An Update, an Excerpt, and an Apology

Some broken threads.

I found out Kevin and Sami had lost the tag titles while sitting at my mother’s deathbed. Jet lagged from a trans-Pacific flight, stunned and bewildered with grief—the fictional loss was so much less important than the real and looming one, yet it became part of the fabric of my mother’s death, one bright thread of pain in a tapestry of sorrow. For a very long time after she died, I found myself unable to do any real analysis of wrestling. I could see and enjoy moments, but nothing seemed connected, nothing seemed to hang together anymore. 

The book did keep progressing, though slowly. And by the time of the build to WrestleMania I found it easier to write, little by little. I’ve felt badly that I haven’t posted here in so long, so I come with a peace offering of an excerpt from a late chapter, “This is Ours,” covering Kevin’s time as Universal champion.

The interesting challenge of this section of the history is pulling out a thread that I noticed at the time but which got buried in the complications and excitements of Kevin’s 2017-18 world title run. Sami crossed Kevin’s path over and over in this time—never for the title, because he wasn’t at that level. But he was stitched into Kevin’s story whenever possible, Kevin’s first opponent as champion and last opponent as champion. It’s an example of the understated way Kevin and Sami so often define beginnings and ends for each other: heel and face turns, championships won and lost. The knots tied into a thread before it’s snapped.