Awesome / Kevin Steen

• The Steen vs. Generico matches from PWG and Ring of Honor are all, each one of them, excellent matches. Special note to their Fight Without Honor at Final Battle 2010, one of the most blood-soaked pieces of brilliance ever created, and their Ladder War at Final Battle 2012: Doomsday, where Steen hits Generico with a package piledriver off one ladder into two stacked ladders to retain his championship.
• This Ring of Honor promo against one of Kevin Steen's worst enemies, Jim Cornette. Despite Steen being a heel, the Ring of Honor fans got firmly behind Steen, partly because of moments like this.
• Do yourself a favor and find the promo Kevin cut for PWG with the The Young Bucks and Adam Cole. While fun is had with Kevin's digs at El Generico, his assertion that Adam Cole is a piece of shit and it takes one to know one, and apologizing to the Young Bucks for swearing (because they're "good Christian boys"), the entire promo is 3 minutes of vicious heel perfection. It's also the promo where he called himself "the champion of the universe".
• After winning a Fatal Four Way against Jay Lethal, Michael Elgin, and Tommaso Ciampa to get a title shot at the ROH World Championship, Kevin Steen delivers one of his most infamous promos: "The bottom line is, when I get that title shot, the Kevin Steen who's coming for it? It's not Fight Steen Fight. It's Kill Steen Kill!"
• Takeover: R-Evolution was a one-two punch for Owens. First there's his debut, where the crowd is quiet for his then-unfamiliar entrance music, but as soon as "KO" and "FIGHT" are shown on the Titantron, a huge cheer goes up. This builds to a roar as Owens enters, debuting in WWE after ten years on the indy circuit. He then proceeds to curbstomp CJ Parker, stunning the Full Sail crowd with a tope con hilo (which many indy fans recognize, but would not be a move you'd associate with a man of his size if you'd never seen him wrestle before) and a pop-up powerbomb for the decisive win. He then comes back out after Sami Zayn's NXT title win, congratulating his longtime best friend and greatest rival... before slamming him to the ground and powerbombing him onto the ring apron, cementing a long-expected, but fast-executed heel turn.
  Crowd: (after the tope) HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT!
  Owens: (laughing, to the camera) This is just the beginning.
• Before the first NXT Brooklyn event, Kevin is out to deliver one more promo for his NXT title ladder match with Finn Balor, and as soon as he mentions Brooklyn, the Full Sail crowd boos hard (because this would be the first time a NXT pay-per-view would be held away from Full Sail University and the fans weren't happy about it). Owens goes off on the crowd, brilliantly pointing out their hypocrisy in wanting NXT to grow but not to break out into bigger arenas and audiences just because they don't want to have to watch the pay-per-view at home for once, and slamming them with a brutal insult, calling them the "John Cena of wrestling fans".
• Owens' entire debut on May 18th's RAW. How do you top Sami Zayn's messy-but-good push by Cena? By coming out in response to John Cena's "US Open Challenge," insulting most of the audience, responding to Cena's "The Reason You Suck" Speech with a blunt Shut Up, Kirk! retort...followed by a one-hit-KO from a pop-up powerbomb. THEN Owens rubs it all in by literally stomping on the US Championship belt while raising the NXT Championship up above it, and wraps up by taunting the unconscious Cena with his own "you can't see me" gesture. To put it in perspective, this is the equivalent of a C-list comic book villain mouthing off to Superman, drop-kicking the Man of Steel, then pissing on his cape. And it was AWESOME.
• To ramp it up, the actual match he had against Cena at Elimination Chamber, where he gives Cena everything he has, including moonsaults, cannonball sentons, stealing the Attitude Adjustment, an avalanche Death Valley Driver, teasing the package piledriver, and to top it all off, beating John Cena cleanly. And he even got a moment to mouth off after the match to rub it in. Yeah, the internet basically exploded.
  • And when he got on the mic after the match? He quoted Cena's own entrance theme at him.
  • Cena himself gets a CMOA in that match, earning praise for doing the job and making a younger star look like a million bucks.
• The arc of his rise through the company and just how fast everything happened: Signed a contract in August 2014, debuted on NXT television in December, won the NXT Title two months later in February 2015, made his RAW debut and defeated John Cena, clean, on PPV, in his first main roster match, as a heel in May of 2015. That's 9 months from signing his contract to debuting on RAW, and six from first NXT appearance to first main roster appearance - a feat that probably no one else in WWE's developmental has duplicated. Oh, and by the way, his short developmental run impressed WWE brass so much that they threw out the contract he signed less than a year ago and gave him a new one - with main roster money. In all likelihood, too, he'll be defending the US Title, or at least wrestling in a high-profile match at SummerSlam in front of tens of thousands. Now that's awesome.
  • On a kayfabe level, his Evil Plan that he outlined at his introduction worked. Arrive, fight, destroy, profit.
• The fact that he felt the need to call out Sasha Banks' tactic of taunting Bayley's biggest fan Izzy during their Takeover: Respect Iron Woman match as disgusting falls under a degree between this and heartwarming. Either Steen was honestly caught in the moment and repulsed due to legitimate compassion towards Izzy, or he figured on the fly that it was a brilliant heel tactic that he knew the Owens character (who's motivated in part by providing for his wife and more importantly his son) could disapprove of so as to further shine a spotlight on it and thus help Sasha's villain cred.
• Winning his first main-roster WWE championship at Night of Champions by beating Ryback to win the Intercontinental Championship!
• Regardless of Mark Henry's spot in 2015, it was nonetheless an amazing sight when Owens pop-up powerbombed the 400+ lbs "World's Strongest Man!"
• The 2016 Royal Rumble and his Last Man Standing match against Dean Ambrose was an indy fan's dream - Kevin Steen vs. Jon Moxley, which never happened due to both men being heels and never working for the same promotion concurrently. Owens and Ambrose had the crowd in the palm of their hands for over twenty minutes, and while Ambrose retained, Owens nearly had him over a dozen times and took a sick bump through two stacked tables. Not to mention both men entered the Rumble match itself later that night.
• Owens vs. Zayn, Battleground 2016. When Owens and Zayn get into a ring together, awesome usually happens - but this time the two longtime friends/rivals managed to elevate their game to a completely new plateau. Certainly the best match Owens has had that year, and arguably the best match he's had of his WWE career.
• On the 8/29/16 edition of RAW, in the waning moments of the Fatal 4-Way Match between him, Roman Reigns, Seth Rollins, and Big Cass for the WWE Universal Championship, he finally became a WWE champion, with the help of Triple H, and received a "You Deserve It" ovation from the crowd.
  • Also, indy fans noted a past promo in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla where Kevin had declared himself the "champion of the universe". Apparently, Kevin Owens might be Nostradamus.
• While their Smackdown run seemed to have them mired in an endless feud with Shane McMahon, Kevin and Sami showing up at the Raw after Wrestlemania 34 was a fresh start. They proceeded to have a match against each other for the "sole contract", where Kevin attempts a brainbuster off the top rope (which was Generico's move), and despite the countout, pulled a standing ovation out of the normally smarky crowd.
• The 5/14 episode of Raw showcased Kevin wrestling not once, not twice, but counting the dark match for the London crowd, three times. First, he and Seth Rollins had the match of the night for Seth's Intercontinental title. Then, after stealing Jinder Mahal's spot in a Money in the Bank qualifying match, he beat Bobby Lashley and Elias to win the last spot on the Raw side (with some help from Sami, of course). Then he teamed up with Zayn and Elias to take on Rollins, Roman Reigns, and Lashley and wrestled in that match, too.
• Money in the Bank 2018 and Extreme Rules 2018 were both largely lackluster shows, an exception being Kevin's performance on each of them. Money in the Bank saw him taking a bump through a table off a 20-foot ladder, which was fairly spectacular. He one-upped himself at Extreme Rules, paying homage to Mick Foley by being thrown off the top of a steel cage and going through the announcer's table below.
• On the 9/17/2019 SmackDown, his reaction to being sneak-attacked and fired by an Evil Is Petty Shane McMahon (on top of all the authority-abusing crap he already put Owens through)? Smugly serving him with a wrongful-termination lawsuit, complete with specific clauses/details that only strengthen Owens's case.