WWE MATTEL Elite Collection - Series #102 - Sami Zayn (HKN95)

Product Information

Within the fictional world of wrestling, caring is one of a wrestler’s main sources of power. You can care about a title, about the fans, about another wrestler—even spite and hatred are types of caring. To not care is to cut yourself off from that energy, and the foundation of Sami’s heel persona is that he doesn’t care.

It feels like it should almost be a finisher, yet, notoriously, it has almost never actually gotten Zayn a win. The one televised time it did was against A.J. Styles in 2018, when somehow—like a miracle—Zayn’s faith in it paid off for once. His last topé is against Kevin Owens again, because there’s no one in WWE, and few people in all of wrestling, who’ve been taking Zayn’s moves as long as he has. With their history—in WWE as well as out of it—Zayn will always get just a little bit more babyface shine when they meet up as heels, so it makes sense that the last iterations of some of his most spectacular moves would happen against Owens. The Suicide Dive Tornado DDT. This is a move that few wrestlers but Sami Zayn do: When his opponent is in the right position, he takes a running dive through the corner ring ropes and into a tornado DDT.During his time at NXT, WWE released a video shot in super-slow motion of the tornado DDT. Slowed down, the dance-like grace of the move becomes even more clear: It’s innovative, spectacular, a move full of heart, designed to make the audience gasp and leap up. The Barricade Moonsault. This is a move that Zayn added to his regular arsenal after he moved from NXT to the main roster in 2016, a move that would be hard to do elsewhere thanks to the extra-large padded barricades that WWE uses. When his opponent attempts to whip him into the barricade, Zayn instead pulls victory from the jaws of defeat and leaps atop the barricade, transforming his momentum into a moonsault that takes out his foe. He loses this match, as he’s lost so many title matches before, each one driving him further into despair. We haven’t seen him do the move since.

On Oct. 8, 2017, at Hell in a Cell, Sami Zayn leaps forward instinctively to save Kevin Owens from Shane McMahon as he falls from the top of the Cell. In his promos in the weeks after, it becomes clear that his impulsive action has snapped something in Zayn’s spirit. Finding himself allied with the man who has betrayed him, taken his title, even bragged about injuring him so badly he was out of action for months, it smashes his moral compass, leaving him with nothing but that alliance. He’s been broken under the weight of fans’ loving, demanding expectations, broken by Owens’ success and his own relative failure (as Owens gleefully points out just before his turn, six championship runs to zero!). Caring about the fans, about titles, about wrestling has become too painful, and so he bitterly explains to a horrified Daniel Bryan shortly after: I was wrong. And more importantly, I failed to understand the implication that if Zayn did lose faith in his Blue Thunderbomb, he would be left with no faith at all.

Sami Zayn Game Appearances

Zayn’s last Tornado DDT takes place on May 7, 2019, in a triple threat between Zayn, A.J. Styles, and Kofi Kingston for the WWE championship. It’s Zayn’s last title shot before he becomes a manager for Intercontinental champion Shinsuke Nakamura, and he does the DDT to Styles minus the run up the ropes: But here’s the thing: Remember that his friendship with Owens is based in part on his acceptance of Owens’ assertion that all of his style and all of his brilliance has gotten him absolutely nothing that matters—no cold, hard proof of superiority—in WWE. Zayn still has the braggadocio. It’s the solid, stable confidence underneath it that’s been eroded by his friend and by years of struggle. Without confidence in yourself, how can you go flying over the ropes into the void? The character doesn’t have that anymore to buoy him. So he stops doing it. A week after explaining this to Daniel Bryan, Zayn competes in his first singles match since his heel turn, against Randy Orton. In the middle of the match, he pulls out the barricade moonsault.

He wrestles a full match without any help from outside interference against A.J. Styles a week before Clash of Champions—his first unassisted wrestling match since he lost in the King of the Ring tournament over a year ago. Instead, he attaches himself to Shinsuke Nakamura, the Intercontinental champion, holding up another man’s title, basking in the reflected glory of another wrestler’s skill. To those who love him, it’s a torment to see him give up wrestling. It’s anguish to watch him stripped to a bare shell of what he used to be, with no faith in his own skill. Even his overdue and long-awaited championship win has a painful edge, because he still doesn’t wrestle in it, not really.Well, not nobody. A wrestler without moves still exists, assuming he had them at one point in time. This is a field guide to the moves of Sami Zayn, one of the greatest wrestlers in the world, and a chronicle of how he lost them. THE MOVESET OF SAMI ZAYN It’s a bit taunting, a little boastful: this is easy for me, buddy. A good reminder that even before his heel turn, Zayn always had a streak of braggadocio in his style, a touch of pridefulness and almost smug confidence in his abilities. His moveset remains barren because of it. You would think that he’d have some new moves to reflect his vicious attitude. But he doesn’t. One of the most creative minds in wrestling adds nothing and innovates nothing. He simply loses move after move, as if he doesn’t care enough to come up with new ones. The next months are like watching an artist throw away color after color in their palette, until all that’s left is monochrome. But there’s another possibility. Maybe, just as wrestlers can express their character through their moves, Sami Zayn has used their absence to express his character’s slow slide into nihilism. One of the greatest powers of wrestling narrative is that it can tell a tale that spans months, years, even a whole career: a plot that unfolds in real time, pieced together by some combination of plan and happenstance. It doesn’t often come together just right, but when it does, there’s nothing like it. Maybe there’s a deliberate choice there. Maybe there’s a character arc being traced out, painfully and haltingly, through injuries and pandemics, across the years. Maybe it’s a story. And if it is a story about despair and hope, it would go something like this: