Some of the very best moments in wrestling are about redemption. Redemption is Miss Elizabeth throwing herself into Randy Savage’s arms; it’s Shawn Michaels saying “I’m sorry, I love you” to Ric Flair; it’s Daniel Bryan holding those two titles aloft in New Orleans. It’s those fleeting moments where something is lifted out of doubt and darkness and held up as worthy, as valued, as clean and bright and true. Wrestling fans, we love a…
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.
Run-ins are the bane of anyone trying to look back and re-assemble a story in wrestling. You could, for example, watch every single match between Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn in the WWE and never come across the first time they interacted on Raw–because it happened at the end of a match between Kevin and Neville, where Sami comes out and interrupts a post-match beatdown: Lots of feuds and alliances are born in unrelated matches,…
[Warning that there are gifs in here of Sami’s match with John Cena, which he fought with a legit injury.] My father was known for approaching life with teasing irony. Nothing was as it seemed on the surface. “Oh, these cupcakes are terrible, let me save you from them,” he would say while pretending to steal them away, to be thwarted by giggling shrieks of protest. “Santa got lost this year, so there are no…
So let’s say you’re an inexperienced wrestling fan who’s made an unwise and hasty vow to watch everything two indie wrestlers have ever done over the last 13 years (let’s say you’re me). This is kind of like suddenly being handed a huge bag of Lego blocks and told “Here it is, there’s a really cool thing here, but you have to do the work to put it together.” You stare at all the tiny…
I am hating Kevin Owens. I know the grammar sounds wonky there, but believe me, it’s accurate. It’s early 2015, I am in the passenger seat of a rental car driving down the Florida coast, and I am consciously, deliberately, and actively hating Kevin Owens. From the driver’s seat, Dan listens patiently as I list once more the new NXT champ’s offenses: assault, title-stealing, repeated powerbombing, gloating, and generalized friendship failure are only the beginning…
Usually one wouldn’t describe a severed artery as a “lucky break” for anyone. But this is wrestling, so sure, why not. By mid-2004, the tireless work of IWS’s publicist, Michael Ryan, has gotten some IWS wrestlers spots in two East Coast promotions, Jersey All Pro and Combat Zone Wrestling (CZW). One of them, Sexxxy Eddy, slices his arm in the middle of a CZW hardcore match, hits an artery and ends up with a…
I’m watching wrestling while hiding under the sheets so my parents won’t catch me. Clarification: I am a grown-ass human being of full adulthood, and I’m watching wrestling while hiding under the sheets so my parents won’t catch me. This is because I still haven’t figured out a way to explain to my parents that it’s terribly important I watch Sami Zayn defend his NXT title against Kevin Owens; that I have in fact flown…
Once upon a time in Montreal… It’s October 2003, and Kevin Steen and El Generico are just nineteen years old. Kevin has just come out of three years of routinized wrestling school into truly impromptu wrestling; Generico has been trained by a guy who took his money to teach him how to take bumps on frozen grass in the park. Kevin’s been wrestling for IWS for a couple of months now, but only now is…
“Everyone is looking at us.” There are two thousand people settling into their seats in the Gifu gymnasium, nestled deep in the Japanese Alps. Only two of them are not Japanese. “Everyone is not looking at us,” Dan says firmly as we try to find our seats. It’s late 2015; this is only the fourth wrestling show we’ve ever attended, and all the others were WWE shows. But we’ve decided to try a New…
Once upon a time seems a good way to start this story. It’s a story almost too narratively perfect to be true, which includes forbidden wrestling, miraculous moonsaults, emotional breakdowns and epiphanies, and ambition renounced for art. It’s the beginning of one of the greatest friendships, and rivalries, and stories in wrestling. It may even be the beginning of two of the greatest friendships, and rivalries, and stories in wrestling. And as pieced together from two shoot interviews…