10 Times Modern WWE Stars FINALLY Felt Like Big Deals
6. Sami Zayn
The casual fan could be forgiven for not knowing quite how to receive Sami Zayn.
They were given very little reason to care about him upon his 2016 promotion because they were given no cues. He was the guy who exchanged fast fists with Kevin Owens, stemming from some hazy, shared history in NXT and beyond. Zayn was the sort of slight-but-dynamite underdog performer you needed to take a journey with to get behind.
We didn't take any sort of journey with Sami Zayn on RAW, which invited less favourable comparisons to the Yes! man. Instead, we watched him fade into irrelevance, and worse, humiliation, as Zayn's perfectionist tendencies were ridiculed by a regime that also resented these "millennials" for showing zero ambition. How can a WWE performer possibly get over, when no matter how fierce the roar of the crowd, that line is constantly dragged along the floor?
In Sami's case, he did so by adopting a persona so divorced from that which comes naturally to him that you could only marvel at his ability to work. This is a guy so thoroughly nice in real life that he lends a hand to the crisis in Syria when time allows, and we still wanted to wipe that smarmy b*stard smile off his face.
The promo Sami cut on the October 10, 2017 SmackDown was incredible: he delivered it in a grating tone with underlying hatred, but he remained all-sickly smiles. He hadn't changed, so much as he was always like this. It was very credible stuff by modern WWE standards, and transformed Zayn from diet Bryan to full-fat mega-heel.