"Check This Out!": Kevin and Sami's First Singles Match in the US, 2004

(Now available to watch on YouTube!)

In a recent interview with Humza Hussain of the Wrestling in Film Podcast, I spent a fair amount of time talking about a match on a PWG show called “Free Admission (Just Kidding)” from 2004. It was Kevin and Sami’s first singles match in the United States, and it came about as something of a fluke: Sami managed to convince booker Super Dragon to give them a spot on the card by promising they’ll work for the price of the airplane tickets. They were supposed to be wrestling Scorpio Sky and Quicksilver, but the SoCal wrestlers have gotten stuck in traffic, and so at the last second, they’re asked, can you wrestle each other instead?

It’s one of the luckiest of the many lucky breaks in their career. Because even though this is only their sixth singles match together, the two of them have such an undeniable chemistry that they take the thirteen minutes given to them by PWG and make a gem of a match, their whole career in miniature laid out for the increasingly-delighted crowd in the Hollywood-Los Feliz Jewish Community Center.

I write about the match in depth in Fight Forever: The Ballad of Kevin and Sami, detailing how well they play the crowd, how skillfully they win them over.

It’s the story of their career, the story that they carried with them to Ring of Honor and then to WWE, the story of how Kevin needs to learn, over and over again in new ways, that Sami is his match and his equal. They’re both twenty years old here, setting the dynamic in motion like a spinning top that will defy entropy for decades. It’s one of my absolute favorite matches of theirs, simple and delightful. Until recently, you couldn’t see it unless you had a subscription to HighSpots, PWG’s archive, and for a long time PWG was very zealous about keeping full matches off of YouTube.

But there’s a version of it up now that you can watch.

A couple of caveats: one is that it’s not official, so it might disappear at any time, and that would be fair. And it’s not a happy thing that it’s available. It’s only stayed up because Super Dragon, owner of PWG, has stepped away from wrestling and put PWG on hiatus, probably to deal with personal tragedy. But for now, the match is available, and it’s beautiful, and if you read my book and wished you could see it, here it is. (If you haven’t read my book, what are you waiting for?)

It’s a match between two young wrestlers who won’t be denied, who demanded attention from the moment they stepped in the ring, whose every move together said the same thing, either out loud or silently: check this out.