One of the long-lasting feuds and friendships in professional wrestling has been that of Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn.
Their unique link and bond date back well over twenty years, as they first appeared in front of small audiences in Quebec. The two then attacked the industry by breaking into the U.S. independent scene, traveling abroad, becoming commodities in ROH and PWG, and ultimately reaching the pinnacle of the industry in WWE.
Together, they have teamed up in the main event of WrestleMania and squared off on the same stage and taking their feud to the Rogers Centre earlier this year in Toronto at Elimination Chamber.
It’s often described as a storybook relationship, and author J.J. McGee has now completed the task of documenting their story.
Fight Forever: The Ballad of Kevin and Sami is a true work of passion with incredible analysis and research into this relationship, documenting their many matches and contrasting paths to WWE and properly contextualizing their stories.
McGee recently received a huge endorsement from Kevin Owens, who raved about the book and promoted it on his social channels, placing a greater spotlight on this passion project
McGee took time to speak with POST Wrestling about the history of Owens & Zayn, her takeaways from this massive undertaking, and Owens’ seal of approval.
POST Wrestling: How did you arrive at Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn as the subjects to devote such an extensive study to?
J.J. McGee: My origin story is that I was a mostly casual fan of wrestling from 2007 to 2014. In 2014, however, I found the first story and character that I could be really invested in: Sami Zayn’s Road to Redemption storyline in NXT. I knew almost nothing of Sami’s history before WWE at that point, so when the Internet started buzzing about Kevin Steen’s upcoming debut, it didn’t mean much to me. When Sami finally won the NXT title off of Neville/Pac, and Kevin came charging to the ring to celebrate with him, I could immediately feel the weight of the years behind their relationship. It was the first time they’d ever interacted in WWE, but their affection and respect, and sheer we-made-it joy was so palpable, it was clear their connection was deep and genuine. So when Kevin attacked Sami (my favorite wrestler! My first favorite wrestler!) six minutes and forty seconds later, I literally jumped to my feet in the living room and announced to the world that I must understand their history, and I vowed to track down every match they were ever in together before WWE.
I figured it might take a while because they must have been in a lot of matches together. Maybe as many as twenty or thirty! By the time I realized it was closer to 150, it was too late; I was hooked.
POST Wrestling: In the first portion of the book, Quebec is such a big focus. What did you learn about their development in that province and the struggles of Canadians trying to make it in the U.S.?
McGee: What fascinated me most was how much of an isolated island Quebec wrestling was. On a map it looks like the United States would be really easy to access, but between the language barrier and the simple geographic barrier–any major US city is actually six to ten hours’ drive away through a lot of woods–it was surprisingly hard to break out of Quebec into the larger wrestling world. There was (and is) a really vibrant wrestling scene in Montreal and Quebec City, but there can be a huge chasm between that and the rest of the world. A lot of the early years for Kevin and Sami are about the struggle to simply get bookings and attention outside Quebec.
POST Wrestling: As you put their careers into context and go match by match, is there a specific “sliding doors” moment for either Owens or Zayn where either of their careers could have gone drastically different if a decision or circumstance did not occur as it did?
McGee: There are so many, and each one is fascinating. The first really key one is: what if Kevin had chosen to stay in Rougeau’s school in 2003 rather than quit to work in IWS? And I strongly suspect he’d be remembered as a very good trainer for Rougeau’s school, and that without his push and pull, El Generico would be a fond comedic memory of fans of the indie Montreal scene in the early 2000s.
Another really key little moment, one that seemed minor at the time, was Steen and Generico’s first PWG match in 2004. They were supposed to wrestle as a team against Scorpio Sky and Quicksilver, but Sky and Quicksilver got stuck in traffic (or, as Kevin suspects, chose to skip the show rather than wrestle two nobodies from Canada). Whether it was traffic or a bad mood, it meant Kevin and Generico got to wrestle each other, and that meant they got to really show off their very best selves. They impressed the audience, they impressed the PWG bookers, and it opened the PWG door for them, which led to just about everything else eventually.
A third one doesn’t seem as minor, but the ripple effect was even more massive than it first appears: Sami Zayn badly injuring his shoulder in his debut match against John Cena. If he hadn’t injured himself there, he would have leapt to the main roster well ahead of Kevin–indeed, Kevin had been told to never expect a call-up, and maybe without that injury, it could have gone that way. Because Sami being injured meant they called in Kevin to fight Cena next, and that fight turned into a feud, and that feud catapulted Kevin up the card, leaving Sami in the dust in a way that would eventually inform the rest of their rivalry.
POST Wrestling: How important was PWG for both of them?
McGee: I answered a little bit already–it was the first place outside Quebec that started to book them as singles stars, that really took them seriously and let them shine. But it was so much more than that. You can make a really compelling argument that in 2010, when Kevin was out of Ring of Honor in the wake of his massive feud with El Generico and losing his mind with boredom and frustration, it saved his entire career (maybe his whole life) by giving him a creative outlet. When Kevin and Generico’s story was unable to reach a satisfying ending in ROH in 2012, it was PWG that moved heaven and earth to let them tell the story of their reconciliation and reach some closure across one urgent night. PWG shaped their characters and their storytelling, and they had some of their greatest matches there. When Kevin and Sami came out to main event WrestleMania with PWG-inspired logos on their gear, everyone who knew their history knew that the homage was completely deserved.
POST Wrestling: For Kevin Owens, his hardships are well documented from the fallout with Jacques Rougeau, his conflicts in Ring of Honor, and even going to NXT when he was told he was never going to sniff the main roster. Have you found that he operates with a healthy chip on his shoulder from these experiences?
McGee: I do think the key word is “healthy”! Some people have a gift for turning spite into a motivator, and I think Kevin is one of them. He’s a man who carries a grudge forever, even when the person is a friend–for example, his pure delight at informing Seth Rollins that he was debuting to feud with John Cena after Seth had told him many times he’d never make it to WWE unless he got in better shape. And I think that spiteful attitude has served him well, especially because he’s often been able to work great angles with people whom he holds grudges against, like Jim Cornette. And on the flip side, he never forgets someone who’s been kind or helpful either. I believe he’d do anything at all for PCO, or Mark Briscoe, or Super Dragon. The story he’s created of his career is that he got where he is today despite a lot of people trying to hold him back, but at the same time, he couldn’t have made it without a lot of people’s help and support.
POST Wrestling: So many link Owens and Zayn as one, you even draw attention to the two referring to “we” in many instances, but what are some differences you found between these two performers, in or outside of the ring?
McGee: It’s fascinating because honestly, I would be hard-pressed to think of two people more different in their approach to life, in their tastes and backgrounds. Kevin loves to consume more wrestling in his off-time; when Sami leaves the arena, he’s eager to do anything but watch wrestling. When they’re on the road, Sami bemoans the fact that he doesn’t get to see more of the cities they’re traveling through; Kevin holes up in his hotel and calls his family. Kevin loves driving a brand-new muscle car; Sami tools around in a beat-up Nissan Altima. Kevin made his family part of his storylines immediately; for a long time, Sami was totally private about his family life. I think that’s part of why their relationship always seems so fresh, that they’re not carbon copies of each other, they’re always sparking off each other in weird, unpredictable ways.
Not surprisingly, their skills in the ring are also complementary after years of working together. Sami’s one of the greatest in the world at selling, at creating an image of suffering so intense and abject that your heart goes out to him. Kevin’s a perfect brutal wrecking ball who makes you believe that his rage is unstoppable. Of course, both of them have gotten a lot of chances to shine as the opposite alignment in the last handful of years–Sami as a vicious weasel, Kevin as the Just Keep Fighting salt-of-the-earth protagonist. But at base, Kevin’s unstoppable brutality meeting El Generico and Sami’s immovable heroism has generated decades’ worth of energy.
POST Wrestling: From wrestling each other at Le Skratch in Laval, becoming commodities on the independents in the U.S and abroad, headlining WrestleMania, and having a match at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, is there another/final chapter in this rivalry you envision?
McGee: Obviously, given Kevin’s medical situation, any future meeting between them would be a joy and a blessing. But if at all possible, there’s one thing I would like to see, one milestone they haven’t achieved.
Kevin and Sami have never once had a one-on-one title match at a PPV on the main roster.
They’ve had four title matches at PPVs, but all have involved four, six, seven, or thirty men. I would really like to see the two of them face each other alone for a world title on a major show. (And then I would like a storyline where they make up before they retire.)
POST Wrestling: For your purposes, how much did Owens’ promotion and endorsement of the book mean to you, and what was the reaction when you saw his video?
McGee: Sometimes I stalled out working on the book, and my husband could hear me muttering about how it was taking too long, I’d missed the right moment, and it wasn’t going to be good enough, and no one cared anyway. When that happened, he’d tell me that there would always be two people that cared, that the goal was to have something that Sami and Kevin could possibly share with their kids and say “This is what we were creating as you were growing up, this is all of it in one place.” That always seemed like somewhat crazy talk to me, but it did the trick and broke me out of any paralysis to keep going. So you can probably imagine that hearing Kevin say that he would re-read the book when he was retired and in his seventies was… well, it was pretty indescribable, actually. It’s not often a writer gets to hear the subject of their book endorse it. It’s definitely something I’ll cherish forever.
POST Wrestling: Who plays Owens and Zayn in the movie adaptation?
McGee: OK, I know, I know I’m supposed to go with Seth Rogan for Sami. But I’m imagining a movie focused on their early years in Montreal, still in their early twenties. For that, I’m casting Joe Locke (Heartstopper, Agatha All Along)–he’s got a floppy, kinetic energy, and expressive face that would work well for Sami. There’s another young actor named Jack Mulhern (most recently in The Boys in the Boat) that I think captures some of Kevin’s sort of arrogant self-contained intensity. I might have spent far too much time thinking about this question, so I’m going to stop before I start fan-casting their NXT times and their heel run together and their tag team run.
Fight Forever: The Ballad of Kevin and Sami is available now through Hybrid Shoot, and the publisher has curated an extensive playlist of Owens and Zayn’s history as a complement to the book