Betting on Soul

Sami Zayn and Two Summerslams, Twenty Years Apart

A couple of weeks ago, when Sami Zayn spotted Jey being attacked by the Judgment Day, he ran to his friend’s aid without hesitation:

When I posted this gif, there were a lot of comments pointing out that Sami “dropping his title” to aid a friend might be a clever and heartbreaking bit of foreshadowing. At the time I thought maybe it was a bit of a stretch, but at the Tokyo show last weekend, this happened as Sami came to help Kevin against the Bloodline.

Twice in two weeks, in the leadup to SummerSlam, Sami has literally dropped his title to aid or embrace his friends. In some ways it’s nothing, just a little detail in the middle of a swirl of events. But it does remind me of a story which, coincidentally, took place exactly twenty years ago at SummerSlam 2004.

Kevin and Sami had just recently become friends, and SummerSlam was in Toronto that year. They decided to go to the show together, driving six hours after their own indie show to get there. In Fight Forever, I describe how excited Kevin was to get to the show, and how Sami was mainly focused on one match on the card.

You can see Kevin tell the story—to Matt Hardy himself!—on that episode of The Kevin Steen Show. 

SummerSlam 2004 was a mixed bag, with the standout matches being Kurt Angle versus Eddie Guerrero and Randy Orton versus Chris Benoit, which means Kevin was in the audience when Orton became the youngest world champion ever. There was no women’s match on the card, although they did show a video of something called Diva Dodgeball, which was… about what you would expect. The Kane-Matt Hardy match that Sami was invested in ended with the nefarious Kane choke-slamming Hardy for the win despite Lita’s desperate attempts to save him:

Young Sami must have been filled with horror as the triumphant Kane gloated over his reluctant bride-to-be, and as goofy and overwrought as the setup feels, that’s the kind of stakes that always have enthralled Sami the most: the wrenched emotions, the moral clashes, the eternal struggle between the latest incarnation of brute force and daredevil will. Both in the ring and out of it, what drives Sami is not gold and leather. Winning is great, winning is to be striven for. But the most fundamental victory, the one that has to come before any others, is not defeating cruelty and sadism, but having the courage to stand up to it and not back down.