It’s February 2013, 2:12 AM, and Kevin Steen is sitting in front of a red curtain and a sign with red block letters taped to it spelling out “The Kevin Steen Show.” A Kane mask, pilfered from the Highspots warehouse, perches on the sign and glares down at him. 
On one side of Kevin is a wrestler who goes by Cheeseburger, who is kind of supposed to be Kevin’s co-host, but who will spend most of the next couple of hours nodding off in exhaustion. On Kevin’s other side is Michael Elgin, who is a lot of muscles assembled into the form of a wrestler. Elgin is holding a plastic bottle that he spits black tobacco juice into now and then, to Kevin’s vocal disgust. Elgin explains that he’s switched from loose tobacco to pouches, because he used to get dental coverage from his girlfriend, but they broke up and now he has to be more careful about his teeth. Kevin looks sympathetic at this: he doesn’t know much about chewing tobacco, but he knows all about fretting over medical bills.
So begins the first episode of the Kevin Steen Show, in which Kevin sits down and talks with different wrestlers about their lives and careers. They’re still available on the Highspots network, and they offer a fascinating window into the world of indie wrestling in general and into the personalities of the wrestlers Kevin interviews—an impressive array including Matt Hardy, the Young Bucks, Johnny Gargano, Jay Lethal, and Adam Cole.
Kevin ends up talking about himself quite a bit, too, as the conversations wander across twenty-six shows and sixty-plus hours. He’s got a lot on his mind, a lot that he’s working through. El Generico, Kevin’s former tag team partner and greatest enemy, retired from wrestling just a month ago in an emotional set of matches that saw the two of them reconcile before the luchador left: for Florida or for Tijuana, depending on who you talk to. For the last decade, Generico has been close to a constant in Kevin’s career: he was part of the reason Kevin turned down a possible WWE tryout as a brash 20-year-old; he turned on his own partner to team up with Kevin; they won the Ring of Honor tag titles together; they had one of the greatest feuds in wrestling after Kevin betrayed him. Over and over, they defined each other’s personalities and careers, shaped each other’s destinies.
And now Kevin is Ring of Honor champion and El Generico is…somewhere else.
There are a variety of reasons, in early 2013, why Kevin seems unlikely to be able to follow him. For starters, his Ring of Honor contract doesn’t run out for almost a year and a half. And while there’s no doubting he’s a brilliant wrestler, even his friends are aware of some key reasons why he might be one of the most talented wrestlers to never make it to WWE:
Okay, he’s not getting rid of his family, that’s obviously a non-starter. And his attitude has gotten him pretty far; it’s as much a positive as a negative. So it makes sense that it’s his “look” that would be the thing most within his power to change. If he can just lose some weight, get in better shape, he’ll be able to make that final leap to the top.
A couple of weeks before Kevin sits down with Michael Elgin, Generico appears in one match in NXT: a house show match in the old FCW arena, before the move to Full Sail. 
His mask and sparkly cape are glimpsed that one time in WWE, just long enough to have officially reached that summit, and then they’re truly gone. But Generico haunts the Kevin Steen Show, just like he’ll more literally come to haunt Kevin’s Weekend Escapades, his life-on-the-road YouTube Series. He’s there in the stories Kevin tells–sometimes by name, sometimes lurking in the omnipresent “we” Kevin uses out of habit. He’s there in wry jokes and elliptical comments, over and over: the specter of Generico and the final goal, the pinnacle of the wrestling world, WWE. As Kevin interviews wrestlers from all different points in their careers, his questions always, always circle around the same themes. How do you feel about your life? Would you do things differently? Can you be content with where you are now? And if you never get there, can you live with that? Rising young wrestlers on track to the top: How are you going to get there? Wrestlers who got tryouts or made it to Developmental but no farther: What do you think went wrong? Former WWE superstars back on the indie circuit: Do you have regrets? Kevin’s looking for answers—and not just from his guests.
Can you get to the top, and if you try and fail, can you live with yourself?
The Kevin Steen Show can easily be seen as the story of Kevin’s attempt to answer those questions for himself.
Kevin asks about Elgin’s career, about his dreams of wrestling in Japan, about how he got into wrestling and what some of his favorite matches are. They eventually start talking about the time Elgin got a tryout with WWE, which he thought went well but never led to anything. Kevin asks him what he thinks went wrong, then listens intently as Elgin describes having to line up to do moves, to cut promos one by one. Elgin mentions that Jim Ross criticized people with tattoos, and Kevin gives the prominent tattoos on his forearms a comically distraught look: damn, one strike already.
When Elgin describes how Dusty Rhodes took him aside for a one-on-one conversation, Kevin jokes, “Did he drop a Bionic Elbow on you?” They both laugh, and as Kevin continues to chuckle, Elgin explains that no, actually Dusty asked him if he was married, if he had kids, if it would be hard for them to relocate to Florida, if his parents would mind him moving so far away.
Kevin’s laugh falters as he listens to Elgin confirm that being a devoted family man may well be a disqualifying factor to WWE. We saw Sami worrying that Kevin’s dedication to his family might end up costing him, and for Kevin, hearing Elgin’s description of his conversation with the American Dream must feel like agonizing proof that those fears are well-founded.
(When he gets to the Performance Center himself and actually meets Dusty Rhodes, a year and a half later, Kevin will talk incessantly about his family, how important they are, how much he loves them, to the point that Dusty will simply conclude “dedicated family man” will have to be part of his character. And so Kevin leans into what others might define as his weakness and makes it his strength).
At the end of his show with Elgin, once he finishes with fan questions, Kevin turns to the camera, suddenly formal. “I would like to make an announcement, actually,” he says. “I am going to announce to the world and whoever watches this–which I hope is not that many people, because I don’t want it to bite me in the ass if it doesn’t happen–I… I’m really gonna try to get in shape. Starting, like… now.” He’s enlisted Elgin and Tommaso Ciampa to try and push him to get in better shape, he says. It’s clear he’s decided–quite reasonably, based on all available knowledge–that his weight is what might keep him from getting to WWE, and he’s determined to do something about that. This is a promise–to himself and to whoever might be watching this video, this not-quite-audition-tape sent out into the void–that he’s going to do what it takes to overcome that obstacle and make it to the top.
At somewhere close to the same time this conversation between Kevin and Elgin is taking place, a wrestler in Florida is making lists of names. He’s from Quebec, so he makes a list of French names. He’s of Syrian descent, so he makes a list of Arabic names. And then–because he’s got red hair and fair skin, and he has no idea what WWE is going to do with him–he makes a list of Irish names, just in case.
He takes his lists of names around to the people in charge of these decisions, and they reject every one of them.
He starts over again, re-building a list of new names, but there’s one Arabic name on the first list that he decides to put back on the new list as well. He’s not sure why. He just likes it.
He takes his new list around and every name on it gets rejected again.
By now he’s started to have matches with NXT, at house shows where he teams with Kassius Ohno against the Wyatt Family. Since he hasn’t been able to come up with an acceptable ring name, he’s forced to wrestle under his wallet name, which can’t have been an ideal situation. He makes a third list of names, and for some reason puts that Arabic name on it a third time.
A third time, they’re all rejected.
At this point, still nameless and probably pretty frustrated, he meets with the head of Creative, Dusty Rhodes–the American Dream–and mentions to him that he’s having a hard time settling on a name.
“Which one do you like?” says Dusty.
The wrestler says, well, he kind of likes this name, the one that he keeps moving onto new lists even though it’s been constantly rejected. Apparently it’s a stubborn name, a scrappy name, a name that refuses to be forgotten even when Creative has nothing for it.
Dusty thinks it over. “Sami Zayn,” he says, testing how it sounds. “Sami Zayn,” he says again, waving his hands as if picturing the name on a marquee, on a WrestleMania Titantron. “I like that. That’s the name. You tell ‘em Dream said Sami Zayn, that’s the name.”
And so it is, because Dream said so.
Sami’s name first appears in the second episode of the Kevin Steen Show, shot at WrestleMania weekend in 2013. It’s Sami’s first WrestleMania as a WWE superstar, although he still has never appeared on WWE programming. He does Axxess shows, including a match against Corey Graves where the New Jersey crowd starts singing Olé so loudly that he stops in startled amazement to acknowledge the tune, annoying Graves.
Meanwhile, Kevin is shooting three different Kevin Steen shows in his New Jersey hotel room. In a few hours, he’s going to lose his Ring of Honor heavyweight title to Jay Briscoe, but right now he’s talking with Adam Cole.
“Do you have any stories from your time in CZW?” he asks Cole. “Any zany little…” He pauses and then blurts out, “…Sami Zany stories?” He shoots the camera a conspiratorial grin: “See what I did there?” In post-production, the Highspots producer will add Sami’s first Twitter handle, @IlikeSamiZayn (which I very belatedly realize, writing this essay, may well have been a reference to the story I just related with Dusty Rhodes).
It’s the first recorded time Kevin ever mentions Sami Zayn by name. Sami’s still something of an enigma, lacking the solid reality of the Generico of Kevin’s stories: Generico oversleeping the morning of SummerSlam, Young Generico yearning for a turn at the Nintendo, Generico astonished at the strength of Eddie Edwards’ chops. But he’s there now, Sami Zayn, officially part of Kevin’s story.
Kevin is not part of Sami Zayn’s story, though. And for all he knows in 2013, he never will be–Sami will never mention a tag team partner, an enemy from some other life, long ago–unless something changes.
Which means something has to change.
A few months after this show, Kevin is going to join Adam and the Young Bucks to create the short-lived but deeply beloved stable called Mount Rushmore. Right now, though, he’s talking about Adam’s history, his remarkably brutal training, his recent feuds. Fellow wrestler Freight Train wanders through in his pajamas and sits down next to Adam to answer some questions as well. After the questions from fans, Kevin is wrapping up the show when he adds, “this is just for my personal interest, because I want to know.” Then he asks Adam, “If you could decide right now, what would happen to your career at this point, what would it be?” It’s that issue again, the one haunting the heart of so many of the Kevin Steen Shows: Is getting all the way to the top necessary to be fulfilled? Could you live without it?
Adam shrugs and answers the same way Elgin did: “Anyone who says they don’t want to have a WrestleMania moment is lying.” But he explains that he tries not to be hyper-focused on that goal and gives some extremely mature advice for such a young wrestler. “I think you could literally drive yourself insane if you obsess over where you want to end up. So instead if I just focus on making myself better, I feel like the entire process will be easier and I’ll just enjoy the journey.”
Kevin is almost entirely off-screen at this point, over on the right, but when Adam talks about obsessing and driving yourself insane fretting about the future, the camera catches his hands suddenly raised and dropped in some sharp motion, as if he’s throwing them in the air, or gesturing at himself. We can’t see his face, but Adam can, and whatever he sees makes him pause for a second and stumble on his words just a bit before moving on.
One gets the distinct impression that, on this WrestleMania weekend, Kevin is not enjoying the journey.
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