Earlier this week was the one-year anniversary of Sami Zayn vs. Roman Reigns at the 2023 edition of the Elimination Chamber. That event took place in Montreal, not far from Sami’s hometown, and it was the first WWE pay-per-view I had ever attended. There have been lots of wrestling shows in my past, and a handful of Raw/Smackdown events, but I had never been to a PPV.
From where I live, it’s about an eight-hour drive to Montréal. On the Friday before the show, I drove up, and it took me about 15 hours to get there because the first 400 kilometres was all freezing rain. The next 200 kilometres was a blinding blizzard. I saw dozens of cars off the road along the way, and three different pileups before I had gotten even 50 kilometres outside my hometown. They even had to shut down the highway outside of Québec City, forcing all traffic to pull over, because visibility was horrific, and the cars were literally piling up. I took a picture of my side-view mirror when we were stopped to give an idea of the ice buildup all over my car:
I ended up missing Friday night’s Smackdown, but somehow arrived safely very late Friday night. All this is to say: I was incredibly invested in the Sami/Roman main event, and Sami’s story overall. Given we knew that everything was building to a Cody Rhodes-Roman Reigns main event at WrestleMania 39, we also knew Sami wasn’t winning the title. There is always hope, and a dozen cans of Molson Dry had me believing a win was possible but Sober Me always knew he wouldn’t. Of course, Roman won, Sami got hometown-cheered in defeat, and that was that.
That loss for Zayn is something that is both still hard to believe and yet the most believable thing they could have done.
Let’s give some context here. Wrestling fans always have their own favourite wrestlers; it’s what makes fandom a lot of fun. When we see the wrestlers we’ve followed succeed, it brings us into their success even if we’re just faceless human beings standing in the crowd cheering a scripted television show.
To that end, Sami Zayn was never one of my favourite wrestlers. In WWE, I always preferred Sami’s long-time real-life friend Kevin Owens, and others like Seth Rollins and Sasha Banks. Sami could put on great matches – his match vs. Shinsuke Nakamura is available in full on YouTube and it’s incredible – but he was never really someone that made me tune in.
Once Sami got involved in The Bloodline story, though, he hooked me. I even wrote about it last year in the week following his loss at the Chamber; he created a multi-layered story, told over several years, about a rising star that never reached his potential on the main roster, became a side act, and wound up a broken man. WWE themselves even put that into Zayn’s video package to hype up the Zayn/Reigns match. He turned to Roman Reigns and The Bloodline for acceptance and the bully started to use him in the ways all bullies do before Zayn finally found the courage to stand up to him. It led to incredible moments, not the least of which was Zayn slamming Reigns’s back with a chair, which led to one of the loudest pops you’ll ever hear:
As outlined in the article linked just above, when you’re telling a bully vs. bullied story, the bullied person needs to win. Unless you’re aiming for a very depressing ending, the person being bullied needs to win. Of course, that didn’t happen, and Reigns walked out with the title.
The match itself didn’t need to be a title match. This wasn’t about Roman Reigns’s title – this was about Sami standing up to Roman on his own two feet and bringing him down. It could have been a non-title match but because WWE dug their heels into the sand about Roman’s wining streak, they ended the story in the worst way imaginable.
That is the difference between Zayn and Reigns’s current opponent Cody Rhodes. Rhodes needs to win the title, Zayn doesn’t (and didn’t). He just needs to beat Roman, and those aren’t the same thing. One is about the recognition of your own value, and one is about the recognition from your peers.
So, the bully wins and time rolls on. Now we sit about six weeks away from WrestleMania 40. What, exactly, the main event will be is a bit muddled, but the frustrating part as an outsider that hasn’t watched WWE TV in nearly a year is seeing Rhodes being paralleled to Daniel Bryan’s underdog run 10 years ago. It is so mind-bendingly stupid that it’s hard to ignore.
Rhodes has won the last two Royal Rumbles, only the fourth wrestler in WWE history to win two in a row, and the first since Stone Cold Steve Austin in 1997-1998. At the risk of pouring cold water on this: a guy winning two Royal Rumbles in a row, giving him an accolade not seen in 25 years since the biggest star of the last 30 years accomplished the same thing, is not an underdog story. Rhodes has been pushed to the absolute moon since returning to WWE, whereas Daniel Bryan was wrestling 5-minute matches on the mid-card a year before his WrestleMania run. Bryan’s one world title reign ended in a 10-second squash match (Kofi Kingston-esque, in that sense). Those aren’t remotely comparable situations.
WWE had its underdog story a year ago and shot that underdog behind the barn to push the guys that they wanted to push. They had no intention of telling a good story, and for all the ‘Sami will end The Bloodline’ nonsense fans were fed, a year later The Bloodline is still a thing. I mean, holy fuck, they just added The Rock (for however long that lasts). The best story that WWE told in a decade ended as soon as the referee’s hand hit the mat for the three-count when Roman beat Sami.
One year since that Elimination Chamber, Reigns is still champ, The Bloodline still exists, Rhodes is still being pushed to stratospheric levels, and Zayn hasn’t won a televised singles match in over six months. (He has one televised singles win in the last calendar year and it was against JD McDonagh in August, the fifth-most important member of a five-person faction.) It is always a story they can come back to, but they didn’t pull the trigger at the right time, and it’s extremely clear what they think of all the people involved. The Underdog From The Underground was buried, and the whole ordeal remains an all-time storytelling fuck-up.
Cliffy's hell-hole 