Fight Forever: Wrestling's Greatest Feud

A Conversation with Author J.J. McGee about wrestling rivalries and a new Hybrid Shoot Book

Based on original art by Josh Drews

NEW BOOK ALERT:

In Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn, today’s fans have one of the most coherent and long-term collaborations that has ever existed in wrestling history. Over the course of their twenty-year career we can document the number of matches they’ve been in together at over 300–and Kevin estimates it’s at least double that, thanks to the sheer number of matches with tiny promotions that were never recorded.

J.J. McGee, a professor at Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan with a doctorate in rhetoric, has primed her brain to look for symbolism, recurring themes and subtle character work. Known to wrestling fans as “Mith Gifs”, she has a gift for finding the little things that make a story special. Fans know they can count on her to stitch together the pieces of an elaborate tapestry, revealing the complete picture of what’s really going on.

In Fight Forever: The Ballad of Kevin and Sami, she’s exploring a partnership unlike any other—the saga of two men who fought their way from high school gyms to the grandest stage of them all at WrestleMania without ever losing touch with who they are.

Each chapter of this history will focus in-depth on one match, the fictional story leading up to and away from it, and some of the real events connected to it. As we move from one match to the next, you’ll hear about the triumphs and losses, the disasters and miracles, the heroes and villains–both in the fiction and in reality–and follow along as the two men at the center of the story grapple with the defining question of both the characters’ and the real peoples’ lives:

“Can we succeed together, or are we stronger apart?”

The wrestling you fall in love with first will always be the version of the sport that lives closest to your heart. For me, it’s the sport as it existed in the 1980s, both the cartoon shenanigans of the WWF and the outrageous violent spectacle that made Southern wrestling an entirely different kind of beast.

In many ways, Dusty Rhodes and Ric Flair represented the perfect amalgamation of these two diverse brands, creating something Vince McMahon would later euphemistically call “sports entertainment.” If anyone represented that term in human form, it was Rhodes and Flair, larger-than-life avatars of two very different versions of 1980’s America, anthropomorphic cartoons ending each night covered in each other’s blood and sweat.

Rhodes was the everyman, famously the son of a plumber, a man who’d dined on pork and beans in alleyways around the country but was also all too happy to turn up on the SuperStation TBS in the world’s gaudiest fur coat. He was new money personified, the redneck who’d worked his way to the top and would stuff himself into the world’s tiniest Mercedes convertible if he damn well pleased.

Flair was born with silver spoon in hand. Equally loud and raucous, his was a wealth and privilege that was flaunted more than shared. Ric Flair didn’t show up at the cookout with a case of Budweiser and the new Waylon Jennings record. He invited your girlfriend to his luxury hotel, then sent her back home with a memory to last a lifetime.

Same coin, different sides.

In real life, the two met in the early 70’s back in Vern Gagne’s AWA. Dusty was a hot young wrestler making his name known around the wrestling world, his matches teaming with Dick Murdoch almost as chaotic as the bar scene wherever the two showed up after wreaking havoc in the ring. Flair fell a little in love, even asking if he could be re-christened “Rambling” Ricky Rhodes. Luckily cooler heads (including Dusty) talked him out of it, encouraging the greenhorn to go his own way.

Their first match to make tape was a clip played around the nation in 1981, a title change where Dusty’s knee gave out on a suplex attempt, allowing the “Nature Boy” to capture the world’s heavyweight championship back when that was a very big deal.¹ It was Flair’s first title win and set the stage for a rivalry that would run both in the ring and behind the scenes for the rest of their professional lives.

Many more classics followed as the two brought their iconic rivalry all over the country, WCW using it in new markets to put the promotion’s best foot forward. The two fought surrounded in steel, tied together with a bullrope, in a War Games cage—whatever the stipulation, they delivered a match that always had them on their feet.

Their final in-ring confrontation happened nearly 20 years later at WCW Greed, a 2001 pay-per-view in the promotion’s final days. In a tag match Dusty, teaming with his son Dustin, strutted, preened and helped elbow his family to victory over Flair and his protege Jeff Jarrett. It was a delightful bit of business and the two old foes had the crowd in Jacksonville, Florida eating out of their palms, legends able to get so much from so little.

While Dusty vs. Flair is peak wrestling for me, obviously other feuds struck a cord with different subsets of fans across space and time. Maybe it was Hulk Hogan vs. Randy Savage, Mega Powers forever etched in your psyche. Or, perhaps, it was the emotionally fraught battle between Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi, partners turned rivals, that lives in one corner of your brain for all-time.

For many, including new Hybrid Shoot author J.J. McGee, the ultimate wrestling rivalry is Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn, two Canadians who have transported their combustible relationship from the independent scene (where they wrestled as Kevin Steen and El Generico respectively) all the way to WWE pay-per-view.

I talked with McGee about how a respectable academic became a rabid wrestling fan, how she went about writing a book and why the “Ballad of Kevin and Sami” came to dominate most of her free time.

Jonathan Snowden: People out in the world have a lot of thoughts about what wrestling fans are like, what kind of people they are, a lot of negative stereotypes. In the popular imagination, they are nothing like you, a fancy college professor (McGee is a professor at Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan with a doctorate in rhetoric) with an extensive academic background. How does someone like J.J. McGee become a wrestling fan—and not just a wrestling fan, but an obsessive wrestling fan?

J.J. McGee: I came really, really late to wrestling. I didn't get into watching it at all until I was in my thirties. I started watching it because, when my husband was working, he would put it on his background noise. And I'm incapable of not watching something if it's on the TV, so I ended up watching it and getting into it that way, little by little.

Snowden: Who were some of the early wrestlers who clicked with you?

McGee: There was a moment when Randy Savage was in the ring and Sting came down from the rafters. I didn’t know who either was at the time. Sting had a baseball bat and he handed it to Savage and turned his back on him. Basically saying, “You can hit me if you want, I dare you.”

And I thought that was amazing. I loved the theatrics of it immediately—but I kind of fell off from watching it after that.

I didn't really click with it until I hit Sami Zayn actually. I watched for about seven years as background noise before we started watching NXT. And I just really liked his character in NXT a lot. When Kevin showed up, when he attacked Sami, I could really feel the weight of their history. The fact that you could tell that this had been years in the making.

I'm trained as a researcher. I love doing research. And I decided that this was my thing. I was going to dig deep and find everything they’d done.

How many matches could it be? I remember thinking like, “There might be 10 matches that I have to go find.” But I swore that I would find every single one that I could. Then, maybe a month later, I was like, “This was a very rash promise to make. This isn’t going to be easy.”

Snowden: Can you pinpoint what it is about Sami that, after seven years of watching in the background, really caught your attention? What was it about the way he presented himself that really caught your eye?

McGee: He was such a believable babyface at the time. He felt really real at a time when that didn’t feel very commonplace. You could feel when he was frustrated. It was a very realistic sort of frustration.

And I think it really appealed to me that he seemed so well-rounded. It was impossible for me to believe that he played a cartoon character for so long, because when he is Sami Zayn, he's this really pure of heart guy, but also a guy who is just really frustrated with himself and his friends and the world. It’s complex. And it really worked for me.

Snowden: Sometimes, when I’m watching wrestling, I ask myself “do you think that's good performance or bad performance?” In this case, is he a great performer because he's putting these real emotions into his act? Or is he a bad performer who can't hide his real life feelings, even when he's doing a TV character?

McGee: That's an interesting question. I would say he's a great performer, because I feel like a lot of the frustrations his character was feeling were not exactly the same as the frustrations the real person was feeling. . I ended up studying a lot of acting textbooks, to discuss Sami in particular, and this is something actors do often to access and redirect their feelings into their art.

Like, as a character, he was frustrated with Neville for doubting him, doubting he could win the big one. Sami, I think, could easily take a lot of his frustration he felt towards people doubting him in real life and apply it to Neville, who didn't actually doubt him. The emotion was real, but he understood how to redirect it to a fictional target. Which I think makes for really good acting.

Snowden: So, you have this interest you’ve become really engaged in. What was basically just a television show you watched just because it was on is now something you decide that you're going to devote so much of your personal time, your mental space to. You're writing about it, you're talking about it, researching, you're reading books about acting—you're deep into it.

Why?

Was there a grand plan to become a member of the media? To write a book? Or was it for you, a chance to kind of document your journey as a fan? Why did you do this?

McGee: Very much for me. I'm a researcher. I love finding out more about things. Before I got into wrestling, I was very much into comic books. The two have a lot of similarities, including that they’ve been going on for 80 years or more, and you'll never know all of it. But I just love to find out more and more. I loved knowing that I had all of this information.

The story behind why I started writing was, when I started doing research just because I wanted to find out more, there was a person called Michael Ryan who went by Llakor. He was the publicist for the independent wrestling promotion that Kevin and Sammy worked with when they just got started. And I loved the way he wrote. He wrote really vividly. He wrote very much straddling the line between kayfabe and not kayfabe. He would wink at it. He took it really seriously, but kept a sense of humor at the same time. And I remember reading his stuff and being like, “Wow, I love the way this guy writes.”

And after a few months of research, I started to be like, “Okay, this is maybe the only guy, other than Kevin and Sami, who knows as much as I do about their history.” And I decided to look this guy up— and I found out that he had died just before Sami debuted in WWE. He had known that Sami had made it, but he hadn’t gotten to see Sami debut. I was like, “Oh, now I am the only person other than Kevin and Sammy that has all of this information in my head.” And I looked and he was the same age as me pretty much. He had died suddenly of an aneurysm. And I was horrified…“If I get hit by a bus tomorrow morning that's it. Nobody knows this history.” So I felt like I probably ought to start writing some of it down.

Snowden: So many of the people online, hardcore wrestling fans, have been at it a long time. I can remember some scenes from wrestling all the way back to elementary school.

McGee: What was it that hooked you?

Snowden: Dusty Rhodes was in a cage match in Atlanta, and his partner turned on him, and it was four or five guys beat him up, and he's bleeding all over the place. And he came back and gave this really thrilling, kind of ominous promo about how he was gonna get revenge on all these guys,. “It's never gonna be over.” The way I felt, it was like the way my grandfather talked about John Wayne. That's how Dusty Rhodes felt to me.

But you don’t have childhood memories like that, so what has it been like to enter this world, this fandom, as an adult person? I’ve seen and possibly even participated in some aggressive gatekeeping. And you're kind of presenting yourself as an expert in this area. Rightfully so, it turns out. But I'd imagine you encountered some pushback and some negativity. Or maybe I'm projecting that. I don't know, tell me, what was it like?

McGee: It helps that it went really, really gradually for me. In part because I was in no rush to get followers, I was just kind of poking around. I'm very earnest and I've found that that provides a fair amount of armor at a certain level. I just kind of keep going through it.

I started on Tumblr. And Tumblr's a lot more sort of casual friendly. There's a lot less gatekeeping there.

In fact, I never intended to move to Twitter until someone started swiping my GIFs off of Tumblr and posting them on Twitter. Somebody asked them about it, said they shouldn't be doing that, and the person was like, “Well, they're not posting on Twitter, so it's okay for me to post them.” And I was kind of annoyed, so I decided I'd better make a Twitter account. It took off from there.

Snowden: My wife discovered you on Twitter and brought you to my attention and I loved what you were doing. You've got these storytelling beats that you look for when you present your GIFs and the information you present on Twitter (and now this book) often helps connect disparate narratives, pulling out themes in the process.

Sometimes I’ve talked to wrestlers about matches that fans have built elaborate stories and storytelling elements around and the wrestler has looked at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. They haven’t processed it in that way.

Is intent important to you at all? Do you think maybe you see things that the wrestlers weren't aware they were presenting? (My wife who edited the book) Kristina believes, in Kevin's case especially, he's 100 percent aware of what he's presenting and why.

McGee: I'm with her on that.

Snowden: Do you care at all? When you're presenting these through lines, you're finding these interesting tidbits, does it matter what the artist intended to present? This is something you see in discussions about literature all the time—the idea that once a book is out in the world, it belongs to the audience just as much as the author and they may see it in a different way. Do you think that’s true of wrestling?

McGee: I admit one of my nightmares is to talk to Kevin or Sami and have them be like, “Wow, boy, you have a very active imagination. You've created a lot of stuff out of whole cloth that we had no intention about.” I think that would really bother me.

But at the same time, I think I'd get past it, because at a certain level, the text that you have is what it is. Whether it was created fully consciously or not. And I think if you can find themes that make sense for the audience, those are real, whether or not the person consciously put them in there or not.

But in Kevin's case I think most of the time it was conscious.

Snowden: It was interesting to discover that you found Sami Zayn in NXT. So that means a lot of the work that you've done here, you've gotten into the little time machine that we call YouTube and had to go back and find all these matches and moment.

Do you think that if you had gone back and watched those early El Generico-Kevin Steen matches and not found yourself connecting to them, would you have just given up on this? When was the match or moment when you said to yourself “Oh wow, this is everything I wanted it to be?”

McGee: In the beginning, when I started looking for stuff, I’d go to YouTube and type in Kevin's name and you get like 50 videos. You have no idea when they exist in time. At first, it was just like a kaleidoscope. You know, just shifting, and I couldn't tell when anything was happening.

So I kept trying to find earlier and earlier and earlier footage. And I kept thinking I would eventually find some point where they were sort of charmingly awkward in the ring, where they didn't look like they were comfortable and at home with each other. And eventually I found their first PWG match², which was their sixth singles match together. And it's like they've been wrestling for 20 years already. They were completely confident and comfortable with each other and I remember looking at that and thinking “They just always clicked.” They've been doing this, the two of them, basically at a professional level since the minute they started. So I knew that, whatever was there was, from the beginning, was going to be good. And that was really exciting, actually.

Art by Jaime Shelhamer from Fight Forever

Snowden: When you watch their matches in PWG, one thing you can’t help but notice is that Sami in particular created a real high level of difficulty for himself. As a professional wrestler, he made this decision to become a masked luchador who doesn't speak. If WWE is the goal, well, that’s like half an audition.

Seeing his facial expressions all these years later, it's like one of his secret weapons, right? The way he emotes in the ring. To throw that part of wrestling to the side—in some ways it’s almost a self-destructive choice. But yet it worked out. Do you have any thoughts about why he would do something like that?

McGee: Some of it he didn't really have much of a choice about. Because he got over so hard and so fast that the promoters only wanted El Generico. But he also embraced it, Sami has said at one point that he approaches wrestling like writing a sonnet. It's the constraints of poetry that make it beautiful. He likes to work with strict restraints. He likes being told, “You've only got five minutes to make an impression” for example. One of his favorite things that he misses terribly is going out in front of an audience that doesn't have any idea who he is and having 10 minutes to win them over.

I think the mask was a challenge for him. And I think he found ways to make it more beautiful because it was so restrained. He had to find the simplest, most understandable way of expressing himself because he had no language and no facial expression. And I think he found that a really interesting challenge. I think he really enjoyed it.

Snowden: There are several other rivalries that have lasted a decade or more. In my neck of the woods, Flair and Ricky Steamboat started wrestling in the 70s and continued on through the early 90s. But it wasn’t nearly as continuous as this.

Not only did Kevin and Sami have an extended partnership and feud on the independent scene, they had a chance to replay some of their greatest hits (while perfecting them) for a wider audience with WWE. What makes them, and fans, and promoters, keep going back to this never-ending battle?

McGee: One of the things they will always mention is that they're always kind of surprised that people still like to see the two of them interacting. And so they feel a lot of pressure to find new ways of doing things to make it worth people seeing again and again.

Snowden: If you had to pick one match as an introduction to Sami and Kevin, which one would you recommend?

McGee: You know, I really think their most recent match at Elimination Chamber would be a good introduction. That seems ironic because there’s so much history behind it, but they’re so good at communicating that weight without any background needed.

If you want to treat Sami and Generico as separate, I highly recommend their very first PWG match in 2004 at Free Admission (Just Kidding). It’s a perfect encapsulation of their dynamic.

If I were to give a second Kevin vs. Generico match, I think their PWG match at Steen Wolf is maybe their very best, just vicious and brilliant.³ If you want something that can be accessed on YouTube, it would be Final Battle 2010, to show how far their relationship came, from the clean simplicity of 2004 to the absolute messy melodrama of 2010.

Snowden: Yours is a book that is, in a big way, about a fictional story. Occasionally you're talking about Kevin and Sami in real life, when real life collides with the art they are making. But really you're talking about a body of work. That's kind of unusual for the space. Most wrestling journalists are so interested in the behind the scenes, the real people behind this fictional world. You took a totally different approach. What is it that made you more interested in the story being told, treating wrestling with like the kind of respect that people treat movies and books and other kinds of fiction with?

McGee: What really struck me as I started watching as many of their indie matches I could get my hands on, was that there was a single unified character arc that was running through all the different promotions. Their characters' relationship didn't wobble back and forth depending on where they were working. From IWS to CZW to Chikara to ROH, they had consistency. And I thought that was really exciting, because that meant it was a story the wrestlers were telling. Not the bookers or the promoters, but the wrestlers were working to make sure they stayed true to a path, a story. But because it was told in lots of different promotions, that meant it was really hard for anyone to see the story they were telling in one place. And then even in WWE, because there are so many stories going on at once, it can be hard for a fan to focus on just their dynamic and how it's evolving, so even when it's all in one promotion, it's still hard to isolate and see the unity of the narrative. But it's definitely there.

In one of my essays, I compared it to a book that was written and then ripped up and all the pages were scattered all over the wrestling world. I see Fight Forever as basically trying to put that text back together as much as possible, weaving it back into a coherent story. I really see my work as trying to pull all of these things together into one place. To tell you, from start to end, the story of these two men and the art they made together.

Snowden: Do you think there is an endgame for these wrestlers? One that they may have in mind? Or one you hope to see?

McGee: I think there’s little doubt that they’re working as hard as possible to achieve the nigh-impossible goal of a main event WrestleMania match for a world title. This is hard to believe, but on the main roster they have never faced each other in a singles title match at a PPV! I think that’s their main goal now, to be in the world title scene together in some way.

I feel like the final endgame, however, is reconciliation in some form. I don’t think that will mean another tag team title win (although I would be thrilled if it did), but there’ll be some form of resolution of their differences before their career comes to an end. I remember how hard they worked, through injury and limited time, to achieve positive closure on Kevin and Generico’s relationship, and I’m sure they want to end their WWE career with the same deliberate alignment of their fictional and authentic friendship.

My personal fantasy booking for the end of it all is a career versus career last man standing match which ends with neither of them being able to rise and thus retiring each other simultaneously. That might be hard to construct an exciting match around, but if anyone could do it, it would be these two.

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Fight Forever: The Ballad of Kevin and Sami is available for pre-order at Indiegogo. Support independent art. Pre-orders allow us to cut the middle man (looking at you Amazon) out of the process and deliver books directly to readers. Your continued support and patronage means a lot.

1. Flair became just the 15th man to capture that crown since Orville Brown became the first champion back in 1948.

2. PWG Free Admission!! (Just Kidding) 11/13/2004

3. Both PWG matches are available online exclusively on HighSpots, a streaming platform for independent wrestling.