Kevin Nash says the Kliq angle that fans never got to see in WWE fell apart because of him. Speaking on the latest episode of Kliq This, Nash said the 2002 run with Shawn Michaels back in the fold was the opening he had been waiting for, until his leg gave out.
“That f***ed me up because we got Shawn. Like, we could have maybe done something and gotten Paul to get involved with us to where that would have been, like, the Kliq angle, like finally do the Kliq angle,” Nash said. “But I f***ed that up when I blew my leg out, because Shawn was back. Shawn was back in the mix. So, oh well.”
The nWo arrived in WWE at No Way Out in February 2002 with Nash, Scott Hall and Hulk Hogan. Hogan was cheered out of the group within weeks, and Hall was released in May. By the time Michaels returned on the June 3 episode of Raw, when Nash introduced him as the newest member of the nWo, the group was down to Nash, Sean Waltman as X-Pac, Big Show and Booker T. A week later, Michaels superkicked Booker T out of the group. Triple H was on the Raw roster at the time.
That put three members of the Kliq in the same faction on the same show, with a fourth down the hall. Hall, the fifth, was already gone.
About a month after Michaels’ return, Nash tore his quad during a multi-man tag match on Raw. It was his first match back after tearing his biceps earlier in the year, and he said he had returned three weeks ahead of schedule. Nash recalled telling Vince McMahon exactly what the problem was.
“This is (the) first thing I’ve done coming back, and I’m coming back three weeks early,” Nash said. “And I remember looking at Vince and saying, doing this kind of s*** when people aren’t cleared and ain’t been in the ring is exactly how people get hurt.”
The injury ended the nWo in WWE and kept Nash, who has said he was 42 at the time, out for around nine months. Triple H had torn his own quad a year earlier, in May 2001, and Nash has said in past interviews that watching Levesque go through the same recovery helped him with his.
Michaels ended up in the SummerSlam spot opposite Triple H instead. After Triple H turned on him, the two met in an Unsanctioned Street Fight on August 25, 2002, at Nassau Coliseum, Michaels’ first match in more than four years after back injuries forced him into retirement in 1998. The match started a second career for him that ran until 2010.
Nash returned in 2003 and moved straight into a program with Triple H over the World Heavyweight Championship, teaming with Michaels and Booker T against Evolution along the way. He got a title match at Judgment Day that ended in a disqualification, and the feud finished in Hell in a Cell at Bad Blood, which Triple H won.
Nash, Michaels, Triple H, Waltman and Hall never worked an angle together as a unit in WWE. The group’s most famous on-screen moment remains the Madison Square Garden curtain call in May 1996, after which Nash and Hall left for WCW. All five are now in the WWE Hall of Fame. Michaels, Hall and Nash were inducted individually, and all five went in as part of the D-Generation X and nWo group inductions in 2019 and 2020.
