I reach out and rest my hands on the barricade in front of me. Dan and I are in Brooklyn for SummerSlam 2018, and we’re in the very front row, on the end, right at the stairs to the ring. The crowd roars and rustles around me, and I cheer with delight as Seth Rollins wins the Intercontinental championship, groan with disappointment as the Bludgeon Brothers retain their titles. There’s a lot on the card I’m excited about, but if I’m being honest, I’m mostly here for one match.
I’m here for a bit of redemption.
When we bought the tickets, back in March, I had an irrational hope that I might get to see Sami Zayn win his first main roster championship, maybe even a tag team title with Kevin. But then he was gone, injured, and Kevin was immediately trying to make friends with Braun Strowman, arguing that neither of them had any friends on the roster now.
I bristled. “I don’t like that,” I said sulkily to Dan. “I don’t want Kevin to replace Sami. I want him to realize that Sami always had his back, that things are going to be tougher with Sami gone.” I was relieved when Braun not only rejected Kevin’s friendship, but intensified the feud between them. There. You’ll see Sami isn’t replaceable.
At first I could enjoy Kevin’s feud with Braun, even though Kevin rarely got any offense in against the Monster Among Men. He took amazing shoulder tackles from Braun that I made gifs of with pride (he’s so good at this, look at how good he is).
For a long time the lopsided nature of the feud didn’t bother me–I’ve long ago accepted that my favorites are not generally people who win cleanly and easily, they don’t tend to be dominant bruisers. That’s part of what I love about them, that they struggle and lose and scratch and claw and keep their heads up anyway. So even though I was missing Sami fiercely, I enjoyed watching Kevin struggle against Braun.
For a while.
It started to get… difficult. So many inside-out spots. So little offense. It started to feel almost… unfair. Kevin spent a lot of time running away from Braun and getting caught out and tormented for his troubles. It wasn’t much fun to make those gifs, but the segments were legitimately funny, well-timed and well-delivered, so I did it. It was good comedy, and comedy is really tough to pull off well. Braun overturned Kevin’s car in the parking lot, and I giffed Kevin’s hilarious slow realization that this awful thing had happened. I didn’t enjoy making it much, having to see the chagrin dawn on his face over and over. But that was silly of me, I knew that. It was just fiction, after all. It wasn’t anyone’s fault but mine that I was starting to feel kind of discouraged.
I played that discouragement up for comedic effect in online conversations, focusing on how good Kevin was at making us feel badly for him. I tried not to actually feel too badly for him. Here’s a secret about me as a wrestling fan: I strenuously resist feeling too bad for people who are making tons of money doing what they love at the top of their profession, where they’ve aimed to be for most of their life. They don’t need me to sit around moping that they’re not getting the best storylines or the most titles. Okay, Kevin’s actual friend was legit injured and he seemed stuck in a pointless feud where all he did was suffer ignominiously, but– focus on the acting, on the plot, on the story. It’s a story, it’s a story. You shouldn’t feel so bad.
When Kevin parked his car at the beginning of an episode of Raw and the camera casually scanned by a portable toilet, I groaned out loud. The entire episode of Raw unfolded horrifically in my imagination, absolutely clear and humiliating. And sure enough, the episode ended with Kevin towed haplessly through the halls, duct-taped into a toilet.
“Somebody please help me!” he called out forlornly from inside. The commentary team laughed. “Somebody better tell Kevin Owens there ain’t nobody coming to help him,” chuckled Coach, and I knew Kevin was thinking Sami would have helped me, but he’s not here, and I withered with mortification and anger and a terrible sad frustration. I know Kevin Owens–much as I love him–is a coward and a bad person, but surely this is too much. Later, Dan reassured me by explaining various ways that Kevin might not have actually been inside for the final toss off the stage, but it didn’t cheer me up: I was miserable about how pointless all this suffering seemed, how it just kept dragging on, even though Kevin was doing little but trying to avoid Strowman now. I couldn’t bring myself to make gifs of that segment: it was too depressing. I didn’t want to talk about it with people, I didn’t want to be the moron that kept trying to focus on the positive, I didn’t want to hear the words jobber and buried tacked on to Kevin’s work. Was there a point to any of this? Was there a story? How could Kevin not have a story? Why was he failing, and failing, and failing? I stopped even looking at Twitter except to respond to a few comments; everyone who loved Kevin was so upset and it was too discouraging.
When Braun hurled Kevin off the cage in their cage match, I was piteously relieved–first, that he didn’t seem to be badly injured, and second, that he had technically won. He’d beaten Braun, even if it felt like the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory, achieved at more cost to himself than to Braun. Still, the number of people who’d beaten Braun even in such a sideways manner was vanishingly slim, so I took a scrap of satisfaction from that. And then when Kevin challenged Braun for his Money in the Bank briefcase, I felt a flicker of hope. It seemed a slim chance, but Kevin’s clever, he’s cunning. If he could trick Strowman into getting disqualified, he could win that briefcase. At the very least he’d have an interesting SummerSlam match as he tried to maneuver Braun into a disqualification, right? All the lead-up to the PPV was about different ways he might be able to weasel himself a win. I could easily think of five or six more. One of them could work, right? And I’d be there for it, for his moment of redemption after months of lonely humiliation, for the payoff to so much worry and fretting and discouragement. I’d be there cheering him on. It was a slim hope, but something to hold on to.
So here I am, in the Barclay Center, the front row, with my hopeful heart and my fears and worries.
It’s over almost before it begins. Strowman catches Kevin off-guard right as the bell rings, and Kevin rolls out of the ring to try and collect himself.
(See that guy in the audience over on the far left of the gif behind Braun, suddenly spilling his drink? Remember that, it’s going to show up again later).
Kevin takes two inside-out bumps on the far side of the ring from where I am, then he gets in one superkick, which Strowman shrugs off.
From my seat, I can’t see the chokeslam onto the ramp, but I hear the ripple of reaction from the audience: ooooh, owwww. Strowman tosses him into the ring, picks him up, and slams him onto the mat.
I hear someone say, “But… that’s Braun’s finisher,” in a confused voice, lost as a child. As the bell rings, Dan puts a hand on my shoulder, and I realize it was me.
The match is over and it’s been less than two minutes. For a moment, I feel only bewilderment: he didn’t even get a chance to try one single trick. Nothing from the weeks before has paid off at all. It’s as if an actor in a play placed a gun on the table in act one, then another gun on the table in act two, then another gun on the table in act three, and then the curtain came down and the play was done. I don’t understand.
Kevin is rolling out of the ring. As referees come to check on him, there’s suddenly people at my elbow. It’s a custodial crew, there to deal with the drink spilled at the beginning of the match. They’ve been waiting patiently for nearly two whole minutes, and they need me to move so they can clean it up now that nothing important is happening.
I’m herded away from the barricade, from Kevin pulling himself together, and I stumble up a few of the steps, staring up at the crowd filling the Barclay Center as they wait for the next match to start. I can’t even be there at the barricade to reach out and encourage Kevin, I realize, and that realization brings with it a devastating sense of relief. Because what could I possibly say to him? Chin up buddy, tomorrow’s another day, you’ll get him next time? There is no “next time,” he’s not getting another shot at that briefcase, this was all pointless and I have no hope to give him, because I have none left myself. The fiction–Kevin Owens is a bad person who was an arrogant coward and probably deserved to be beaten in two minutes–and the reality–Kevin Steen just had a two-minute match at SummerSlam where he looked like a fool and all the “story” got him exactly nowhere–are suddenly crushed together, I can’t keep them separate any more, and I feel like my heart has been crushed between them. I stare blindly at the crowd and realize it was stupid to hope for anything better to happen, and the months of despair I’ve been desperately holding at arm’s length all come crashing in on me at once.
Eventually I’m allowed back to my seat, and I sit down and bow my head so the cameras can’t catch me and start to sob helplessly, feeling ridiculous even as I do it. I weep so hard that another fan sitting near us asks if I’m okay; embarrassed, I wrap my arms around myself and try to stop. Instead I start shaking, so violently that the security guard at the end of the row gently informs Dan that there are emergency medical staff nearby if I need them. I cannot seem to get my shit together. What finally pulls me out of it is hearing “The Ride of the Valkyries” hit and knowing that Daniel Bryan is entering the ring. He was at a meet and greet this morning, and I managed to stammer that every time I see him wrestle is a gift. I meant it with all my soul, and not even existential heartbreak is going to keep me from being there to see him wrestle.
As he comes to the ring for his first SummerSlam match since his return, beaming, I put out a shaky hand and touch his as he goes by.
It feels like touching joy.
After that it’s easier. I get to see Finn Balor enter as the Demon for the first time in two years; to enjoy the way the fog of his entrance slithers down the ramp before him, curling caressingly around the ring. I get to witness not only Brock Lesnar finally losing and the Universal title being brought back to Raw where it belongs, but also Braun Strowman getting F5ed, which I cordially, bitterly enjoy. As the show ends I check my phone and discover that I have a variety of mentions and DMs on Twitter, all of which ask the same thing, implicitly or explicitly: Are you okay? The hazards of everyone knowing who my favorites are. I’m able to answer them more or less cheerfully, to focus on the things I enjoyed about the show. I’m mostly okay. Mostly.
There are, however, occasional relapses.
“I give up, I give up, I give up!” I howl after Raw the next night. Dan says something, but I can’t hear him because I’m currently buried under all of the hotel comforter I can manage to pile on top of me. Kevin wasn’t even on the show this week: is he injured? Did they simply have nothing at all for him to do? I can’t stand the idea of having to keep making gifs of Kevin’s storyless, aimless losses; I look ahead at the months and months and months without Sami and my soul feels shattered. I can’t bear it anymore. “I give up!” I sob. “I’m not doing it anymore, I quit, I give up!”
Dan says something again, and this time I hear him.
“But this is exactly what you wanted,” he says.
I lunge out of my lair of blankets, disheveled and mascara-smeared, like a distraught and possibly rabid raccoon. “What did you say? How dare you?”
“But it is,” he says. “Remember? When Sami went out, you said you hoped that Kevin would struggle without him. You said you wanted him to miss Sami and have a hard time getting by without him. Kevin once said he was nothing without El Generico, and you wanted some proof that he felt like nothing without Sami, too. This is,” he repeats patiently, “exactly what you said you wanted.”
I stare at him, horrified. I did say that, I remember that now. “But I wanted— I wanted him to miss Sami but still…”
“You wanted him to be miserable without Sami, and yet reign triumphant over Raw as the first two-time Universal champion?” Dan says. “So–wait, you wanted him to be more successful while Sami was gone. You wanted the story to be that he does better without Sami around, that it was Sami that was holding him back.”
“No!” That would be awful, to have Kevin get even more fodder for his I’m the one who wins the titles issues. “No, but… but…” I glare at Dan. “Are you seriously saying that this is the story? That Kevin’s story right now is that he’s failing and despairing and lost?”
Dan shrugs. “Maybe not. It’s kind of impossible to tell. But it fits what’s happened so far, doesn’t it?”
I think about this for a minute or two. And then I burrow back under the blankets, wailing: “I’m sorry if this is the story, Kevin! I’m sorry I wanted this, it’s horrible, I’m so sorry, I give up, I give up, I give up…”
I don’t give up forever, of course. Next week I’m there, back home in front of my tv, watching as Kevin challenges Seth Rollins to the Intercontinental title. When he says that he would have won against Strowman if only Sami had been there, I make a small, pained noise.
He wrestles as if he’s desperate, as if he feels in his bones that this is his last chance at a title. It’s a beautiful match, the kind he hasn’t had a chance to have for months now, full of drama and anguish and wild skill as both he and Seth struggle over the title that symbolizes–for Kevin has literally framed it this way–the triumph of friendship, because Dean came back from long months of injury to help Seth win it. There’s no way Seth is letting that go. Near the end, when Seth kicks out of a pin, Kevin looks up with an expression of utter despair:
Stricken, I mutter, “Oh, damn it.” I feel like this is his last flickering attempt at seizing some victory from despair. I can tell that he’s doomed. When his beautiful moonsault misses and he takes a curb stomp and loses, I feel an echo of my despair in Brooklyn grip my heart. I watch as he sits in the ring after his loss and listens to the crowd chant his name, and it’s as if a light has gone out behind his eyes. It’s as if he’s given up: given up any hope of a title, any hope of being a major player in the factional drama that’s about to erupt all around him.
Oh, he’ll be back next week, for whatever reason. Maybe it’ll be explained, maybe it won’t. It’s a theme in his career: how he quits over and over, yet always somehow manages to drag himself back. So he drags himself back to Raw, where he’ll smack-talk and cause trouble and suffer at the hands of the Shield or Finn or whoever for his pains. Maybe he’ll even find a way to snap out of his funk and snatch glory somewhere before the year ends. It’s possible.
But there’s no pretending he isn’t in despair.
When Raw ends, I sit for a while, distressed and fascinated at the same time. Then I say to Dan: “It’s time to finally watch that match between Kevin and Colt.”
Last year, after I wrote an essay about Kevin’s betrayal of El Generico in 2009, Kevin showed up unexpectedly in the comments on Twitter to mention that there was a match from 2009, at the Ring of Honor show Survival of the Fittest, that he considered a “crucial piece” leading up to his turn.
Well, I had to watch the match after that, right? But I didn’t have the DVD, and it proved brutally difficult to track down. It took months, and negotiating with German sellers on Ebay, and then receiving Survival of the Fittest 2011 (not 2009), and waiting until a copy of the right year showed up, all for a match that I knew from looking at reviews was less than seven minutes long. By the time I got it I was much further along in the history and desperately trying to get caught up on footage from 2012, so I put the DVD away and kept intending to watch it later, but never quite got to it. It never seemed exactly the right time.
Kevin discouraged and despairing and thinking about quitting seems like a good time to watch it at last.
There’s really not much to it: at first glance it seems mostly like a comedy match between Kevin and his friend Colt Cabana in the first round of the tournament. Kevin and El Generico have been struggling to win back their lost tag titles and failing, in part due to Kevin’s continued knee problems. But Generico’s not there for this tournament: he’s off in Japan doing another tour with Dragon Gate. As they step forward to shake hands, Colt says in a voice half-concerned and half-taunting, “Kevin, you look lonely!”
Kevin looks taken aback. “What?” he says.
Colt repeats, “You look so lonely!”
“I’m not lonely,” Kevin says with a bright smile.
Colt asks where Generico is (“I like Generico!”), and Kevin says “Generico? Generico’s not here.” He’s still cheerful, but his mood is darkening. He asks where Colt’s tag partner is, and when Colt says he doesn’t have one, Kevin says through a gritted-teeth smile, “That’s because no one likes you.”
The crowd gasps, Colt looks upset, and a chant of “Say you’re sorry” breaks out. They eventually hug it out, which Colt uses as an opportunity to grab Kevin’s ass and then playfully spank him a few times. The audience laughs, and Kevin tries to laugh it off as well, but he’s clearly seething.
The match proper is short: only about six minutes. It’s largely comedy through most of it, and then something goes wrong: Kevin tweaks his knee on a random dropkick (the camera doesn’t even really catch it!)
Colt and Kevin hobble through the rest of the match. It’s an awkward, fumbling ending, bafflingly clumsy to the casual viewer. However, the careful watcher (if you’re quite smart and know the tricks to look for) will realize they’re ad-libbing on the fly, trying to deal with Kevin’s hurt knee. A person who understands how wrestling really works would catch this moment where Kevin and Colt are clearly both talking to each other and communicating through the ref, which is how wrestlers deal with legit injuries:
Soon after Colt gets a fairly clumsy rollup pin and the match is over. The ref raises Colt’s hand as Kevin rolls to the side of the ring, clutching his knee; Colt looks like he’s trying to be triumphant, but he keeps sneaking worried glances at Kevin, even asking the ref to go check on him again.
A contemporary review of the match calls it “a whole lot of nothing” in confusion. It’s pointless, it’s frustrating, it’s meaningless. And it’s a match Kevin considers “crucial” to his story, a match setting up his near-retirement and turn on his tag team partner months later. Because he’s not badly injured; they’re not ad-libbing the ending; they’re not checking with the ref to see what to do next. They’re just fucking with you, and the more smartened up you are, the more you’re likely to fall for it.
I imagine some forlorn Kevin Steen fan there in the audience in 2009, wondering if their favorite is really hurt. Worrying that he’s being overlooked and passed by. Trying to read the tea leaves, to see the reality beneath the fiction. While Kevin–pretty much entirely on his own, without much input from the Ring of Honor writers–was quietly doing the character work to prepare for the next chapter of his story. For months he sold that knee, embellished on his despair. In the backstage promo that aired a few days before Survival of the Fittest, a distraught Kevin explains to Generico that it’s his fault they failed to get the titles back in their last attempt, because he couldn’t seem to stop hurting Eddie Edwards:
It’s an early sign of that tendency toward binge-violence in Kevin that will show up again and again in his career; his inability to stop himself once he gets started hurting people. It’s causing him deep distress right now: he apologizes over and over in a desperate tangle of words to Generico, who clearly has no idea what to do and no words to comfort him:
This promo makes even more painful the moment where the audience tries to get Kevin to apologize to Colt by chanting “Say you’re sorry,” and Kevin responds by blithely and arrogantly saying he has never apologized for anything.
The psychological disconnect between Kevin in public and the Kevin “accidentally” captured backstage is immense, and growing. It’s going somewhere, but it’s almost impossible to see it except in retrospect: in November 2009 this match is just a pointless loss, and a possible injury, and a faint creeping sense of unease.
So does this mean that Kevin’s current WWE situation is all part of some deep, long-range story? It’s impossible to say for sure. It could be, or it could be Kevin doing work in the margins of the main story going on right now, biding his time. Or, of course, I could be grasping at straws, trying to make sense of random booking choices. To some extent, that’s your choice, and a choice we all struggle with. When your favorite seems to be sidelined in favor of someone else’s stories, you can shrug and call it “bad writing” and stop paying attention–and you have a good chance of being right, because Lord knows, there is plenty of poor and inconsistent writing on wrestling shows. Or you can take it as a challenge and look for what the wrestlers themselves seem to be saying about their character, because the great ones always know where their character is and what motivates them, no matter what the script says. You can count on that. The one thing you cannot count on is always having the story about your favorite spelled out for you in large canonical letters of flame on the Titantron for all to see and realize that Your Favorite is the Most Important.
It’s Schrodinger’s storytelling, where you don’t know if it’s a story or not until those closed boxes get opened–if they ever even do. And if they don’t, well, it’s up to us to shake them and take some guesses.
Because one of the really weird things about wrestling is that it’s a huge ensemble cast in which former supporting characters can become main characters for a while, and former protagonists can suddenly find themselves serving as cannon fodder or background characters for a stretch. It can hurt to find your favorites suddenly serving someone else’s story, but please always remember: that’s one of the reasons we’re here, to be one of the supporting characters ourselves, one that loves them with a steadfast love through the hard times. To be Crying Kevin Owens Fan in Front Row or Beaming Cosplaying Elias Fan With Scarf or Overwhelmed Kota Ibushi Fan Trying to Speak A Little Japanese. Because wrestlers can use that. They can always, always use that in the stories they’re continually making, every show and every day.
Your worries and doubts and hopes, the ones that feel solid and heavy as stone: they’re raw material for wrestlers. Something that could be a weapon to break barriers. Something that could be a foundation to build on. So hold on to them, even if it means being willing to exist fully in those moments of despair, to stand in the dark with your heart squashed and your hopes buried, bereft and lost.
(But please, don’t fail to touch joy whenever you get the chance).
Recent Comments