The Tiger is Out

The genre-savvy glee of Kevin Owens' attack on Cody Rhodes after Bad Blood

In case you missed it, Kevin turned heel on Cody Rhodes after Bad Blood.

Yes, yes, you can certainly say Cody had it coming after teaming up with the man who made Kevin’s life hell for literal years (Roman ran over him with a golf cart!) But the fact remains that attacking a friend when he doesn’t expect you to is basically a heel turn. Mostly. Heel turns, like face turns, usually require one more step to clinch the change, and that’s a recalibration with the audience. Wrestling is a collaborative art, and a wrestler’s relationship with fans is the base of their morality. Generally a wrestler finally seals the turn by either expressing newfound gratitude and respect for the fans, or by starting to insult and disrespect them. At the most basic level that’s the “cheap heat” of insulting a town’s sports teams or food, the quickest way to communicate disdain for the fans.

(This is why that moment a few weeks ago when Kevin saw a sign asking him to rip up the sign and obliged was so funny: sign-ripping is heel behavior, but Kevin did it to make a fan happy, so it was actually face behavior.)

Anyway, Kevin turned heel after Bad Blood—not after Cody’s match on the PLE, but after the entire show, as fans were streaming out of the arena on the way back to the mundane world. 

It’s a brilliantly-done segment that achieves two things simultaneously.

First, it’s the kind of thing Kevin absolutely loves, blurring the lines between fiction and reality even more than usual. When he set up his big turn on El Generico back in 2009, he started planting rumors months in advance of the turn that his knee was badly injured and he was going to have to retire, rumors that commentary mostly never addressed—because of course the minute they did, it would be obvious it was part of a story. In the same way, the treatment of Kevin’s turn on Cody since it happened has deliberately played with that. Triple H made a terse, businesslike post acknowledging it. None of the WWE social accounts has mentioned it. No breathless clickbait titles, just as if it were something no one is quite sure how to deal with. There’s no official footage, only fan cameras (or, well, “fan” cameras—someone pointed out that obviously WWE would have plants in the crowd to make sure the right angle was caught, and I immediately felt like an idiot for not realizing that.)

On Raw, people danced around the topic in the way they would if indeed one of their co-workers had assaulted another, like Seth after he “slipped” and mentioned Kevin punching Cody:

Over and over again, commentary came close to talking about it, but always cut themselves off or were interrupted. And two of the people closest to Kevin touched on it gingerly and then shied away:

(Mark my words, Cody was there on Raw not merely to stare down Gunther, but very specifically to have that conversation and get this handshake from Kevin’s former tag team partner, who has not appeared on the same screen as him in over a year now).

The turn and the aftermath all have Kevin’s joyously genre-clever fingerprints all over it, and I have a feeling he’s gleeful about the reception it got.

The second reason is more practical: WWE didn’t want to risk an audience (not a crowd but an audience) getting caught up in the energy of Kevin’s turn and start cheering his beatdown of Cody. Because Kevin as a heel is something special, and he has an ability to sweep a crowd up in the sheer violent anarchy of a moment. Even in the footage we have of the turn, with fans just milling around, you can hear how everything starts to crackle with excitement, some yelling at Kevin to stop, but lots of others cheering him on. It’s the kind of energy you don’t want getting too concentrated near your top babyface champion.

I confess, I never want my favorites to turn heel. I am a simple fan, and I like when audiences cheer for the wrestlers I love and am sad when they’re booed. With Kevin especially, I get the impression that the character is deeply miserable when he’s a heel, trapped in cycles of behavior that he loathes and craves at the same time. But there’s always a chaotic energy to his heel work that’s instantly compelling, undeniable. People intuitively react to that wild magic, a reaction best summed-up in the classic poem by “Nael, age 6”:

Yes

YES

The tiger is out