Sami Zayn Details How WCW Magazine Inspired His Finishing Move
Sami Zayn has shared an interesting about how he came up with his “Helluva Kick” finishing move thanks to something he saw in WCW Magazine.
The main event of WWE’s WrestleMania 39 Saturday (Night One) saw Sami Zayn & Kevin Owens challenge The Usos for the Undisputed (Raw & Smackdown) WWE Tag Team Titles. It was the first time that WWE Tag Team Titles have been in the main event of a WrestleMania because the story going into the match was so strong.
While the story was a big reason why the match was in the main event, the four men involved in the match put on a performance that lived up to the immense hype going into it.
In a match that went nearly 25 minutes, Sami Zayn was the legal man against Jey Uso, who was his good friend in The Bloodline until Jey attacked him on the road to WrestleMania. Zayn would win the match (and the titles) for his team by hitting the Helluva Kick three straight times on his buddy Jey.
The Helluva Kick is a move that Sami Zayn has been using for many years since before he worked for WWE. It’s a running kick – a Yakuza Kick – that you deliver while your opponent is standing up against the turnbuckle.
Prior to the days of the internet, magazines in all forms were a way to get information. In the wrestling world, there were all kinds of magazines including official magazines put out by the major wrestling like WWE and WCW when they were running in the 1990s until their end in 2001.
During an interview with Love Wrestling, Sami Zayn revealed that he came up with the name Helluva Kick based on something he saw in WCW Magazine.
“If you want the actual history here, I don’t know if I have ever told it in an interview before but what it is, is when I was a kid I had WCW Magazine and I was reading some match results and it said Chris Jericho defeated Syxx, or maybe it was the other way around, with a hell of a kick but it was written ‘helluva’ like that and I thought it was a ‘helluvah kick’. So I thought it was a type of kick.”
“So I told this story to Excalibur, who now does commentary on AEW every Wednesday. I told this story to him at dinner one time at Denny’s after a PWG show and then we started calling the Running Yakuza Kick in the corner that I would do at the time, we started calling it the Helluva Kick. So that’s actually the real history of that name.”
Sami Zayn was drafted to the WWE Raw brand recently. However, as a current WWE Tag Team Champion with Kevin Owens, WWE has said the team can appear on both shows for as long as they hold both sets of titles.
@lovewrestlingca Sami Zayn on Helluva Kick Origins! #wwe#wwetiktok#wwettfam#samizayn#helluvakick#aew#aewdynamite#samiforsyria#lovewrestling#ilovewrestling#elgenerico