Let me tell you a story. This is a story about Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, Daniel Bryan, and Shane McMahon. Like most stories, it has a hero. But wrestling narrative is weird, because the supporting character of one story will be the hero–or the villain–of the next, so all four of these characters could be the main character, depending on how you look at it. So let’s try an experiment. What happens if we make…
Tag: Kevin Owens
“I propose to speak about fairy-stories, though I am aware that this is a rash adventure.” So J.R.R. Tolkien opened his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” and calling wrestling a kind of fairy-story may be the very rashest of adventures, but I live for danger, so here we go. I could probably write more at length about the world of wrestling as a strange kind of secondary fantasy world, with its own rules of physics and morality,…
Anything you can do, I can do better I can do anything better than you In 2012, El Generico loses, and loses, and loses. He loses key matches in Ring of Honor against Kevin Steen, unable to halt his nemesis’ rise to the top, and then unable to unseat him. He loses or vacates at least four different titles in the U.S. and Japan and Germany. By the end of the year he holds not…
Brooklyn in August is a seething cauldron of sounds and sights and smells, hordes of people gathering in the miserable summer heat, hoping to receive their handful of moments from the SummerSlam weekend. It’s August 20, 2016, the night of TakeOver: Brooklyn II, and Dan and I are carefully making our way down the stairs in the Barclay Arena, looking around in astonishment. Back in February, we took a long, hard look at our budget…
After their big blowoff match at Final Battle, Kevin and El Generico limp out of 2010 and into 2011 to find themselves on different paths for a while again. Generico works in Ring of Honor, but also works for Pro Wrestling Guerrilla (PWG) in California, tours Europe, has a couple of dark matches for TNA, and goes on four different tours of Japan to work for DDT Pro, an offbeat promotion where he eventually crosses…
[Warning for intense bloody imagery in this essay.] Final Battle 2010, the climax of Kevin and Generico’s bloody feud, takes place in the dead of winter, but I watch it many years later in the early spring, when the leaves are that particular luminous green that’s almost golden. (The leaves are important. We’ll get back to the leaves.) The year-long arc, from 2009 to 2010, from Final Battle to Final Battle, is Kevin’s story. I…
Some moments in wrestling are staggeringly momentous, huge enough to fill a stadium with emotion, so titanic that the audience’s reaction becomes itself part of the moment: the Miz winning the world title; the breaking of the Undertaker’s streak. Some are smaller, more intimate, shared with a group of hundreds at a small show or a live event. Some are so fleeting and personal they may only touch a scattered handful. But whether big as…
There’s a quote by Edmund Burke that I came across in college. For years, a copy of it in careful violet-ink handwriting was taped to my computer, where I would see it every day: Never despair. But if you do, work on in despair. It’s… not the most uplifting of inspirational quotes, I suppose. The bright assertion of the beginning (Never give up! Hustle, loyalty, respect!) is undermined by the resigned weariness at the end:…
The ancient Greeks used a specific word–kairos– to mean roughly “the ability to choose the perfect moment to act.” They used it, for example, to describe the gift of knowing exactly when to loose an arrow in order to hit the target perfectly. Wrestling is a constant struggle to achieve kairos, because any wrestling promotion is basically an intricate ecosystem of interconnected parts: feuds and wrestlers and venues and dates. It’s like finding the right moment to…