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WWE Undisputed Champion Sami Zayn previously believed that his opportunity to win a WWE Championship had passed him by when he didn’t beat Drew McIntyre for the title at the Royal Rumble PLE in January, but he did eventually capture his first WWE Championship at the Night of Champions in June. Zayn is now currently in the midst of his second reign with the WWE Undisputed Championship.
“It’s cool,” said Zayne in response to a question from Chris Van Vliet on Insight about how it feels to be a champion in WWE. “Yeah, here’s the thing that’s funny about it because even at the start of this year, which was nine months ago, ten months ago now, whatever, I was wrestling Drew and I didn’t win. I had kind of just battled with it and went, you know what, maybe the ship sailed. I was real close a couple of years ago with all the Bloodline stuff and all that, and even in the fallout of that. Then I was close, but after losing that match, I was like, well, you can’t tell this story again.
“Maybe it’ll happen in some different way, and it did happen in a bit of a different way. But the Cinderella story, underdog who finally wins the big one, we burnt that card. That card was done after losing to Drew because you can only tell that story so many times. You can get them on board once, twice, three times, and it wasn’t the right time. It wasn’t. I didn’t have the momentum that I had a year or two prior to that. But I had to kind of struggle to accept that maybe I just missed the window, slipped through the cracks, and it just won’t happen.”
Zayn said he didn’t believe he had to win a WWE Championship to validate his career. “I’ve said this before in other interviews, or to friends, or my wife, or whatever,” said Zayn. “I’ve had a tremendous career and winning the world title at that point is just the cherry on top. It would be nice to have, but it’s not like if I never win it, it’s like I never got it. You know what I mean? You don’t live and die by these things. You kind of just got to look at the big picture.”
