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Sami Zayn had seen this story before.
He was concerned by it — and couldn’t have been more wrong.
He and real-life friend Kevin Owens have been teaming up and turning on each other countless times on screen during their career across multiple promotions.
It left Zayn worried this time would be detrimental to all the work he put in and the success was having as a character — especially during 2022 and into 2023 — even as it led to one of the biggest matches and moments of their career.
Finally turning his back on being the Honorary Uce in The Bloodline, Zayn’s character was tasked with teaming up with Owens again to take on The Uso for the undisputed WWE Tag Team championships in WrestleMania 39’s Night One main event.
Less than two months after main-eventing Elimination Chamber facing Roman Reigns for the Undisputed WWE Universal champions in front of a raucous hometown crowd in Montreal, Zayn was again teaming with Owens as the victorious new tag champs.
“I actually thought at first, we’ve been here before and I don’t know if … I really started to round out as a character because of the Bloodline stuff,” Zayn said in a phone interview ahead of being in the men’s WarGames match for a second straight year at Survivor Series on Saturday (8 p.m., Peacock).
“One of my concerns was if I go back to just being friends with Kevin that’s it, I’m just Kevin’s friend again. Just two guys who are friends and whatever character I did over the last three, four years going into that kind of got washed away. And in some respects, I think that happened.”
Zayn, 39, started to change his mind as their run together progressed, as they started stacking up quality match after quality match against some combination of The Judgement Day’s Finn Balor, Damian Priest and Dominik Mysterio that left him “proud” of their work.
It culminated with Priest and Balor beating them for the titles at Payback, ending their reign after six months and two pay-per-view defenses.
A little more than a month later, Owens was traded from Raw to SmackDown as part of storyline compensation for Jey Uso, and he Zayn were on their own again.
Zayn felt there were still a few fun avenues for them to explore as a team, especially with Owens going into spontaneous fits of frustration at wrestlers breaking some of the silly unwritten rules of WWE, such as coming into scenes before their name was mentioned.
“Only once we were coming towards the tail end of the run did I feel like, ‘Oh wait, we’re starting to hit a bit of a stride here,’” Zayn said. “This feels a bit different from past times where we’ve teamed. It felt like we were starting to hit something a little different and then it ended and we lost the titles.”
Zayn, who will team with Randy Orton, Seth Rollins, Cody Rhodes and Uso against The Judgment Day and Drew McIntyre at Survivor Series, had some ideas for where he and Owens could have gone as champions.
“I do think there is more we could have done with the tag team titles and I think there is a lot of fun character stuff to explore that we never really got to explore,” he said. “For example, when Kevin was having those enraged sorts of outbursts, I thought there was a lot of really fun stuff we could have done that was entertaining. I had all kinds of ideas to go to counseling and all kinds of things. That never really got to happen.”
One thing about how WWE broke him and Owens up pleased Zayn greatly.
Neither one of them turned on the other like they had in the past and it didn’t lead to a singles match or any kind of feud between them.
Zayn said he was “glad that didn’t happen.”
Now their story is they are still friends working on different shows, able to come back to their storied relationship when the time is right.
“I’m kind of pleased with the fact we kind of went in separate directions in a way that isn’t similar to ways we have done it in the past where one guy invariably turns on the other and then get into a program with each other once again,” Zayn said.
“I’m sure Kevin and I will wrestle once again and one of the keys to kind of keeping it fresh over the years is a little time and space, a breathing room in between so those characters can evolve in their own ways and then when the reconvene you seeing different versions of those two guys from the last time you saw them.”
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