Sami Zayn is the WWE Champion, and if you didn’t feel something watching that rollup pin Cody Rhodes in Riyadh, I’m genuinely worried about you.
This wasn’t a shocking swerve. It wasn’t some hot-potato title change to pop a ratings number. According to Yahoo Sports, Zayn escaped a CrossRhodes attempt and rolled up Cody Rhodes across nearly 20 minutes of the Night of Champions triple threat, with Michael Cole calling it “A miracle in Riyadh.” That’s accurate. That’s the right call. Sami Zayn just won his first WWE world championship after a decade-long pursuit of getting close enough to smell it, and then not getting it.
A decade. Think about how crushing that is as a bit. The guy became the world’s most lovable almost-guy, and WWE just kept putting him in position and then yanking it away. Somehow, instead of that being annoying, it made every single near-miss more emotionally loaded than the last. If you followed the Zayn underdog story heading in, you knew this was different. You felt it in your chest when the three-count hit.
He cried receiving the championship from the referee. Grand Slam champion, finally.
The Kevin Owens reaction broke my brain a little. Owens has been out since before WrestleMania 41 with a neck injury — watching from home, missing the whole run. SI.com has the full reaction roundup, but none of it hit like Owens’ own post:
https://twitter.com/FightOwensFight/status/2071009622442533347
“Sami becoming WWE Champion was inevitable. He has deserved that moment for a very long time.” From the guy who beat Zayn up for years on television, and then spent years being his best friend, and then watched it happen from a couch while hurt. That’s the thing about wrestling when it actually works: the relationships between the characters accumulate weight over time, and when the payoff comes, you feel the whole history of it.
People are comparing this to Daniel Bryan at WrestleMania 30 and Kofi Kingston’s title win, and those comparisons aren’t wrong. What they all have in common is years. Years of investment before the crowd gets to lose their minds. The Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, a venue WWE has mostly used for spectacle-over-substance shows where the crowd applauds politely, absolutely erupted. Saudi Arabia! For Sami Zayn! That tells you everything about what genuine character investment does to an audience, regardless of where you’re sitting.
Wrestling Twitter keeps chasing the next swerve, the next “nobody saw that coming” debut. And sometimes that’s exactly what the show needs. But catharsis isn’t manufactured in a writers’ room the week before the show. It’s built in the slow accumulation of someone almost getting the thing they want over and over again, until the audience needs them to have it as much as the character does.
Becky Lynch posted she was “crying tears of joy.” Owens shared old photos of him and Zayn at various career stages. The whole wrestling internet collapsed into a collective sentimental mess. That’s not a swerve reaction. That’s what happens when a story actually pays off.
Took him ten years. Kid from Montreal. Took him ten years and he got there.
My dog Revis doesn’t watch wrestling but I absolutely showed him the clip twice.
