You know when a singer goes to the wrong city when addressing the crowd? It happens even to the best. The great Bruce Springsteen has already shuffled between Pittsburgh and Cleveland.
It happened to Kevin Owens too, but in all honesty, he was just on the phone for an interview, not in front of 18,000 viewers. And he was not mistaken; he just forgot where he was.
“Hi, Kevin, where in the world are you right now?”
“Uh… f***, I’m where?” »
It will come back to him a few seconds later. The Quebec wrestler is in Savannah, a magnificent city where Forrest Gump waits for the bus while philosophizing about life. And where is WWE Raw taped on this Monday night.
Owens then details his schedule for the past few days, and it’s understandable why he was lost for a moment. His week started Friday in Lafayette, Louisiana for the SmackDown TV show. From there, a three-hour drive awaited him to get to Monroe, still in Louisiana, for the Saturday show.
From Savannah, after the show, the 39-year-old planned to drive three hours to Charlotte, from where he will fly to London, where his wife and two children are waiting for him. “I land on Tuesday, I have Wednesday with them. Then I go to Ireland for a show, and it continues for the weekend. After all that, we’re going to have a few days in Paris with the family. The holidays, in quotes, are stuck between the shows.
“Road fatigue, we accept it. But being away from family is a big sacrifice. Before, we had three, four days at home a week. Now, if I have three days at home, it’s wow. »
The other aspect to take into account is that when he is at work, the one who is called Kevin Steen, in real life, is not exactly sitting in his chair with both feet on the desk .
These days, he struggles with his old friend Sami Zayn. Since WrestleMania 39, in April, the two compatriots from Quebec have been tag team champions and given their immense popularity, WWE asks them to participate in the televised galas on Friday and Monday, while the vast majority of wrestlers are required to work at only one of the two events.
But as he now wrestles as a team, we guess that the shows are less physically demanding, since there are four wrestlers to lend themselves to the stunts, rather than two. At least, that’s what we thought.
“The big advantage of wrestling as a team is that it’s less mentally demanding, because multiple people are involved to make the fight exciting,” Owens said. It’s easier to have a good match as a team than one on one. But physically, we give ourselves as much. It’s not like it’s going to save my body. »
Owens’ schedule is so jam-packed that WWE promoters have scheduled time for him this last week of June for a series of interviews intended to boost upcoming shows in Quebec…August 20-21! The great wrestling circus will then be passing through Laval and Quebec.
It’s the proverbial ransom of glory, those banal moments for ordinary mortals that become complicated when you reach a certain status. These moments that a generous salary cannot buy.
Life moves fast in this industry, and Owens had a pretty clear demonstration of that last spring. We were telling you about the title of champions by team that Zayn and him won in April. It was Saturday, the first night of WrestleMania. In another era, you needed two tapes to watch this show. Now it takes two days.
Anyway, on Saturday, Owens and Zayn become tag team champions in the first night’s final. The next day, they again participate in the “festivities” by intervening during the final. However, the event is presented in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, and on Monday morning they are expected on the set of the Today Show, in the studios of NBC… in Manhattan!
The best ? The WWE Monday Night Show was held in Los Angeles.
“We got to the Today Show, did the interview, and got on the plane back to Los Angeles.
“It’s fantastic to be tag team champions. But Sami and I keep our heads down and get through it as best we can, because it’s very busy and it comes with stress.
“It’s rock and roll, but it’s part of the game, it comes with our position in the company. Tsé, to be able to say that we did the Today Show… If you look at our careers, we were two young people, he grew up in Laval, me, in Marieville. This is not something that many people could have predicted! »
