Exclusive — J.J. McGee, Author Of New Book Fight Forever, On All Things Kevin Owens And Sami Zayn

Writing Fight Forever: The Ballad of Sami and Kevin, a book about longtime wrestling companions Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens, hasn't been the easiest endeavor for J.J. McGee, a professor at Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan with a doctorate in rhetoric. Under the social media handle MithGIFs, McGee had already spent years producing essays about the wrestling relationship that most fascinates her — she told Wrestling Inc. that she initially thought the book would be as simple as just putting her previous work together, particularly since Zayn and Owens weren't involved with each other on WWE programming at the time. Seemingly as soon as she decided to write it, however, their paths suddenly collided once again, as they began crafting a new chapter of their story that culminated in them winning the Unified WWE Tag Team Championship in the main event of WrestleMania 39 Night 1. The roller coaster hasn't slowed down for McGee in the time since — the pair were split up once again, Zayn won the Intercontinental Championship at WrestleMania 40, Owens turned heel again and brought back his old Package Piledriver move, and the two had their latest singles grudge match at WWE Elimination Chamber at the Toronto SkyDome in their home country of Canada. Most recently, Owens has revealed he's suffering from a neck injury that will require surgery, putting him out of action indefinitely and costing him his planned WrestleMania 41 match with Randy Orton.

In this exclusive interview, Wrestling Inc. Senior Lead News Editor Miles Schneiderman — a fellow fan of Zayn and Owens and a longtime follower of McGee's work — speaks to McGee about what makes Fight Forever different from other wrestling books, her favorite Zayn and Owens matches, whether she sees them ever leaving WWE, and more, before culminating with her reaction to the Owens injury news.

Miles Schneiderman: Did you enjoy the Elimination Chamber match?

J.J. McGee: Yes, very much. It's funny because — you know this, and I know you as well are not really big on blood, but I did feel the lack of it a little bit in that match. I was like, "You know, I don't really, but..." I really felt like they would've wanted it.

And then Cody bleeds in the main event segment and you're like, "Oh, okay. That's why they couldn't do it," because he had to do it.

Yeah. Which I understand, but at the same time, I could kind of feel their frustration that this is the kind of match where blood works.

It's hard when Sami's out here talking about how this is going to be the worst they ever do to each other and it's like, "I don't know, man."

I mean, I've watched Final Battle 2010 and I'm not so sure you're going to be able to do that.

Can you explain how you got involved in all of this? The study of Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens? Steenericology?

It's my favorite word, Steenericology. I am actually late to wrestling. I didn't watch wrestling as a kid and I only started watching it in my 30s, so I came to it very late, in about 2013. And I started watching it because my husband had it as background when he was studying. And so I started watching it and got really interested. Fell in love with Sami Zayn during his "road to redemption," of course. And that meant that I was watching when Kevin showed up at TakeOver: R Evolution.

Didn't know him from Adam from before then. I did not know who El Generico was when I was watching that show. But the moment at the end of the show when Kevin attacked Sami after they hugged and they're so happy together and Kevin attacked Sami. And I literally stood up in my living room, pointed at the TV, and said, "I want to know everything these two people have ever done together."

You could feel how much history they had together. You could feel all of it. And I am a researcher by nature and by training, so I was like, "Okay. This is great. This is a thing that I can go research and learn more about," and I had no idea. Researching wrestling is very hard!

What are the biggest strengths that Zayn and Owens have as performers, as storytellers? What are they great at that other wrestlers don't do as well that make them stand out?

I think they both have different strengths. I think one of the things they both do a lot though is that they both have a very strong sense of who their characters are, where their characters are going, absent anything from creative.

They know what they want their characters to be doing. And so, they put a lot of it into the stuff that is extra. I don't know quite how to put that. Like when Sami wasn't part of a storyline, you could still see in his entrances and in the stuff between moves where he thought his character was. I think Kevin's even better at that, in part because of his background. He's really, really good at thinking, "What is my character doing here? Aside from any story that I'm in, where do I feel like my character is?" And they really bring that all the time. They're always ... I call it writing in the margins. They've got the text, but they're always working on the stuff that they think is happening to their character on the side as well. And I think that gives it a really rich feeling. Their characters feel extremely real and well-rounded because of that.

Whenever something small happens that could have been accidental but could have been intentional, you always think it was probably intentional because they pay so much attention to details.

Yeah. When I post stuff, very often, and I think this is very normal, I will always get people saying, "Well, that's a reach. I can't believe that's intentional." And I'm kind of like, "Well, maybe. Maybe it was just a coincidence. But with them, you can really never be sure." Was this a reference? It's always possible. It's always possible, which is fascinating to me.

So you were able to interview them. WWE is not involved in the book at all.

Not at all.

But you were able to talk to them for a couple hours. Was that your first time speaking to them in-person? Because I know you had communicated with them a little bit online.

I had met each of them at meet and greets for the two minutes of awkward, shaky interactions. And they knew who I was then, so I wasn't random.

What was the experience like of talking to them in-person and just being able to ask them questions about their careers?

It was amazing, obviously. Nerve wracking but amazing. They were very funny. They were in separate places. Sami, I think, was in Montreal and Kevin was in Florida at the time. But they did enjoy bickering about being late and it was very performative, which cracked me up. It felt like a sort of, "Well, we're famous for bickering. So let's make sure we start this conversation with some bickering."

They've been doing "frenemies" for so long, they can't not do it.

It was really interesting. I felt very much like Kevin was restraining himself ... Kevin's done so many more of these kinds of interviews in the past, that I felt like he was trying to make sure that he didn't answer everything and gave Sami space to answer. And I really get the feeling — I felt like Sami was really eager to talk about his history, which I thought was really interesting.

You said he talks about Generico, which must be fascinating, because I've never heard him talk about Generico before.

It was really interesting. And here's the most odd thing about it, he always refers to Generico as "it." I think because he talks about it as a gimmick. So he's like, "It was something that I really enjoyed, but when it stopped..." So it was very weird. He didn't use "he" or "I" at all. He talked about it like "it." But he talked about being really sad at having to give it up, which I wasn't sure about. Yeah. He said he fought really hard to keep Generico going.

He wanted to keep it in WWE?

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

Right? I didn't know that at all actually.

He appeared in the mask and the cape once in "NXT." And then, after that, it was just gone.

You've been writing about them for years, their body of work. Talk to me about why you needed to write this book, and what does this book add to your body of work on the subject that wasn't there before? What's the book's relationship to your scholarly work; how would you say it adds to it?

The reason why I ended up feeling like I had to write the book was in part... I'm going to write about this on my Substack at some point. They had a promoter named Michael Ryan who worked for IWS with them when they were in their 20s, and he was really tireless. He promoted them like crazy. He wrote a lot of blog posts about them. When I found them, I was really fascinated by the way he wrote. He wrote "I Am El Generico's Father."

That's a great essay.

Yeah. And so, when I first started doing research, I kept running into his writing. And so, I started slowly gathering up all of this information. And finally I was kind of like, "You know, I know so much about this now. I feel like maybe I should write something. But I don't want to step on this guy's toes, because he'd written so much about them." So I went to see if I could find him and found out that he had died shortly before Sami had debuted in WWE.

He knew Sami was going to make it. He knew Sami had signed, but he didn't get to see him in WWE. And at that point, I was like, "Oh." I realized other than Kevin and Sami, there was really no one in the world that knew as much about their history as I did now. And suddenly I was like, "Oh, it would suck if I got hit by a bus." I literally was like, "Man, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, that history's gone." Because nobody's going to be able to gather that all up again, which was why I started writing about it, because I was like, "I did all the work to gather all this information. I might as well start writing it." And what the book is that's different is it has a lot less of me in it, basically. Generally speaking, a lot of the stuff I've posted online is about myself as much as it is about Kevin and Sami.

Oh, you're a major character.

My feelings about wrestling. My reactions to wrestling. I mostly trim myself out of the book. I think I still have an authorial voice, I hope. But my own feelings about it, I try to mute, so it's not about me so much. It is much more of a history book rather than a sort of reaction to wrestling book.

That's interesting because I read your struggle to classify it as, "Is this a history? Is it a biography?" You ultimately landed on film novelization ... That strikes me as not the kind of book about wrestling that I've seen before, in terms of books that have been written from ... I don't want to say a fan perspective, but an outsider perspective as opposed to from an insider perspective.

It does feel like it's a very unusual kind of book, because I feel like a lot of books are either official and therefore pretty much kayfabe, right? Treating it as though this were an actual thing that happened or they're entirely sort of history, like this is what was happening backstage ... Either talking about it like you're entirely inside the fictional world or talking about it like you're talking about the people and the business and the deals that were made to get to this. And this book is really very much in the middle. It's basically treating the events as though they were pretty much real, but with an eye to what was going on backstage that influenced things. Especially when that ends up intersecting with the story.

With Kevin especially, it's interesting because so much that happens backstage ends up front stage with Kevin. All the struggles with Jim Cornette were originally backstage. But eventually, he pulls them out and makes them part of his character that he and Cornette become characters that hate each other just like the real people hated each other.

He turned babyface because Jim Cornette was gone, so he didn't have any reason to be a hateful bastard.

"I guess I don't hate Ring of Honor anymore." It was really interesting to watch that sort of, "Well, I hated Ring of Honor because Jim Cornette was here and now he's not. So I guess I'm good now."

So much of their work feels autobiographical. which is so weird to talk about with Zayn, because he's wearing a luchador mask.

It is.

It's very clear with Kevin, who used his real name for so long .... This thing that people talk about being fascinating about wrestling being the intersection between reality and fiction, they almost represent that as people. Like they are people who represent, in these two very different ways, the intersection of fiction or reality.

Yeah. I agree. And Kevin, especially, is just fascinating with that. I don't know how he does it. Because Kevin Owens, the brutish, sort of horrible evil guy, is clearly not Kevin Steen. And yet, he is so much more than a lot of people. I don't know quite how he does it. He's like himself, but tilted to the side a little bit — a 90-degree angle of himself.

I think a lot about wrestling as an art form, because there's a lot of conversation in fan spaces about that right now — about the art of wrestling. And it feels like there's weirdly distinct camps forming around specific styles and cultures and time periods and eras of promotions. So for lack of a better term, is there a wrestling movement that Sami and Kevin represent or belong to ... Do they represent a style or a philosophy in the art of wrestling?

I feel like they do, but I don't have a name for it.

Who else is doing it?

Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi do that same sort of, "We tell really long stories that continue way past the official feud. And come back over and over and over again." I think Adam Page is doing that as well ... His character never shifts at random. You always feel the sort of guiding push of the person behind it.

This is going to sound really negative and I don't mean it that way. Because, for example, I love The Miz. But you can tell that The Miz is told, "Now, you're a babyface," and he says, "Oh, okay. Now, I'll go out and be a babyface." "Okay. You're going to have a heel turn." "Okay. Now, I'll have a heel turn," and it doesn't feel like he's as focused on, "What is my character?" He's doing what needs to be done for the greater good of the storylines around him. Whereas, I think people like Page and Zayn and Owens, obviously they're not sacrificing helping other people. But they're always working really hard on keeping a unified sense of their character's self going. And I think you can really feel that with some people. And to be fair, I think if everybody was that way, it would never work.

You need a lot of people who are willing to say, "Oh, my character is a heel now? Okay." Or else, you could never have that. But I do think it's a very distinct style. Very, very character-driven.

Almost like putting loyalty to character above loyalty to the promotion and what the promotion wants to do ... "I will do what the promotion wants to do until it conflicts with who my character is, at which point, we have to have a conversation."

Yeah. And you can tell that Kevin and Sami got that ... Especially when they were on the indies when they were doing five different promotions, right? You have to get a sense of yourself that transcends what CZW and Chikara and Ring of Honor want this week, because it's going to be different things. So I'm sure a lot of it comes from that.

What's your favorite Kevin Owens or Sami Zayn match either together or as individuals?

With Sami, I will always love Sami versus Neville at TakeOver: R Evolution. It's probably my favorite wrestling match ever. Because it was the one that really taught me what wrestling could be, how emotional it could be. That was the first wrestling match that I was all in on, like in tears and worried and really committed.

I love Final Battle 2010. I love it.

It's a great match.

Which is funny because I don't like blood. I don't like gross out ... shock stuff. And that match is just full of just horrible stuff, but it all works and I love it. It's such a ride.

I went back and rewatched some of the year-long feud recently and I had really forgotten how weird some of it was.

What specifically?

There's just much more of a weird, psychosexual vibe to the whole thing.

Yes. I touch on that in the book. And I have to admit, I'm kind of like, "I don't know how much to dwell on the fact that he's doing this."

The whole time. I'm like, "Okay. So they're exes." If you watch it through that lens, it makes perfect sense.

Yep. It is really intense. There's just a lot of really dark stuff and I call it erotic. Not sexual, but erotic.

Yeah. That's a good distinction.

There's just a lot of stuff churning around. It is and it's easy to forget that honestly. When I was rewatching it, I was like, "Oh, wow. Wow. This was... There's just a lot here." And you can understand why... This is one of the things. I was going to say, Poor Jim Cornette, which is not a phrase that I usually would ever say. But he was there trying to sell Ring of Honor to Sinclair at the time. And meanwhile, here they are scrubbing Colt Cabana's face across a barbed wire bat, everybody just soaked in blood ... It must have driven him crazy.

There was a lot of it I had still never seen because the DVDs that they released were just little bits of it really and a lot of it was really hard to find. I got very lucky. Shane Hagadorn has the files of all of those Ring of Honor pay-per-views and let me look at them. So I was able to fill in a lot that I had never seen before honestly. I was like, "Oh, wow. I had written about this in the past, but I really didn't know what was going on." So it is a much more detailed look at that, which is great.

So every time we hear about their [WWE] contracts expiring soon ... they always end up re-signing, and they have so many friends [in AEW]. Like The Bucks are there and Cole and all those guys. Do you know why they keep re-upping with WWE? Are they just that happy? Is the money that good?

Obviously, I don't know officially at all. With Kevin, I really think he likes the stability, I guess, I would say. Which doesn't sound right because if you say that, it's going to sound like I'm saying AEW is chaotic and I don't want to say that, but — Kevin has talked very often about how he really likes the crew. He's made really, really good friends with the backstage crew, with the lighting, and the social media guys and stuff. And he's actually literally mentioned that as a reason why he's re-signed, I believe. That he would miss them.

Isn't that interesting? I mean ... they're your co-workers. You're hanging out with the lighting guy just as much as you're hanging out with Karrion Kross. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I assume the money is definitely a consideration, especially for Kevin. With Sami being able to have a platform for Sami for Syria and stuff is a big deal. There are trade-offs though. Obviously, if he were in AEW, he'd be more free to talk about stuff that he did not talk about in WWE. So I feel like he's got to have at least thought about that, but I don't know.

Well, while we're on the subject of questions you can't answer. Is Sami ever winning the world title?

Yes.

All right. Good.

Actually, I'm a little shook on that one because I was very much of the, "You would not keep dwelling on something if it wasn't going to happen." But then, they kept dwelling on how Punk was not going to main event WrestleMania. And now, he's not. [Editor's note: It turns out that CM Punk will, in fact, be main-eventing WrestleMania Night 1]

What were you thinking when [Punk] did the promo segment with Kevin and then the match with Sami?

I was really wondering if we were going to get a full program with them. I don't know how Kevin would feel about that. He's mentioned Punk a few times or made references to him on screen. So I feel like maybe he's angling for it because he knows it would be really intense. It would be really good.

The match with Zayn was amazing.

It was so good. And it was really interesting to see the three of them cross paths. I mentioned that Zayn and Punk had never had a match in any form, and people couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe it. And I was like, "Well, when you do the history, Kevin and Sami were the bottom of the bottom of the Ring of Honor card."

They barely crossed. I mean, Punk was gone.

There was no way. They interact for three months and they crossed. They're both in Ring of Honor for three months. And at that time, Punk is the champion and they're jobbers at best. They're barely there. There's no way for them to have a match, especially in Ring of Honor at the time. You're not going to have a Tozawa vs. GUNTHER sort of match in Ring of Honor at the time. For better or for worse. I don't think that's a good thing or a bad thing.

[Wrestling Inc.'s initial interview with J.J. McGee took place prior to the announcement of Kevin Owens' recent injury. Prior to publication, Wrestling Inc. contacted McGee again and asked her thoughts on Owens undergoing a neck surgery procedure that will keep him out of action for at least the rest of 2025 and potentially longer.]

It probably isn't a shocking spoiler to reveal that Fight Forever ends on the sentence "The story is never over." It's an ending that rings a little bitterly now, after seeing Kevin Owens look out at us and say he's not sure when we'll see him again. It's the most serious threat to Kevin and Sami's twinned narrative since Sami made the leap to WWE and left Kevin behind, possibly forever. But just as Kevin somehow forced the story to keep going then, seizing WWE's attention out of sheer stubborn cussed will at a time when no one thought he'd ever catch their eye, I have faith he and Sami will keep the story going, no matter what. It might be in the ring, it might be out of the ring, but they have no intention of leaving things unresolved between them.

He and Sami's bodies, like all bodies, are fated to fail them one day, but their wills remain indomitable.

In his absence, when we see Sami again he'll be moving forward, without Kevin for now—or so it seems. But I compare them in the book to two stars always affected by each others' gravity, even when one's presence is invisible. No matter how high Sami's star may rise or how far he may wander, his path will continue to be shaped by the pull of Kevin's trajectory. And we'll be waiting and hoping for the moment Kevin's star comes into sight once more.

Fight Forever: The Ballad of Sami and Kevin was a crowd-funded project that will be available soon from Amazon.