Between addressing a live WWE audience one final time in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and flying across the Atlantic to prepare for their match against Roman Reigns and Solo Sikoa for the Undisputed WWE Tag Team Championships, Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens sat down for a special interview with Cathy Kelley for The Bump.
Discussing Owens' preferred nicknames, Zayn's dubious understanding of his fellow wrestlers' nicknames, and a lot about WCW legend Robocop, “The Underdog from the Underground” did provide some useful insight into their forthcoming match with Reigns and Sikoa, suggesting that there is a fatal flaw in The Bloodline's plans to retake the Tag Titles at Night of Champions.
“Well, I don’t know if I would put it the way you put it about getting in the headspace,” Zayn said. “I know about getting in the headspace necessary to confront Roman, and to confront Solo. When it comes down to knowing what’s going on in the mind of that lunatic, I don’t know if anyone can really put themselves there. Anyway, you cut it, I have a lot of experience with them, obviously, I feel like I have a leg up in that regard, and I said this on television the other day… yes, Roman is on a h*ll of a tear, to say the least, right? And he wants to celebrate his 1,000th day as champion by adding yet more championships to his respirator. But when it comes to being a tag team, as hard as this may be for him to hear, Roman and Solo are not as good as Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens.”
Individually, one could argue that the combined star power of Sikoa and Reigns could be enough to take down any tag team in WWE, but as Zayn pointed out, they aren't really a tag team, as the duo have never actually wrestled a match together save WarGames at Survivor Series, which didn't feature a single tag. Even if Sikoa and Reigns can take the lead early on, Zayn and Owens' hundreds of tag team reps together should prove the deciding factor in the contest.
Sami Zayn reflects on wrestling alongside Kevin Owens at Mania.
Stopping by My Love Letter to Wrestling to discuss his current in-ring efforts and the build-up to arguably the most important weekend of his career, WrestleMania 39, Zayn opened up about just how unbelievable the prospects of wrestling alongside his best friend in the main event proved to be and how happy he was to accomplish that goal with KO by his side.
“It’s just a bit surreal, I suppose,” Sami Zayn admitted via WrestleZone. “But it’s weird because there’s these two things happening at once because you’re living in the present. So when you’re in the present, you’re like, oh, yeah, naturally. So, for example, if you asked us 20 years ago about the idea of main eventing WrestleMania as a tag team, it seems absolutely insane and unlikely, and you wouldn’t even bother wasting time thinking about it.
“But then fast forward 20 years, you’re in The Bloodline angle, and The Bloodline is the hottest thing, and we’re here, it’s time to pick a main event, and we’re right there, like oh, yeah, of course, we’re gonna be the main event. It’s right there. You know what I mean? But if you take a step out of those shoes and you try to rewind to 20 years prior, you think, man, can you imagine how did we end up here?
“That’s one of the things about having Kevin as a friend on the road and a guy who I continue to share my career with is it forces you to constantly get out of the here and now of the hamster wheel that is WWE and remind you of where you came from because he came from the same place. So there’s always a reminder of where you started, and it’s standing right next to you at all times.
“I think anything that where you rise in the field that you dreamed of being in, is you lose perspective of the inner child, the eternal 13-year-old who wanted it to begin with like that guy gets buried away because you’re here now, and you’re caught up in the business side of it and the ego and the and the climb and the chase and all this kind of thing and competitiveness or whatever.
“So anytime you can touch back in with that inner child that reminds you of why you’re actually doing this. It just gives you perspective. It gives you gratitude, and it gets you. I just think it’s very important mental clarity to not get diluted.”
After spending years, literally, without a title between them, KO and Zayn were able to parlay the latter's time in The Bloodline to book the biggest moment of their collective careers, marking only the second time in WWE history where a tag team match headlined a night of WrestleMania. Though some, like Ric Flair, would have preferred to see Charlotte Flair take on Rhea Ripley for the SmackDown Women's Championship, in the end, the match was a perfect ending to the first night of WrestleMania 39 and a triumphant way to send 80,000 fans at SoFi Stadium home happy.
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