On February 18^th, Sami Zayn lost to Roman Reigns at WWE Elimination Chamber in. Montreal. It’s now been a week since then, and I still don’t completely understand the way many fans, not to mention numerous corners of wrestling media, are reacting to it.

The day after Elimination Chamber, I wrote an essay about why Sami losing was actually a good thing, because it fits the narrative of the story that’s being told — a story that’s not about becoming world champion, but about abusive families and discarded friendships, and whether you’ve gone too far down the road to hell to turn back. This story isn’t about Sami Zayn, I argued, but about his relationships with Kevin Owens, and with Jimmy and Jey Uso. The day after that, on Monday’s WWE Raw, Sami and Kevin shared an emotionally charged segment in the ring, in which Sami apologized for all he’d done to Kevin and asked for Kevin’s help, an olive branch that Kevin icily rejected, telling Sami that if he needed help, “why don’t you ask your buddy, Jey.”

In other words, I was 100% right, obviously, in your face, haters — a message that, shockingly, not all of the haters have been quick to embrace. Not even after another emotionally charged segment on this past Friday’s WWE SmackDown, which saw Sami accuse Jimmy of being both the first to accept him into the Bloodline and the first to superkick him out of it, as well as of allowing Reigns to abuse and manipulate his twin brother, Jey, who as of this writing still has yet to officially declare his loyalty to Sami or to Roman.

I think there are two reasons why fans of WWE, or at least the Bloodline story, remain so adamant that Sami (a) should have won the world title in Montreal, or (b) should still win the world title in the main event of WrestleMania 39, presumably in a triple threat match featuring Reigns and Royal Rumble winner Cody Rhodes. The first one is that they just love Sami and want him to achieve the highest level of success he possibly can, and I can’t really argue with that. I love Sami too. I would love to Sami become world champion. I would love to see it happen in the main event of WrestleMania. But being in favor of Sami’s personal success is really the only good argument, and it’s not a strong one. The second reason people are so dug in about this is because they think there are other good arguments that are stronger, and the reason they think that, I believe, is because we’re all still suffering from the long-term PTSD of 40 years of wrestling controlled and dictated by Vince McMahon, who, for worse or for fucking worse, has warped the popular perception of pro wrestling almost singlehandedly for decades, to the point that many find it difficult to talk or think about wrestling in ways that aren’t, on some level, McMahon-approved.

Am I immune to this myself? Hardly. I was calling for Sami to get that world title Mania main event along with everyone else not too long ago, and I’m sure there are other ways Vince has influenced my thinking about wrestling that I’m not even aware of. But on this particular issue, I think I see things pretty clearly at the moment, and I think I see where Vince’s creative legacy is leading people astray. And so, in an act of supreme hubris, I’ve taken it upon myself to address some of the arguments I’ve heard for why Sami either should have won the title at Elimination Chamber or should win the title at Mania, and in the process, reveal some of the Great Lies of Vince McMahon that have led us to this point.

Continue reading “The Room at the Top is Empty: Sami Zayn and the Great Lies of Vince Mcmahon” →

Speaking to the press last night after WWE Elimination Chamber, a night that saw him wrestle in the main event, for the world championship, against the biggest star in the company, in his hometown of Montreal, Quebec, Sami Zayn seemed a touch less elated that one might have expected after the most important match of his career — perhaps because he lost it.

“I’m feeling very strange, and I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. “It was kind of an unhappy ending tonight. I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t affect me. Of course, this is a dream come true … but the storybook ending obviously has a certain ending to it, and that’s not what happened. I can’t act like there’s a small part of me that wishes I could have given that ending to the people, the story, myself, family, friends, fans, and the city of Montreal.”

“Looking into the crowd after the three count, just seeing their faces, I was like, ‘This is not fun,’” he continued. “They were so hurt, so deflated, but not in a storyline sense … it was a downer — even if the fight was great, which it was.”

Scrolling through Twitter in the wake of the fight in question — which was great, it can’t be denied — it seemed the fans in Montreal weren’t the only ones feeling deflated. There was a general tone of anger and resentment after Zayn’s loss, and not the kind that makes you more excited to watch Cody Rhodes dethrone Roman Reigns at WrestleMania. Instead, it was the kind of feeling where you’re wondering if WrestleMania is even worth watching. The sentiment seemed to ultimately coalesce around the idea of “same old WWE.” Can’t give anyone a win in their hometown. Can’t put the title on a guy who isn’t tall and handsome and bulging with muscle. Can’t reward the long-suffering wrestler who got himself over organically after years of being stuck in the lower midcard, or the audience who are screaming for him to win, to just win, just this once, WWE, please, listen to us when we tell you that we have chosen our champion and let that man hold those belts high to raucous applause. No, can’t have that. Same old WWE.

It shocks me more than I think anyone will ever understand that I do not share that sentiment. It seems correct, after all. I understand it. Had Zayn won, I would have been so happy. I would have basked in the joy of an entire city, an entire province, an entire nation, and an entire fandom. I’ve been a fan of Sami Zayn for 15 years, and it would have been incredibly special to have seen him defeat Reigns and raise the titles high.

It also would have been the wrong choice, and I’m glad Sami lost.

That’s because the story that’s been told over the past 12 months in WWE is not The Sami Zayn Story. It’s Sami Zayn and The Bloodline. It’s not just Sami’s story. It’s Jey Uso’s story. It’s Kevin Owens’ story. It is not, and has never been, a story designed to catapult Sami into the main event picture in WWE (though it has certainly done that). It’s not a story about Sami proving that he’s the best wrestler in the world or overcoming the glass ceilings put in his way by a company that doesn’t believe in him. That was Daniel Bryan’s story. That was Kofi Kingston’s story. That’s why their stories involved actual authority figures as primary antagonists (Triple H for Bryan, Vince McMahon for Kingston) and that’s why their stories had to end with them becoming world champion in order to have satisfying endings. Those were stories about individual accomplishment, about people who were held back from being acknowledged as truly great. And maybe, on a meta-level, you feel that way about Sami Zayn — that he’s better than WWE has presented him over the years, that he’s one of the best wrestlers in the company and deserves to be treated as such instead of working (admittedly brilliant) matches against the likes of Johnny Knoxville. That’s understandable. That’s how I feel about Sami, too.

But that isn’t what this story is about.

I was pretty sure Sami wasn’t winning the title last night, although, credit where credit is due, WWE’s presentation and the match itself did a great job of making me think, on a couple occasions, that I was wrong. I wasn’t dreading a Zayn loss — on the contrary, I was expecting it. There was only one thing I was dreading: the idea that Zayn would lose specifically because his friend, Jey Uso, who had refused to join in on The Bloodline’s beatdown of Sami at the Royal Rumble and whose loyalties were supremely in question, would turn on him. That was the expectation for a fairly wide swath of Wrestling Twitter, and while I saw the logic behind the idea, especially if the idea was to build to Zayn and Owens vs. The Usos for WrestleMania, as has been reported, I really didn’t want it to happen. It would have felt like a betrayal of Jey’s character, and a major creative setback in the phenomenal story being told. This element of the match, rather than Sami winning or losing, was always going to be the determining factor in whether I thought this was the “same old WWE,” or if it was something different. And it turned out to be the latter.

Jey didn’t turn. He actually didn’t end up making a choice at all, standing with Reigns and Sami in the ring, steel chair in hand, attacking neither of them. It was the only scenario that made sense. If Jey had hit Sami with the chair and re-established himself as part of The Bloodline, he would be undoing months of subtle, beautiful character work. But if he hit Roman with the chair and established himself as a babyface allied with Zayn, that would have essentially ended the story too early. The same is true of Kevin Owens, who came out after Zayn’s loss to attack The Bloodline, who he’s been feuding with for months. I had expected Owens, another Quebecois and Zayn’s “you and I are destined to do this forever” frenemy across the wrestling landscape for the last 20 years, to arrive to end the show as a means of sending the Montreal crowd home…well, maybe not happy, but not entirely heartbroken. And if you really wanted to make them happy, I reasoned, you would have Zayn and Owens embrace in the middle of the ring, officially best friends again. But while Owens did appear to take out The Bloodline, and while he did stand aside for Zayn to hit Reigns with a Helluva Kick, there was no embrace. There wasn’t even a clear sense that the two men were even allies again. Owens just left, cautiously and meaningfully eyeing Zayn on his way back up the ramp. Because, again, when those two finally reconcile, the story is basically over.

Because this story is fundamentally about friendship, about love, about family. It’s about sacrificing your old family for your new family, and the complications that happen when your new family maybe isn’t everything you thought it was. Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, Jey Uso, and even Jimmy Uso aren’t just wrestlers, they are deep, fully realized characters who have feelings about each other, and while those feelings all exist within the orbit of Roman Reigns, they don’t involve Roman directly. Jimmy and Jey aren’t in The Bloodline because of their feelings for Roman, they’re in The Bloodline because of their feelings for each other, which Roman masterfully used against them back when he first started putting the group together. Roman himself doesn’t actually care about either Sami Zayn or Kevin Owens, and they don’t care about him the same way they care about the other characters in the story. Sami sought Roman’s approval because he wanted to be in The Bloodline, but it was Jey’s approval that actually mattered; that was the relationship the story hinged on at Survivor Series. Kevin cares about Roman only insofar as he wants to be champion; his role in the story isn’t to hate Roman, it’s to love Sami, and then to be alienated from him. Reigns is an overarching presence for all of this, but he’s actually not a central figure in this narrative. The central figures will all be present for the tag team title match at Mania, assuming that’s where we’re going — Sami, who wanted so desperately to be part of a loving community that he ended his friendship with Kevin via a Helluva Kick; Kevin, who tried to tell Zayn time and time again that The Bloodline wasn’t his true family, and who ultimately gave up on his friend; Jimmy Uso, who was the first member of The Bloodline to accept Sami, but also the first member to kick Sami in the head when he refused to follow Roman’s orders; Jey, who doubted Sami’s intentions from the beginning, but was won over the point that he now loves Sami like a brother, and now he has to decide if he will remain loyal to his old family or to his new one. That’s the story here, brilliantly told via the actions of complex characters with complicated feelings, and Sami accidentally spearing Jey last night before the latter could make a choice will only add to the tangled nature of this particular web as we head toward WrestleMania.

And Roman? He now has to deal with Cody Rhodes. And while I don’t expect that match to become a triple threat involving Zayn, I do expect Zayn to have a massive impact on the outcome of that match. Because if we all believe that Cody is going to win — and we do — the only way for that to happen is for The Bloodline to fall apart. For literally years now, Reigns has held onto his championships solely because his cousins (and Paul Heyman) have been there to help him. It’s his ace in the hole, his biggest advantage, and Sami told Cody as much last week on Raw. It makes no sense for Cody to win the title win The Bloodline still intact, and as Roman has made clear, Sami is the man who will tear the group apart, purely by being a friendly and lovable person. Would I like to see Sami Zayn win a world title in WWE? Yes. 100 percent. I want it. But that’s not how this story ends — that’s not how Sami beats Roman. He beats Roman by taking Roman’s family away and thus leaving the champion vulnerable to another contender in the form of Rhodes.

Or at least, that’s how I see it. There are still any number of ways this story could go, and any number of ways WWE could still screw it up. But they didn’t screw it up last night at Elimination Chamber — quite the opposite. That match ended exactly the way it needed to end, not with Sami holding the titles, but with Sami wondering where his friendships with Jey Uso and Kevin Owens currently stand. And if you still feel like Sami was done a disservice, consider this:

Sami Zayn has only, ever, had two televised singles matches for a world title in WWE, both against Roman Reigns. The first one, on the December 3^rd, 2021, episode of WWE SmackDown, before the Sami/Bloodline story began, was in the service of the feud between Reigns and Brock Lesnar leading up to WrestleMania 38. After the opening segment saw Lesnar goad Zayn into challenging Reigns for the Universal title that night, various segments throughout the broadcast made it clear that the idea of Zayn beating Reigns was an absolute joke. Even Zayn belittled himself in the process, ultimately attempting to solicit help from Lesnar because, in Zayn’s words, Lesnar would then have an easier opponent to defeat for the title. The “story” ended with Lesnar decimating Zayn prior to the “match,” which Reigns won in 15 seconds.

Last night, Sami Zayn’s championship match with Roman Reigns was a major beat in one of the best-told stories wrestling has ever seen, and it lasted more than 32 minutes. Far from being a joke, Zayn was a hero, and very clearly capable of defeating Reigns — at one point, if the ref hadn’t been knocked unconscious, he very obviously would have won. The match established firmly that Zayn was on Reigns’ level, at least that night in Montreal, and even if WWE doesn’t continue to treat him with quite that degree of respect, I think it’s safe to say Sami’s days of losing matches to celebrities are over. More importantly, he’s an established babyface with a boatload of popular support, as he was always meant to be. Last night was a spectacular moment in the career of Sami Zayn, one that has permanently elevated his stock in WWE, and I don’t know how much more we can ask for considering the fact that none of this was supposed to happen when the story began. He’s not going to be holding a world championship as WrestleMania comes to a close, but he will almost certainly be holding a tag team championship alongside Kevin Owens, his best friend both in kayfabe and in real life, and I can’t wait to watch it happen.

As the press conference last night went on, and Zayn spoke further about what he and Reigns had created that night, he started to visibly and audibly feel better. Removed from that singular moment of loss, the moment when he stared out at the faces of the people of Montreal and felt bad for letting them down, he was able to step back and feel proud of the story he was telling, a story that, I think it’s safe to say, will go down in wrestling history as one of the medium’s crowning achievements. Sami Zayn doesn’t need a world championship to show us he’s one of the best wrestlers in the world — he’s spent a full year showing us that, and he will continue to show us that, by proving himself to be one of wrestling’s greatest storytellers. Think about how deeply he made you feel, how desperately you cared about his victory or defeat in what is, after all, a scripted narrative, and give him the credit he deserves. The world championship is a prop with no true value outside the fictional world wresting creates. Our feelings, our investment, is what truly matters in wrestling, and is what will ultimately linger in our memories forever.

Nobody can take last night in Montreal away from Sami, and nobody can take it away from us, either. We can only take it away from ourselves, by caring more about who has the big gold thing than about the story being told. On February 18, 2023, Sami Zayn proved that he was the best wrestler in the world — not by winning a championship match, but by losing one.

This article was originally published by FanFyte on August 3rd, 2021, three days after WWE released Bray Wyatt.

The first images were of decay. The abandoned degradation of small-town America – loose tires and wire fences, unpainted shacks and unpopulated storefronts, a church. The outermost borders of civilization just before the point where it vanished into the swamps beyond. The first words we heard him speak were, “Good things come to those who believe in Bray Wyatt.”

It was an assertion that would be tested constantly over the course of his WWE career. After all, no one believed in Bray Wyatt more than the man who played him, third-generation wrestler Windham Rotunda. Watching those early NXT video packages that officially introduced him in 2012, one gets the sense that Rotunda is talking not about his fictional followers, but about the Bray Wyatt character. “They don’t love you like I do,” he says. “They don’t know you, man. They can’t protect you like I can. And how am I gonna do that? With love.” Windham Rotunda loved Bray Wyatt, and that love fueled a blood-red streak of creativity in a world where creativity isn’t necessarily rewarded. Good things did come to him, but two barriers popped up for every breakthrough, demanding that he overcome them next. For nearly ten years, his dark and innovative mind sheparded Bray Wyatt through a repeating cycle of destruction and re-birth. The character would change, and change, and change again, yet somehow remain the same, continually playing with themes and ideas that were present from the very beginning, shining a light on Rotunda’s relationship with wrestling, and with himself.

Bray Wyatt was born alongside the show we know now as NXT, but by that time, Rotunda had already debuted on Raw, challenged for a championship, and been in the ring with Randy Orton and John Cena. As a “contestant” on the original game show version of NXT (in a piece of potential irony, his “pro” was Cody Rhodes) he had been given the demeaning ring name Husky Harris and was briefly part of both Wade Barrett’s all-NXT heel stable the Nexus and CM Punk’s New Nexus before being punted in the head by Orton and sent back to FCW. His main roster stint had lasted three months, and while his in-ring talent was undeniable, WWE had made it painfully obvious that he didn’t look like Vince McMahon’s idea of a wrestling star.

Bray’s early NXT packages seem to reference this history. “I been through hell, man. I know how cruel it can be. I know what it’s like. I know what it does to a man. It changes him. It makes you stronger…. It took away my ability to feel fear, to feel pain! I’m not afraid anymore!” Looking back, the creation of Bray Wyatt can be seen as a direct response to the frustration of being Husky Harris, humiliated and tossed aside. “What will they do when they discover they cannot hurt me?” he asks, briefly invoking Hulk Hogan in one of his line readings. “Whatcha gonna do to something like me?”

Wyatt never said who “they” were, but he didn’t need to. He feuded with other wrestlers, but his enemy, as he constantly made clear, was the machine, the systemic apparatus of the WWE that had judged him and found him unworthy. In the beginning, he was half fallen angel and half Antichrist (one early NXT promo involves him speaking in tongues) both of which had been done before in wrestling. His look was based on Robert DeNiro’s character from the 1991 thriller “Cape Fear,” which had previously been used as a gimmick by Dan Spivey, and he was far from wrestling’s first evil preacher. What made Wyatt unique was his vendetta against WWE itself, and crucially, the fact that he saw the fans as his allies. The imagery of derelict houses and empty streets was no accident – Wyatt spoke in the language of the impoverished and abandoned, those whose dreams had been crushed, as his had, by forces too big to fight back against and too all-encompassing to escape. He was tapping into the class resentment of post-Occupy America, but he was also tapping into the resentment of WWE fans who had spent years enduring one of the promotion’s most creatively barren periods, resentment that would lead to total revolt at the 2014 Royal Rumble. In this era, it was no trivial thing to promise revolution, and as he refined his character’s ideology, Wyatt struck on a fundamental truth: “When we are alone, we are weak and frail. But when we come together, when we unite, we are strong! We are dangerous! We are family.”

The creation of the Wyatt Family was, counterintuitively, another reaction to setback. Wyatt wrestled his debut match on NXT’s fourth episode, but shortly thereafter was sidelined with an injury. He kept appearing to cut promos, though, and more importantly, he gathered his family, incorporating Luke Harper (the late, great, and much-lamented Brodie Lee) and Erick Rowan into his act. Bray Wyatt turned out to be very much a creature of community – his rare solo runs didn’t last long, and Rotunda’s storytelling style was ill-suited to solitude. He worked best as part of a group, playing on the relationships between the people around him and keeping his character consistent by referencing his own history with them. And of course, he had his fireflies, the fans who illuminated his dark entrances with lighters and cell phones as they swayed, entranced, to the rhythm of his sinister song.

Unfortunately, no amount of crowd support could get Bray Wyatt what he really wanted. It was a fatal flaw in the meta-narrative of the character: The system the fictional Wyatt raged against was a real thing that controlled his story, and as a result, he could never be allowed to win. For WWE to make him their champion, or even let him score a big symbolic victory by, say, beating John Cena at Wrestlemania, would be to acknowledge even the smallest bit of his critique, and that isn’t a tale Vince McMahon has ever been interested in telling. Bray Wyatt was a heel who hated WWE, and heels who hate WWE lose to John Cena. The immutable truth of his dominance by actual, existing power structures had a profound impact on the Wyatt character. He could, it turned out, still be hurt. He could still feel fear. Sometimes anger isn’t enough. Sometimes community isn’t enough. Sometimes (almost every time, actually) you go up against the machine with your brothers and sisters by your side, and you lose, because the machine really is that insurmountable and the odds against you really are stacked that high.

Wyatt expressed all this explicitly in a backstage Smackdown promo following his loss to Cena at Payback 2014, ending with the words, “Brothers and sisters, I am reborn.” Rebirth was his counter to being slapped back down by reality – his appearance didn’t change much at first, but his stories gradually became less about revolution and more about his personal relationships. Wyatt never won the WWE Championship back when he was prophesying WWE’s demise, but he did win it, almost incidentally, during his 2016-2017 storyline with Randy Orton, which was about Bray placing his trust in the wrong person and losing everything because of it. This narrative would repeat itself in Wyatt’s final WWE match at Wrestlemania 37 (appropriately against Orton) when he was betrayed by Alexa Bliss – one of the most oddly endearing things about Bray was always the fact that, despite his monstrousness, he was a vulnerable character who deeply loved those who followed him, and often suffered for it.

Wyatt also came to represent creative innovation in the increasingly stale world of WWE. The ideas for the character weren’t always good, and when they were good, they were often poorly executed – that same Randy Orton story included the laughable bug projections at Wrestlemania 33 and the infamous House of Horrors match – but the attempts always centered itself around Bray Wyatt. Prior to the House of Horrors, there had been the New Day’s invasion of the Wyatt Compound, a visually offensive mess of a vignette that coincidentally came immediately on the heels of Matt Hardy’s ridiculous masterpiece, “The Final Deletion.” Later, when Hardy’s “Broken” character proved so popular that he brought it back with him to WWE, Wyatt was his opponent in “The Ultimate Deletion,” WWE’s sole attempt at re-creating Hardy’s bizarre world, and later his tag team partner. It was a collaboration that could have yielded much more, but that couldn’t get off the ground within the company’s creative rigidity – according to Hardy, he and Wyatt were taken off TV because “they were tired of us suggesting ideas.”

Rotunda was in desperate need of another rebirth. This time, though, he transformed more completely than ever before, reimagining Wyatt as the host of a creepy kids’ show, Firefly Fun House, who also happened to be the Fiend, a nightmare wrestler with a mask made by Tom Savini and a lantern made out of the old Bray Wyatt’s head. The new twist on the gimmick rocketed Wyatt back to relevance and led him to the longest period of sustained success he’d ever had, but the most interesting thing was Firefly Fun House, which again provided Rotunda with a platform to grapple with his frustrations. It’s some of the most fascinating creative output of his career, and it’s a puppet show – Wyatt finally interacts directly with the long-invoked Sister Abigail, uses “Huskus the Pig-Boy” to acknowledge the existence of Husky Harris and comment on WWE’s obsession with certain body types, and audaciously trots out a devil-horned puppet of Vince McMahon himself. It all culminated at Wrestlemania 36, in the midst of a pandemic, with the Firefly Fun House match.

It involved John Cena, of course. Bray Wyatt was, in many ways, Cena’s opposite, and always had been. Their differences were more than physical, though Cena’s bodybuilder physique represented everything Wyatt wasn’t. Cena earnestly believed in WWE as an institution; Wyatt earnestly believed it was all a lie. Cena was the superhero, inspiring children everywhere; Wyatt sang chilling versions of children’s songs and had once defeated Cena with a demonic children’s choir. And of course, Cena had beaten Wyatt all those years ago, throwing him into the cycle of death and rebirth that would eventually lead to the Fiend. Their final “match” was entirely cinematic, a dark mirror deconstruction of Cena’s career that left him broken and destroyed. Previous attempts at cinematic segments involving Wyatt had fallen short in part because they inevitably devolved into standard wrestling physicality – this one thrived on abstraction, with metaphors and historical references standing in for forearms and clotheslines, and in that environment, Bray Wyatt could finally stand triumphant. It was his first and last win at Wrestlemania, and John Cena wasn’t seen again for over a year.

There’s a bittersweet poetry to the fact that Rotunda was released from WWE immediately after Cena returned. Bray Wyatt could no longer exist in a world that he couldn’t permanently change, no matter how many times he changed himself. According to Fightful, one factor in Rotunda’s release was that he had been “getting protective of his character,” an idea that certainly tracks. Wyatt died and came back to life as many times as he needed to, but in the end, the only way to change the game was to stop playing. We don’t know if there will be yet another evolution of the strange, sad, evil character that means so much to the man behind it, but his fans can take inspiration from the final edition of Firefly Fun House, which aired the night after Wrestlemania 37. “I think this could be a brand new start for all of us here,” Wyatt said. “A new season, new friends, and a brand new me! I feel reborn!”

His WWE career, for now, is over. His future is unknown. But nobody in wrestling is better at being reborn. And good things come to those who believe in Windham Rotunda.

Bray Wyatt returned to WWE on October 8th, 2022.