Sami Zayn opened up to Ryan Satin on the latest edition of the “Out Of Character” podcast about losing to Undisputed WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns at Elimination Chamber 2023 earlier this year.
Zayn lost the main event match in his hometown. He said,
“I forced their hand as much as humanly possible, but still just a buck short, you know, and it was a hard pill to swallow … even though you kind of know what the plan is or where things are headed.”
“There’s kind of this hope that you hold on to like, ‘Yeah, but if the crowd is loud enough, and the story is good enough, it’s kind of right there,’ and it kind of felt like we got right there, about as close as any human being on Earth can get without actually getting there,” he added. “But it’s fine because getting there on its own is an amazing feat. What I mean by getting there is not beating Roman, but getting to that match, everyone wants you to beat Roman and getting an audience in that frenzy and experiencing an audience like that, again, being a part of a story like that, very few people on Earth can say they’ve ever done that.”
Zayn noted that he understands he got a lot out of the storyline and is grateful for the moment.
“It’s like a lightning in the bottle type of thing,” he said. “You don’t get it very often, and then you kind of get it, and you’re like, the story, the audience, your performance, all of it … it’s just gotten you to the exact right place that you dreamed you’d be. Then when you get there, it’s like, you just kind of fall short and you don’t know if you’ll ever get it back. So, for sure that’s hard and you don’t know if you can do it again.”
“I got a lot out of that story,” he later added. “Don’t get me wrong. It goes without saying.”
