It’s a modern reference. Wrestling is a unique form of entertainment as a majority of the characters are supposed to be turned way up but also supposed to be treating everything as real. That is easier in some cases than others and it can be rather tricky to walk such a line. However, sometimes it can be easy, as well as smart, to reference something taking place outside of the wrestling bubble. A prominent SmackDown wrestler is doing just that.

Sami Zayn has held the Intercontinental Title since Clash Of Champions since September and has been doing some interesting things since. Zayn has been talking about how WWE is against him and does not want him to be the champion, allowing him to refer to himself as the Great Liberator. As a result, Zayn has been doing things his own way, including hosting his own awards show this week on SmackDown. Things might not have been going so well behind the scenes.

This is rather clever. Check out what Zayn has said now:

In a post to Instagram, Kayla Braxton has released some audio of Zayn backstage at Friday’s Sami Awards, showing Zayn yelling at his production crew for not being professional. The audio is a riff on the audio of Tom Cruise going on a similar rant against the production crew of Mission: Impossible 7 over not following Coronavirus protocols. The Sami Awards were a parody of the upcoming WWE Slammy Awards.

Opinion: The key to this one is timing, as the Cruise audio only came out a few days earlier. WWE has a bad tendency to do something like this far later than they probably should, so this was as good of a way to do it as WWE had available. Zayn is the kind of person who can make this work too, so hopefully he gets a bit of a rub out of the whole thing.

What did you think of the idea? How long will Zayn hold the Intercontinental Title? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books. Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. Thank you for reading!

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