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…
The Spectacle of Excess Posts
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…
Greetings Spectacle Readers! I have several cool posts simmering, but I’m feeling inspired to keep up with the prolific J.J. McGee, who has brought this blog back to awesome with her bi-weekly Sami/Kevin history project! Instead of trying to force my next Punkrockbigmouth art crit piece to completion before it’s fully cooked this week, I’m sharing the first chapter of the novel I wrote for my MFA thesis well over a decade ago. I wasn’t ready to…
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…
I am thrilled and honored to present this guest post by Tom Breen, from whom I very much hope we will see more in the future. It was Tom who just a couple months ago turned me onto Joey Janela, the indie talent whose brilliant carny antics have reinvigorated my love of professional wrestling in a major way. Tom articulated so much here about a wrestler whose work I’m just scratching the surface of how…
On the Progress of Wrestling Theory in the Trump Era (and a Word About Our Stunning New Contributor)
I’ve given myself a bit of a complex about this moratorium on writing about WWE. It’s been great to force myself out of my comfort zone, seek out new wrestling to watch and figure out how to go about watching it and writing about it. The process has been slow and faltering, but highly rewarding. However, as a wrestling theorist, I simply cannot ignore a near monopolistic-sized chunk of the market that is my topic…
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…