Sami Zayn and Johnny Knoxville Fought for the Future of Pro Wrestling

Johnny Knoxville's win over Sami Zayn wasn't just a feel good story, it proved that wrestling truly is for everybody.

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At WrestleMania 38, Sami Zayn and Johnny Knoxville had one of the greatest wrestling matches of all time.

I know, I know – I am a very hyperbolic person when it comes to the great sport of professional wrestling, but this is not that. I am a very sentimental person when it comes to the great sport of professional wrestling and Jackass, but this is not that. When this match happened on April 3, 2022, I was convinced that I had seen wrestling’s future, in a sense.

Let me explain.

In wrestling, there is always an everyman. I don’t mean an “everyman” like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, but a literal everyman, someone who looks and talks and moves more like us than like a professional wrestler. This was the oft-stated appeal of Dusty Rhodes. It’s Tommy Dreamer in ECW and Diamond Dallas Page in WCW and Heath Slater with his “I got kids shirt.” It’s Toru Yano entering the G1 Climax every year knowing that the entire field is more talented than him and finding the absolute dumbest way to win possible in spite of that.

All of those men are trained, skilled professional wrestlers. Johnny Knoxville is not.

 Yes, Johnny Knoxville trained for this match, and he is an experienced stunt performer whose life has revolved around elaborate experiences of pain, but unlike those everymen and unlike Sami Zayn, he is not a professional wrestler. Whatever mystique there is to getting gored by a bull or getting your testicles electrocuted only carries over so far in a realm where “this isn’t ballet” is a slogan and “on any given day a wrestler can beat a boxer” is a creed. Johnny Knoxville isn’t a boxer or a dancer, either – he’s a guy who puts on a cup and allows his friends to swing a sledgehammer at his groin. He’s not a normal person, but he is a person.

Why does this distinction matter to me? It’s tough to articulate, to the extent that I didn’t write about the match last year, but it’s something like this: in his performance, Johnny Knoxville proved that the physical mechanism of professional wrestling belongs to everybody, that anybody is capable of wrestling a great match.

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The fact that very few people who aren’t skilled professional wrestlers will go on to have a great wrestling match is immaterial. The world allows for great poetry, music, and films to come from people who aren’t otherwise poets, musicians, and filmmakers, but not wrestling, at least not since the end of the backyard wrestling boom. The skills necessary to be a great wrestler or have a great match got more and more specific, requiring years of training and many more years of in-ring experience to get to a level where such matches are even possible.

I have a lot of romantic, less than productive ideas about professional wrestling, the most romantic, least productive of which is that wrestling is for everybody. You may find this unoriginal, and I agree insofar as it’s the rallying cry of wrestling promoters and wrestlers who are trying to sell you something. When I say that wrestling belongs to everybody, I mean the body and its potential, skin and muscle and sweat and blood, the way our shapes are in concert with or in conflict against others, whether meaningful or insignificant, whether it’s consequential or not – the whole damn world is wrestling, only very little of it happens in a wrestling ring, even less of it at a high level, and damn near none of it with someone as inexperienced as Johnny Knoxville in the ring.

So here’s where I tell you why the match itself is so great in-ring. That’s the catch, and also the beauty of the thing: it isn’t. Johnny Knoxville isn’t a wrestler – he isn’t even particularly athletic. He gets blown up pretty early in this match, and while he’s never exactly struggling, if he was in there with anybody else on the WWE roster, this match might be a tough watch.

Luckily, he’s in there with Sami Zayn.

I don’t need to point to Zayn’s current run with The Bloodline or break kayfabe or bemoan what WWE has done to him since calling him up from the friendly confines of Full Sail University – on any given night, Sami Zayn can be the best wrestler in the world. He has an unbelievable range – Zayn’s history and wrestling’s general treatment of men with his body and backstory would never suggest a long, successful heel run, but here he is, bullying Johnny Knoxville and his friends, reveling in his skill as a wrestler in the face of someone who is not. Celebrity wrestling matches are extremely difficult to pull off. It is even more difficult to do a celebrity wrestling match where you want the celebrity to win.

Zayn’s performance is incredible. Knoxville is game, but he needs someone to lead, and in Zayn he has someone capable of imbuing comedy with darker undertones of jealousy and rage plays against the giddy masochism he and Jackass extremely well. This is what makes the run-ins in this match so good. Rather than functioning like Suzuki-gun and providing a distraction while an old man catches his second wind, Chris Pontius and Wee Man are facets of a thing the heel has come to hate. Sure, Pontius stripping down to his Party Boy thong was a reminder of just how much Pat McAfee sucks as a wrestling announcer, but it lets him uncork a Helluva Kick on a guy who was there for a good time and not a fight.

The centerpiece of the match is Wee Man, who emerges from under the ring swinging and kicking at Zayn. WrestleMania is an event with a bodyslam as its foundation – it’s been 34 years and Hulk Hogan slamming Andre the Giant is still shorthand for the spectacle of the occasion – and Wee Man’s takedown of Sami Zayn is as viscerally satisfying as any I’ve ever seen. It’s textbook – he scoops Sami up, holds him, and plants him firmly on his back, setting Knoxville up for a clean tornado DDT. It’s the match’s most thrilling nearfall, two unlikely heroes nearly vanquishing a wrestler with his move, but it’s not enough, and Wee Man falls to the match’s third (and most brutal) Helluva Kick. 

From there, it’s academic. The match becomes a progression of Zayn tasting crow for making this an “Anything Goes” match, as Jackass props lie under the ring and the ringside area, waiting to strike. Zayn maintains his composure for a moment, but the tide has turned. There’s the pyro trick in the corner, the bowling ball to the dick, the ball-kicking machine, the high-five machine, the mousetrap table, and finally, the giant mousetrap itself, a machine I figure Knoxville drew up like the stunts he wrote for the movie. It’s over from there, and night two of WrestleMania has a feel-good story that rivals “Stone Cold” Steve Austin closing the book on his life as a professional wrestler with a victory in a good match that was also built around the limitations of its special guest star.

I am glossing over the spots in this match not in the interest of time, but because, for the sake of my argument, they come as a package. The oldest and truest of Paul Heyman’s maxims is that, in order to successfully promote a wrestler, the booker has to hide their negatives and accentuate their positives. I’ve already said that the negative is that Knoxville isn’t a wrestler and the positive is the gleeful masochism of his profession, but if you watch the match with that in mind, tracking its progression from a normal no disqualifications match to an elaborate machine built to humiliate and hurt a bully, you will bear witness to a pocket dimension where the logical next step of Heyman’s maxim is made true – not any wrestler can be a star, but any person can be a wrestler.

This is the thesis statement of the entire feud – one of Zayn’s big lines in the run up to the match is “Johnny Knoxville thinks that he can do what I do, but he can’t.” This is of piece with the way many wrestlers and fans regard wrestling – a specialized labor that is impossible for the layman to do or, in some cases, even critique. I tend to agree that wrestling is specialized labor, and that to be great, good, or even decent requires years of training and experience, not necessarily for the sake of being good at the mechanisms inherent to the craft, but to find one’s role in it. But I also believe that wrestling is for everyone, that its tricks can be learned, its narratives understood, its universe comprehended.

I know this wrestling match worked like that for a lot of people in my orbit who think that professional wrestling is stupid, standing in contrast to the Dave Meltzers of the world who found the match embarrassing. It opened a door, and even if the uninitiated did not step through, they got a look at what wrestling is capable of, the same way that people who don’t read poetry often have a favorite poem. It's an opportunity, and even if it isn’t taken, the object itself still dazzles.

On the surface, the allure of this match is Johnny Knoxville, but the engine driving it is Sami Zayn. What a miracle of a professional wrestler he is. For fifteen minutes, he created a space wherein Johnny Knoxville  was the protagonist of a plausible underdog story in which a 51 year old stuntman with an absurd amount of wear on his body didn’t just win – he wrestled. For 15 minutes, Zayn and Knoxville deconstructed the notion that there is a barrier between wrestler and observer. They went beyond the notion that wrestling as a genre is for everyone and showed that wrestling as a physical art can be practiced by anybody. That doesn’t devalue wrestling as specialized labor, rather, it serves the notion that professional wrestling truly is a universal language, not just because it exists in many countries and in many forms, but because something this good can come from the least likely of places: a WWE ring, a WrestleMania, a celebrity wrestling match where someone with no experience beats someone with 20 years behind them.

Liberatory professional wrestling. It is possible, even if the future of this great sport appears somehow darker than ever.