Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens are going to be back in action again in the next few months, and everything is going to be great.
That’s what Kevin thinks, at least, and we know because he’s told us so. When Sami Zayn went out with injuries to both of his shoulders in May 2018, Kevin spent the next five months reminding us of his best friend, Sami Zayn over and over again. If Sami were here, was his constant refrain, If Sami were here everything would be okay.
And maybe that’s true. Or maybe Kevin was managing, somehow, to see the past year in the rosiest light possible, focusing only on the positive moments and not the negative, trying to make Sami into his image of an ideal friend: positive, reliable, a source of staunch support, the perfect wingman and sidekick. So somehow he’s managed to overlook, ignore, reason away that before his injury, Sami apparently tried to trick Kevin into letting down his guard so Sami could win the title off him, promising to lie down and let Kevin pin him “to pay you back after all you’ve done for me” (oh, the ambiguity of that phrase)–but then seeming to try and roll him up at the last instant:
And Sami ignored Kevin’s appeal that they fight together, leaving him at Lashley and Strowman’s mercy:
These certainly aren’t actions that fit Kevin’s paradisaical image of his best friend, Sami Zayn, who’ll always have his back and be his guardian angel. But Kevin seems to be unwilling to see that, because it contradicts the story he’s created for himself: the story where all is forgiven and Sami will be there for him no matter what. He’s bent all of his considerable willpower to the task of ignoring the fractures and faultlines in their friendship. But he’s not likely to be able to ignore them forever, because these things don’t just go away, no matter how much you might wish they would. Not in wrestling, not in life.
This is a tentative field guide to those fractures and faultlines, a little re-introduction to what’s likely to unfold in messy technicolor glory in 2019.
Kevin yearns for Sami to trust him, yearns for it with the intensity of a man dying of thirst longing for a drink of water in the desert. He trusts Sami, after all: even before their partnership begins, he literally says that Sami is the only person he trusts.
And over and over again as they teamed up, he put his faith in Sami, trusting him to save him, to support him, to have his back. His trust in Sami seems almost unshakable to this point. He desperately wants Sami to trust him in return.
For all of his reputation as a brutal loner, most of Kevin’s career has been defined by an incessant quest to make friendships and alliances: after El Generico, he worked with Steve Corino and Jimmy Jacobs, with Akira Tozawa, with the Young Bucks and Adam Cole, with Chris Jericho. When Sami gets injured, he immediately sets out to forge alliances with Braun Strowman, with Elias, with Baron Corbin, with Jinder Mahal. None of them can replace the one with Sami that he’s fixated on, though. Over and over, Kevin reminds us: my best friend will be back soon, and then you’ll all be sorry.
It’s not likely to happen that way in the long run, because Sami doesn’t seem to trust him–he likes him, but he doesn’t trust him, as we’ve seen: he won’t work with him, he won’t let down his guard. And really, why should Sami trust Kevin? Even in the world of wrestling, filled with backstabbing and abandonment, Kevin’s betrayals are legendary. The vicious, tenacious campaign against Generico; the horrifying shock of the Festival of Friendship; the indelible image of Kevin staring down at Sami’s crumpled body with blood dripping from his broken nose.
At this point, who would be mad enough to trust Kevin Owens?
Kevin wants the answer to that question to be Sami Zayn. Sami, who he has hurt worse than nearly anyone else—Sami, who lost his title to Kevin, lost seven months of his career to Kevin, who had to watch Kevin rampage across the main roster while he rehabbed, who fought him bitter tooth and nail for years—Sami trusting him again would be undeniable proof that he was worthy of trust. Sami is the final boss for Kevin’s friendship issues; until Sami can truly trust him, their friendship will never be whole.
(In his heart, I think there’s a chance that Kevin really doesn’t trust himself to deal with friendship. Sami is that worry externalized: maybe Kevin needs Sami to trust him because he doesn’t feel certain he can be trusted).
The funny thing, the real kicker, is that I think it’s likely Sami does trust Kevin, a lot more than he wants to. But he knows that’s a terrible idea, a ruinous idea. If Sami’s smart, he’s going to do everything he can to keep from having any sort of faith in Kevin’s friendship. So the one thing Kevin desperately wants from him is the one thing that Sami is going to resist giving him–or resist letting him know he already has.
Sami needs Kevin to respect him. He needs it like a starving man standing outside a bakery yearns for bread. After all, he respects Kevin: as he says in their last promo together as enemies, there’s no arguing with Kevin’s string of titles.
Sami’s entire wrestling career has been about forcing people to respect him. On the podcast he did on Turned out a Punk, Sami mentions that one of the things he misses is the challenge of walking into a venue where no one knew him at the beginning of a match and winning their respect by the end of it. His feuds with Cesaro and Neville in NXT all had respect at their heart. His clashes with Mick Foley on the main roster were sharpened by his anguish at the idea that his hero might think he wasn’t good enough to face Braun Strowman. And of course his fateful decision at Hell in a Cell was based in part on feeling disrespected and treated lightly by Shane McMahon. But maybe even more, by the fact that just before Hell in a Cell, Kevin sneered at Sami’s lack of titles and success–not just in WWE, but across their whole careers.
Part of why Sami throws in his lot with Kevin is in an attempt to win his respect at last, to show him that they really are equals by accepting Kevin’s worldview and joining him in his own cutthroat game. “I used to think that I despised you,” he says after teaming up,
And for a while it actually seemed to be working: as long as they were working together for a shared goal, like saving their jobs at Clash of Champions, or trying to win a co-championship at Royal Rumble, everything seemed to be fine. It must have been a great time for both of them: Sami convinced that he’d won Kevin’s respect, Kevin believing that Sami finally trusted him. But when General Manager Daniel Bryan pitted them against each other for a shot at the WWE championship at FastLane, everything fell apart.
In the heat of the moment, Kevin–panicking and desperate to win a chance at a title–reveals that he still doesn’t see them as equals, that he expects Sami to forever remain the backup, the wingman. He likes Sami–he likes him a lot!–but he doesn’t seem to respect him. This is where everything goes to hell and Sami starts scheming and calculating to beat Kevin for a title, this is the difference between Clash of Champions, where they had a shared goal:
And FastLane, where they had to compete:
Sami’s thrown away so much in his attempt to win Kevin’s respect, and you can see in his anguished expression as Kevin yells at him that he’s realized that no matter how hard they’ve worked together, no matter how much they’ve overcome together, he still doesn’t have Kevin’s respect, and that maybe he never will. Because–
Oh. This is the hard part to write.
I don’t want to write it.
I don’t.
Because why should Kevin respect Sami, after all? In the world of wrestling, over and over, value is measured in cold hard gold. Title holders are the top of the card, the top of the PWI rankings. the objective best by definition. The wrestlers in-world accept this metric, which is entirely natural. And by this standard, there is almost no way that Sami can ever earn the respect of Kevin Owens, two-time Intercontinental champ, three-time U.S. champ, second ever Universal champion. Kevin’s just gotten too much of a head start; even if he never wins another title it’ll take Sami years to balance the scales. No wonder Sami seems driven to win a title at Kevin’s expense, no wonder he tries to trick him at FastLane, no wonder he seems single-mindedly focused on specifically pinning Kevin. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to force Kevin to respect him.
As the wrestlers believe within their world, so do the fans in ours. The statistics are painstakingly parsed in endless arguments on Twitter and Reddit: how many reigns, how many days, how many defenses. Curtis Axel is worthy of less respect than Daniel Bryan; Alicia Fox worth less than Charlotte Flair; this is known. Even when we argue, passionately and vehemently, that someone like Sami deserves a title and should have one, we’re accepting the basic premise that titles equal worth. In some ways we’re conditioned to this belief by the shattering of kayfabe and the knowledge that titles are technically granted rather than won in a fight: holding a title is proof that the old rich white guy in charge has deemed our favorite worthy of respect.
I say: screw the old rich white guy in charge. Let me say it clearly and simply: Sami Zayn is one of the greatest wrestlers in the world, and if he never wins a title on the main roster, he will still be one of the greatest wrestlers in the world. Within the world of wrestling, titles equal respect, but friendship doesn’t work within a brutal hierarchy like that, which is why wrestling friendships tend to be fragile and fleeting. Kevin Owens–lover of titles, destroyer of friendships–Kevin is the final boss for Sami Zayn’s respect issues, and until he learns that every belt in the universe piled into a shining heap is not worth one lock of hair on Sami’s head, there can be no true friendship between them, because he won’t be able to give Sami the respect that he demands.
(Deep in his heart, despite his cheerful arrogance, I worry that Sami has lost his self-respect. I worry that the core of self-confidence at his heart was worn away, eroded by years of people assuming he was worth less because he was in the mid-card, until it finally snapped under the weight of his own ideals. Kevin has become that pain externalized: he wants Kevin to respect him in place of the internal certainty he used to have).
The funny thing, the real painful kicker, is that I think way down in his heart, Kevin does respect Sami. I mean, even back when they seemed to hate each other, he put Sami alongside wrestling legends without even thinking about it:
But I think he knows that it would be disastrous to his ego to fully admit that worth could be measured by more than the pile of leather and metal he has accumulated. Maybe in part because he does admire Sami, he can’t ever admit he sees Sami as an equal, because what if… what if Sami is better than him? He can’t risk even thinking that, so he’s going to fight as hard as he can to keep defining value as who wins the titles. The respect that Sami needs from him is the one thing that Kevin is going to resist giving him–or refuse to let slip that he already has.
So these are the issues, the fractures in the perfectly flawed gem of this friendship. Whatever their moral alignments when next they meet, whether they come together as friends or as rivals, whether it happens in two weeks or two months or two years, these are the faultlines in the landscape of their lives that will eventually have to be dealt with. They’re going to have to answer these questions:
In this world, can you trust anyone but yourself?
In this world, can you respect anyone but yourself?
I’ll be honest: there are few stories in wrestling where the answer to those questions is yes. It’s incredibly unlikely that will be the answer for Sami and Kevin in the near future, too. Oh, it’s possible that, if they have a shared goal to aim for, they can ignore these issues for a while. And Kevin’s betrayal of Sami is so far in the past, his title runs dimmed in the audience’s memory by a long drought and a painful string of losses… people may well forget that those fractures are there, just as he seems to have done. But they haven’t gone away, and you can be sure that, sooner or later, they’ll show up again.
It may well take the rest of their careers, in some form or another, to resolve these issues. They’ll go their separate ways for stretches at a time, but they’re always going to collide again: as enemies or as allies. They’re each other’s ultimate challenge, their end goal, their final boss.
You think this is almost over? I say we’ve only finished the first chapter.
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