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…
Author: J.J. McGee
I'm an American expat who lives in Japan and spends most of my free time being painfully earnest about narrative, character development, and slippage between kayfabe and reality in wrestling.
Creating a sudden heel turn is easy: all you need is a steel chair. Or a kendo stick. Or a window. In a pinch, in fact, you need nothing but two treacherous hands and a darkened heart. Admittedly, for a heel turn based on betrayal it helps to have a friendship to betray, and those are harder to come by. Those take time to build: months or years of effort, dozens or hundreds of happy…
I’m in the front row. I’m also in the back row. I’m in The Row. DDT Pro shows in my town are held in municipal sports centers, in rooms small enough that along one side of the ring there’s only space for a single row of chairs, and that’s where Dan and I are sitting. The Row is my favorite place to sit at DDT Pro shows, because my view of the ring is completely…
I’m not quite sure what I expected when I sat down in the movie theater to watch “My Dad is a Heel Wrestler,” the new movie starring Hiroshi Tanahashi and a host of other NJPW wrestlers. Considering it had NJPW’s official stamp of approval, I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be pulling the curtain aside to show wrestlers calling their matches and bookers deciding who was going over whom. And it was a children’s movie,…
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…
It’s August 1, 2018, on Smackdown, and Daniel Bryan is in the ring, staring up at the Titantron. The Miz’s face looms in the massive screen as the two of them cut a promo on each other, setting up their match at SummerSlam. The promo manages to touch on the key points in their history and to sum up their feud–though “feud” is hardly the right word for something both so slow-moving and so inevitable.…
My first love in wrestling was John Morrison. No, that’s not strictly correct. My first love was Starship Pain, his finisher: a flashy split-legged corkscrew moonsault, the first move I ever learned the name of. But over time I realized that it wasn’t the flashiness of it that I loved. When you took away the extra twists and the split-legged flip, the bells and whistles and glitz and glitter, what I loved at the heart…
(Note: You click on any of the art to see a full-size version, and you can click on the link in the caption to go to the artist’s page!) He grew up an orphan on the mean streets of Tijuana. He learned his fighting skills protecting other children from bullies and thugs. He fled Mexico after he injured a man with a brainbuster gone wrong. We don’t know these facts about El Generico’s life from…
It’s December 2016, and I’m at my second New Japan show. I know barely anything about any of the wrestlers, it’s all a buzz of new names and styles. The main event is a tag match, and the first wrestler to the ring is someone who goes by EVIL (in English, in all caps), carrying a scythe and wearing a purple and black velour robe. He is quite possibly the most extra wrestler I have…
Wrestling exists in a constant state of tension between dependence and independence, with storylines that are constantly playing out that anxiety, running through the options over and over. When is it wise to rely on others and when is it smart to walk away on your own? Seth Rollins betrays his brothers to achieve the pinnacle of success, but later admits the victory is hollow. Even worse, there’s the nagging suspicion he only traded in…