It’s early summer, 2015, and WWE is coming to Japan in a couple of months. We have tickets for one of the two shows, and to my delight, Kevin Owens, NXT champion and newly arrived on the main roster, is on the card. In preparation, I have gone to the stationary store and bought nice paper, the kind with gold threads woven into it, and a new pen. I sit down and I put the…
Tag: Kevin Owens
[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…
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…
A big welcome to guest contributor Sawyer Paul, who has laid out a thoughtful theory of a not so straightforward question: what exactly is it that makes professional wrestling “good”? Sawyer’s piece gets at the core of what we’re trying to do here at Spectacle of Excess, and that’s to clarify and celebrate the artistry of this pretend sport. So a big thanks to Sawyer (and all the other recent guest contributors) for the help keeping…
Look, hear me out here: I too was initially bitching and moaning about the perplexing botch/screwjob ending of the Brock Lesnar/Undertaker match at Summer Slam. But after sitting with it for a few hours, I was still captivated, unsettled, left wondering what the fuck. “WTF #Summerslam” I tweeted, and then soon realized that was exactly the sentiment I was supposed to carry away from the match. Here’s the thing we tend to forget about wrestling…