Some people in WWE wanted Sami Zayn to be the star of WrestleMania Goes Hollywood because of his current popularity with the fans, but officials felt Zayn wasn’t ready to be the WrestleMania main event yet and stuck with their original plans.
According to those plans, Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns would face off for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship at WrestleMania. In order to keep his title at Elimination Chamber, WWE had Reigns defeat Zayn.
Rhodes was brought out for a segment on Monday’s episode of RAW in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, but Paul Heyman interrupted him.
On Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer mentioned that WWE cut Rhodes’ promo short by having Heyman appear because they were worried about the Zayn chants during it.
“They didn’t kill the story by having him loose. When Cody was out there…the stuff with Cody and Heyman…they were very concerned about Sami chants, which is one of the reasons why they got Heyman out there in seconds,” Meltzer said.
He added, “They did not want Cody in there by himself because they thought that, I mean it didn’t happen, but boy they did everything in their power to make sure they kept that moving, they did not allow the audience a chance to start chanting or anything like that, it was just back-and-forth. It was designed to give the audience no chance to chant that because of the feeling that if they did it would hurt Cody’s momentum. And perhaps it would, and then it could create that groundswell which is exactly what they don’t want right now, but it didn’t happen. It was a little on the flat side.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
