It was the first worked shoot angle of the three-month-old Monday Night Wars, competing directly against the marquee matchup of Hulk Hogan versus Sting on WCW Monday Nitro . And it opened the doors to a flood of worked shoots that continued for years as creative personnel spent considerable time trying to outsmart their smartest fans.

"It became, 'We've got this television show and we've got to outthink the guys who are doing the analysis,' " said Bruce Mitchell, a columnist for the Pro Wrestling Torch . "They got farther and farther off the track of what they were doing, which was to draw people to watch television.".