The Golden Thread
On wrestling, writing, inspiration and connections
Fight Forever is dedicated to a man I never met.
When Kevin Owens, on the first night I ever saw him, slammed Sami Zayn onto the NXT ramp and I stood up and swore that I would seek out every single match the two were ever in, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I set off on my quest and discovered, to my mingled horror and delight, that there was a decade of history to find out about, hundreds of matches and promos to unearth.
I am a researcher, by nature and by training. There’s nothing I find more satisfying than the feeling of digging into a new topic, of finding every scrap of information and putting it together, of looking back and saying oh, now I understand… now I have enough knowledge to see the bigger picture. With Sami and Kevin, that “bigger picture” was a huge sprawling story that wound its way across years, across promotions, across continents. I chased down as many matches as I could. I watched every grainy promo and vignette. After a while it all started to come together, a huge coruscating three-dimensional pattern like a net of jewels.
And for a long time, I felt no need to share this vision.
No, I was happy with the knowledge for its own sake. I knew something almost no one else in the world knew, and I reveled in that like a dragon squatting on its hoard of gems, running my greedy claws through my files and my data, seeing connections clicking into place: ah, this match led to this moment; this feud referenced this promo.
And over and over again, Llakor’s name came up.
Llakor was the online handle of Michael Ryan, the publicist for IWS, the little Canadian promotion Kevin and Generico started in. I didn’t know at the time that it was his tireless efforts that led to Sami and Kevin breaking out of the Montreal scene and into the States, that without him the wider world might never have seen them. I only knew that I kept running into write-ups of IWS shows or storylines that sparkled with wit and a winking playfulness, all by the same man. One of them, “I Am El Generico’s Father,” told the story of the night El Generico was created from a jobber with a gift for connecting with the crowd. One, “The Kevin Steen Conspiracy,” described a very young Kevin Steen’s strange tendency to get breaks at other people’s expense, though people getting injured or sick. His style—vivid, wide-ranging, erudite—was a pleasure to read, and his love for both Generico and Kevin was palpable.
He made me want to write something. He made me want to find my own way of writing about wrestling, one like his that took wrestling stories and characters seriously, while not taking oneself too seriously. One that focused not on ratings and booking, but on the work the wrestlers were doing to tell a story.
But I didn’t want to step on his toes. It was 2015, and he was probably the only person in the world who knew Kevin and Sami’s story better than I did (aside from Kevin and Sami, of course). It was likely he was working on something at that very moment. I decided maybe I should try to track him down and find out if he had anything in the works. Maybe he had wandered away from wrestling—I found his Twitter account because Kevin followed him, and he last posted two years ago, in 2013, about working for a film festival. But maybe… maybe if I could track him down, he could give me some first-hand information! Maybe we could even… write something together?
I went searching, and very quickly I discovered that Michael Ryan and I were never going to write anything together.
Llakor was never going to write about Kevin and Sami in WWE, because he had died in 2013, just a month before Sami Zayn’s debut.
I sat for a long time, staring at the information on the screen, feeling the awful unfairness of it in my bones. He’d known Sami had made it to WWE, but he’d never had a chance to see Sami beat Cesaro in his debut, never seen Kevin’s bloody arrival the next year, never seen their story make the final leap that his words had propelled them toward so long ago. His death had happened suddenly, unexpectedly, and he’d been so young. In fact, he’d been—
The numbers on the screen came together inexorably.
He’d been only two years older than me.
A chill ran up my spine. He was one of the only people in the world who knew Sami and Kevin’s story better than me, and he was gone. Suddenly I felt the weight of the story pressing down on me, its unrealized potential. At the same time, it all felt so delicate, a spun-crystal tesseract that could be smashed by a single faltering heartbeat. With Llakor gone, I was maybe the only person in the world with the knowledge, the time, and desire to record that history. If something happened to me, like it had happened to Michael Ryan… it might all be gone forever.
That was when I decided I had to, well, finish the story. I had to see if I could write it all down, put it all out into the world, try to make some kind of sense of it all in the way he always had.
One of the things I loved most about his writing was his ability to balance clarity and conciseness with a streak of sheer self-enjoyment. He’d start off a piece with a quote from Tacitus: he’d reference Thomas Wolfe next to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer just because it was fun; he’d recap an entire feud in the form of a Norse saga just for kicks, teetering back and forth between ludicrousness and heroism:
Now it didst so happen that Steve of the Royds
Came to the ring with a golden cape
And having lost to this smaller, quicker man
The heart of the giant was filled with shame.
Taking this golden cape from his shoulders,
Steve of the Royds hung it upon El Generico saying,
"You are more deserving of this cape than I shall ever be.
Wear it and remember that you won it by beating a giant.
I am putting away my boots and hanging up my weight belt
Until such a time that I am needed again."
And El Generico didst wear this golden cape
And with great joy didst cry:
OLE!
And the joyful crowd didst cry in reply:
OLE!
“Verily, I did readest too much Mighty Thor as a kid” he notes wryly.
It was Llakor who wrote up the first narratives about El Generico’s history and gave him his backstory: an orphan on the streets of Tijuana fending for himself using lucha libre, banished from Mexico after a rash brainbuster nearby killed an opponent. He supplied the first descriptions of Kevin’s struggles against Jacques Rougeau, savaging Rougeau for not letting his most promising student gain experience in other promotions. When I read his description of wrestling as revolving around “the Tinkerbell Moment,” I lit up: yes. Yes, this is what wrestling is.
At its heart, wrestling is all about the “Tinkerbell” moment, that moment in Peter Pan when Tinkerbell lies dead and the outraged audience shouts and claps and cheers; desperate to change the outcome. The best wrestling crowds are the ones who are united in their belief that if they believe hard enough; if they clap hard enough; if they shout hard enough – they can change the outcome.
That quote is from his most well-known piece, “I Am El Generico’s Father,” where he describes the night El Generico was created as a character in such vivid detail the reader feels like they’re right there at ringside, cheering for the generic luchador with all their heart.
It was at this point that the IWS crowd had an epiphany – a moment of clarity. It was at this point that the crowd switched from chanting “Olé!” to echo El Generico because it was fun to do and started chanting “OLÉ!” on their own because – well, for lots of reasons. Because they wanted to support El Generico; because they hated TNT; because they suddenly realized that everyone else in Le Skratch was chanting; because they suddenly believed that if they kept chanting El Generico could win.
It was a “Tinkerbell” moment.
Through his words, the origin story of El Generico enters the realm of myth. This throwaway character starts here to become the folk hero that the wrestler behind the mask would make him through the years, via the magic of community investment, that most precious resource in wrestling.
As the dust cleared, a few things were clear. We did not know who El Generico was, but we wanted him back. That night, the IWS fans chose the man that they would cheer for more; cheer for louder; cheer for over and above anyone else. That night, we turned El Generico from a joke to a fixture. That night, we created El Generico. That night, we earned the right to say…
I am El Generico’s Father.
Working on the book, I was constantly aware of how I was merely continuing the lines that Llakor had started to draw twenty years before. Sometimes his words resonated almost eerily into the future, expressing his love and pride for Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn from long before they ever existed. In “The Kevin Steen Conspiracy,” Llakor details all the ways that Kevin has gotten lucky breaks over the years, all the random little quirks of fate that helped him out. Written just before Kevin Steen had his first match in Japan in 2005, it would have rung just as true in 2014 as Kevin Owens got ready to appear in WWE for the first time.
As he waits for his music, will he think of all the little random events that brought him there? His injury, the fight between his trainers, a fan chant, a gush of blood, Sid Vicious painting a midget, a recommendation, a doctor's note, a cancellation, a note of praise? Will he think of all the men who conspired and took risks to give him his opportunities? Manny, Manson, Malaka, Grizzly, Eddy, Zandig, Fat Frank, Super Dragon, Daniels, Joe, Strong, Corino (amongst many, many others.)
No, somehow, I don't think he will. I know Kevin Steen a little bit after writing for him for two years and I think that. . . Kevin Steen will shake his head back and forth and say to himself, “I belong here. I deserve to be here.”
And then his music will hit and Kevin Steen will walk out and prove that he does deserve to be there. And when he does all of us who have conspired to get him there will each in our own way, will celebrate, will, well for want of a better phrase, mark out.
Llakor’s words were right that Kevin deserved all of his success in 2005. They were right in 2014 when Kevin Owens walked into WWE. He’s still right in 2025 every single time Kevin’s music hits and the crowd roars out to welcome him.
But there’s one thing in that passage he got wrong. He says that Kevin won’t think of the people who helped him succeed, won’t feel a debt of gratitude to them. And even though he most certainly means Kevin-the-character and not Kevin-the-real-person, he’s still wrong. Because Kevin’s Twitter account @FightOwensFight didn’t even exist in 2013, when Llakor died. When Kevin came to WWE and created his new account, he followed @llakor, even though Michael Ryan would never post again. Kevin has unfollowed everyone and even deleted his account multiple times in the last decade. Each time he comes back, he re-follows Llakor. Every time.
He doesn’t forget.
In 2023, I was in Montreal to see Sami Zayn fight Roman Reigns for the undisputed WWE championship. It was the purest example of the Tinkerbell Moment I’ve ever experienced; nearly every single person in that building convinced for the span of the match that we could change destiny by loving Sami with all our might (that we failed doesn’t contradict the power of the impulse). Even through the tears of loss, I couldn’t help but think about how proud Llakor would have been to see Sami achieve such heights as his truest self, unmasked and authentic. Because beneath the fiction, beneath the pretense that he was talking about Generico returning to Southern California in 2004, that’s what he was talking about in “That Rudolph Moment,” his faith that the red-headed kid he knew could leave home and come back one day stronger and truer to himself:
Maybe Thomas Wolfe was wrong, maybe you could go home again. Or maybe what he meant was that the person that you were when you left was not the same person that you were when you came back. He had left Tijuana as a scared, red-headed kid, he had come back a confident adult, proud in the mask that he had earned wrestling so far from home.
Once you are at home in your own skin, you can never be lost again.
Speaking of being at home in your own skin, Llakor’s writing style wasn’t one he came to naturally. He talks in “I Am El Generico’s Father” about how his first write-ups were nothing but “ridiculously long move by move descriptions of the shows.” It was only over time that he came to understand that to write about wrestling in a way that moves people, you have to find the throughline, the golden narrative thread that stitches those moves together and ties the audience into the story the wrestlers are telling. Once you can find that, it’s unbreakable: a gleaming ribbon that carries the past into the present and extends into the future. Even if you can’t continue it, it doesn’t fray or break, but lies shining in your words, a gift for someone else to find, and turn over in their hands, and marvel at. And maybe even try to continue. That was my inspiration.
That was Michael Ryan’s gift.
A few links to Llakor’s work:
The piece was a very captivatingly written tribute and through it also unpeeled more layers to both Kevin and Sami and their background pre-wrestling fame. In that same sense, it also shared the deeper motivation that drove you as a writer to pursue the intricate topic that is the subject of your book and ultimately capture it in a finished book form.
Honestly could not hit the like icon fast enough.