Injured WWE Superstar Sami Zayn was a recent guest on Chris Jericho’s Talk is Jericho podcast and the Montreal, Canada native opened up his recent injury and life outside of WWE. Zayn is currently recovering from having both of his shoulders surgically repaired. Despite being away from the ring for five plus months now, Zayn doesn’t seem all too eager to return, “I know wrestling fans, maybe don’t want to hear this, but I’ve been loving being off. I think wrestling fans want to hear, ‘I can’t wait to be back and I miss everything.’ I don’t miss anything. I don’t miss it yet. I’m surprised by how little I’ve missed it. Five months and I don’t miss it. What’s up with that?” Zayn continued, “Maybe I’m overstating my lack of desire to return. I do miss performing. Like you said, I’ve been doing this a super long time. We’re on the road a lot. You know how it is. I just know that when I’ll be back, I’ll really enjoy it. I’m not sitting there itching and clawing and I don’t know if my employer will want to hear that.” Despite RAW running a recent video depicting Sami Zayn’s return as being ‘soon’, Zayn describes his anticipated return as ‘not even close,’ “I’m not even close [to being cleared]. I need a few more months.” Zayn added that he is currently at the Performance Center doing rehab on his surgically repaired shoulders.
Zayn described his shoulder surgeries and the grueling recovery process, “I’ve had both shoulders done seven weeks apart because you need one arm, at least, to be functional. You need to be able to be able to eat and use the bathroom, so I did the right one first because I thought it would be the trickier of the two and it was, so left hand for basics.” Zayn’s recovery from surgery has been significant. He even had to relearn how to use the restroom, “Without divulging too much, I was surprised by my dexterity.” Zayn opened up about what led to the surgery in the first place, “I couldn’t lift very much at the gym. I was hyper aware of both my shoulders. They were not good and I was carrying on like this for maybe – the left one maybe a year and a half. I don’t even know…it was really when the second one started getting bad, I was really concerned. I was concerned for other people’s safety. I’m started to get a little worried about it and it was really when the MRI came in and confirmed my worst fears that something was torn….at a certain point this isn’t going away. At a certain point, you have to confront it.”
Zayn has been utilizing his time away from wrestling to focus on other things like re-framing the way he sees himself in light of some pretty significant world issues. Zayn elaborated, “I’ve had a lot of time to think about, ‘Why am I like this? Why do I do that? What am I upset about?’ Just why, why, why? Peeling back the layers of other people and the world and society and this culture, but also at a certain point, you’ve got to confront yourself….you’re looking at everybody else doing wrong and eventually you’ve got to go, ‘Where do I fit in to all of this?” Zayn’s new outlook has improved the way he treats others and even positively impacted his interactions with fans. Zayn has also given up eating meat and attests to feeling more ‘like a complete person.’ The introspection has also motivated him to re-examine his high school yearbook quote, “I regret very few things in my life, but if I could go back and change one thing, it would be my entire high school yearbook write up. Garbage! Garbage. I’m embarrassed by it all these years later. It’s just crap, ‘Shout out to my friends..’ Just a stupid idiot little kid. I ended up using the quote, ‘You get more bees with honey than you do with vinegar, but if I could go back in time, I would use the one that was the front runner of the time by William Shakespeare, ‘Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’”
A conversation with Sami Zayn wouldn’t be complete without a Kevin Owens mention. Zayn opened up about the coincidences involving he and long-time best friend having seemingly parallel career paths. This also includes their recent injuries, “The timeline may even be similar for our returns. I don’t know. He lives like two blocks from me and when he lived in Montreal, he lived like two blocks from me. We can’t get away from each other, if we tried. I get moved to RAW, he gets moved to RAW. Even when he got signed he got put into a program with me right away and since our names have been linked here in one way or another since. We can’t get away from each other, if we tried. I’m sure he’d like to get away a little bit. There’s times I’d like to get away a bit. It’s good.”
In regards to his anticipated WWE comeback, Zayn said, “I told myself early on. I said, ‘I’m not even gonna think about this stuff ‘til November.’ Well it’s November. It’s also out of my hands. If I’m still a few months away from coming back and I go, ‘I’ve got this idea. I want to come back this way.’ Then when it’s actually time for you to comeback, it’s math. Where does he factor in? OK, plug him in here and all these things you’ve been thinking about for three months, getting married to these ideas are gonna end in toil anyway.” Zayn continued, “This time off made me really OK with when I don’t do this anymore….if I never do this again ever, I’m totally OK with it. I’m OK with who I am with wrestling and without wrestling. That’s how I feel today…I don’t know how I’ll feel in three years. As it stands at this moment, if I never wrestle again, I’m OK with that as a person, but all the more reason that I’m grateful that I can come back and I can still do this for however long I can still do this for. I’m really grateful for it. I’ve been overwhelmed with gratitude in this time off because the more I looked into myself, the more I realized how lucky I am and it really really made me grateful.”
(Transcription Credit: Michael McClead, WrestleZone)
Zayn also shared his thoughts on long-time friend Neville (PAC) and this year’s Survivor Series. Readers can listen to Talk is Jericho in its entirety below:
