20 Most Hated Heel Moves In Wrestling History
18. Destined To Do This Forever
Kevin Steen was a WWF/E kid, through and through: he learned to speak English by watching the likes of Shawn Michaels and Diesel wrestling in the nineties. That kid grew into adolescence during the Attitude Era; when he became a man, he named his firstborn after Owen Hart, his favourite wrestler.
Steen began wrestling in summer 2000, debuting on his sixteenth birthday. Making a name for himself on the independent circuit, he looked on from the sidelines as he saw all of his road buddies, his wrestling peers, signed by the WWE. Bryan Danielson became Daniel Bryan, as Tyler Black became Seth Rollins… as his best friend and running buddy became Sami Zayn.
That’s the backstory to the angle, anyway. Steen got married and started a family while all of his friends became the WWE Superstars that he wanted to be. Finally, Steen signed with the WWE himself, entering their developmental promotion NXT as Kevin Owens, the name both a nod to his son, and to his frustrated ambitions. And on the very night he debuted for the company he’d idolised for two decades, Sami Zayn won the NXT Championship.
It didn’t matter that Zayn had fought tooth and nail to get it, or that the story of his title win was two years in the making: to Owens, Zayn was still out there overshadowing him, being handed everything that Owens wanted.
Owens was the first to congratulate Zayn, and the last to leave the ring with him… and then came the ambush, Owens violently slammed his best friend down to the ramp outside the ring and finally delivering a vicious powerbomb on the ring apron.
He’d deliver another nasty beatdown the following week, leading to a furious, hurt challenge, but Owens refused to accept the match unless it was for Zayn’s NXT Championship. At TakeOver: Rival, Owens destroyed fan favourite Zayn, delivering powerbomb after powerbomb until the referee stopped the match and awarded him the title.
Few men have been loathed so much, and so quickly. Three months after that, the prizefighter was facing down John Cena on RAW. The Kevin Owens Show had arrived.