Chapter 6 of Fight Forever is titled “Just Wrestle,” and it’s one of the few chapters where I spend much time behind the curtain backstage. Some of the reason for that is because it’s a post-mortem of Kevin and El Generico’s utterly disastrous first Ring of Honor run in 2005, and there’s just not much front-stage story to work with—indeed, the title itself comes from the advice Kevin was given when he asked what his character should be: “just go out there and wrestle.” “Just wrestling” has never been where Kevin has shone the most, he needs a clear character and a story to calibrate his performance by. He ends up in 2005 with something perilously close to go-home heat from the ROH fans, something he starts to transcend only when it’s far too late and he already knows he isn’t booked on any further matches.
So the chapter has to dig into the backstage dynamics and the ways that Kevin and Sami, uh, failed to endear themselves to a chunk of the locker room. As a result it’s got quite a different feel than other chapters (not surprisingly, once they enter WWE the story is almost entirely the front-stage kayfabe story), which made it an interesting challenge to write. It does end on a storytelling note, however, exploring the ways that Kevin and Sami used that failure (their first failure, really) to expand and refine their storytelling technique. The backstage conflicts end up becoming important and useful to understanding the way Kevin and Sami deliberately tie their careers together.