Since the moment he was called up from NXT, Kevin Owens had a pretty good run on the main roster. He feuded with John Cena, won multiple championships (including the Universal title), and had an extremely memorable partnership and then rivalry with Chris Jericho.
In a WWE 365 documentary, Owens revealed that Vince McMahon hated his match with Y2J at
WrestleMania 33 and it seems like he's been struggling to recover ever since.
"I think a lot of it needs to stay between Vince and I actually, to be honest, but it wasn’t just that night. There was so much over the months that happened after that that made me question myself as a performer, maybe question my place in WWE, and then ultimately affected my life in every aspect because I’m so passionate about this…
"I guess the weirdest part of it was that up until that point, everything was going great for those two first years there, or whatever, year and a half. I started in WWE, I was working with John Cena right away and we were killing it, and then I kept going up and then I went from that to the Intercontinental Title to working with Dean Ambrose to my first WrestleMania and then me and Sami [Zayn] had our story together and then the Universal Title, so it was like everything seemed to be going up and up and up, just like anybody in this industry would want it to. And I would always come back to positive, literally always come back to positive feedback, until that one night, and then everything switched."
Owens went on to say that he feels like he's been playing "catch up" in his career ever since and it sounds like he's still not entirely happy with th way things have been going.
"I’m not saying that other people or Vince or anybody else were making me feel this way…. It felt like I wasn’t doing anything right. Because I was trying to myself, after WrestleMania, after that match, I tried to kind of change things about my personality or my character or whatever and even the way I wrestled to be more in line with what the company needed me to be or the show needed me to be, but it was hard because I wasn’t finding it… It’s been a struggle since that moment, I’d say."
With any luck, Owens won't be the next Dolph Ziggler because he really should be a top star in WWE and it's a shame to think that one "bad" match could lead to his career going down such a bad route. It certainly hasn't been all bad for KO since then, of course, but he's definitely not where he used to be and in desperate need of a decent storyline.
What do you guys think?