Shawn Michaels Injured One of His Eyes During a 2004 Match With Kane

While professional wrestling features "pre-determined" outcomes and the story lines contain drummed-up drama with a team of writers in order to captivate viewers' attention spans and ultimately entertain, that doesn't mean there's anything "fake" about the action that takes place in the ring. The performers are all subjecting themselves to a litany of different injuries, like what happened with Shawn Michaels' eye.

If you don't know who the Heartbreak Kid is, then I'm going to need you to just listen to his incredible theme song and intro in order to understand what this dude is all about.

He's consistently performed in the WWF/WWE over the years, and not only has he been a fan-favorite wrestler, but he's someone who's managed to successfully rebrand and endear himself to different generations of fans.

He's a seasoned performer and according to Sportskeeda "is considered to be one of the safest wrestlers to work with inside the ring." But even if you take every precaution, you're going to inevitably suffer an injury at some point, especially when you've been working for as long as Shawn Michaels has.

During an Unforgiven no-disqualification pay-per-view match-up in 2004 with Kane, Michaels took a particularly brutal bump in the match that damaged his retina. Although the injury gave him a "lazy eye," it wasn't considered significant enough to take him out of the ring for good.

Further bumps that he took only contributed to the injury which worsened over time. The WWE worked Michaels' eye injury into a story line with Chris Jericho, making it part of a feud between the two men. Jericho threw Shawn's face into the Titantron which became the "kayfabe" reason behind his injured eye according to this writer's room plot.

Fans lapped it up and it helped to paint Jericho as an even bigger heel, especially because the WWE played Michaels' eye injury as a potentially career-ending one.

The Heartbreak Kid even appeared on Monday Night RAW to deliver a speech about the possibility of his retiring from the damage his eye sustained.

As a result, the two had one of the best feuds in the history of the sport. But Shawn sustained a number of other injuries throughout his career, as well. The biggest one was in a match against the Undertaker where his lower back hit part of a casket and he herniated two discs and crushed another one completely. This put him out of action from 1998 until 2002.

Shawn's real name is Michael Shawn Hickenbotton (Shawn Michaels is definitely a better in-ring name), and his son Cameron is actually more interested in race car driving than he is in getting on a mic and telling a bunch of dudes how badly he's going to beat them silly.

Born on January 15, 2000, Cameron is an up-and-coming race car driver, and his dad's quick to sing his praises online.

Shawn also recently had a very candid and humble response about whether or not he considers himself one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time: "I don’t. But it’s funny when you’re younger, certainly you do. But I don’t know, I now only have the ability to see everything in the rearview mirror. Technically, at 56, I am back to where I was at 19 when I was just realizing that my idea of success was having a car and a one-bedroom apartment and maybe one of the main guys in the local territory in South Texas," 411 Mania reported him saying.

He continued, "I’m just glad to be at this point in my life and look back on a really cool body of work that I’m proud of."