Sami Zayn gives his thoughts on Cody Rhodes’ rise in WWE.
The current tag champion spoke about the American Nightmare during a recent appearance on the My Love Letter To Wrestling podcast with host Mark Andrews. Zayn begins by talking about Cody’s return to WWE at WrestleMania 38 and how his unfortunate injury back in the summer of 2022 only made fans cheer for him more.
There were two parts to it. One, Cody genuinely did have a lot of respect and equity with the audience, especially coming back from that injury, and they just like him. So, it wasn’t the same thing as Batista returning, who they hadn’t seen in years at that point, and they viewed him as a part-timer. You touched on something, which was the trust. At that point, the audience had learned to trust wherever the story was going. Even if they were skeptical and even if there were people who were like, ‘Nah, I really want to see Sami and Roman or they should go this direction.’ Over the eight months or whatever it was prior to that point, they learned to…even if it wasn’t what they wanted exactly, we earned enough trust for them to go, ‘Well, okay, let’s see where it goes.’
Zayn would then bring up Cody’s loss to Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 39, a loss that has continued to shock the WWE Universe. He says that watching Cody “put a bow” on his journey would have been great, but understands that there is a longer story being told.
I do think, strictly from a story perspective, it would have been great to see Cody put a bow on it, but it’s still building. That’s the thing that people, it’s so hard to understand about WWE. We build to these things that appear to be these culminations, but there is always a TV show next week. We look at these things through the lens of TV shows and season finales. Even me, ‘Yeah, of course, Cody has to win,’ but you have to hold on to that trust. I’m a fan, I’m invested, and I trust they’ll pay this off properly at the right time and let’s see where it goes.
Zayn and Kevin Owens will be defending the WWE tag team championship against Solo Sikoa and Undisputed Universal Champion Roman Reigns at the upcoming Night Of Champions premium live event on May 27th. You can check out the latest card for the show here.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)