Thursday, March 28, 2024
NewsFreddie Prinze Jr. Recalls WWE Scrapping Kofi Kingston's 2009 Push

Freddie Prinze Jr. Recalls WWE Scrapping Kofi Kingston’s 2009 Push

912 views

TRENDING

On the latest edition of his Wrestling With Freddie podcast, former WWE writer Freddie Prinze Jr. talked about what led to WWE scrapping Kofi Kingston’s push in 2009.

The creative team had big plans for Kofi, but a mistake in a singles match against Randy Orton changed it: “The whole team was motivated, we finished the whole thing up, and everybody thinks we have this great run to the title. We bring it and it gets approved by Steph. She’s right behind it. I don’t think Shane was back in the company at that point, I think he was over in China at that point in time. In the meantime, Randy Orton and Kofi have a match. This is a week later [following the NASCAR promo]. In the match, a spot gets blown. So a spot gets blown and Randy gets p*ssed on live TV. And you see him, you can check this on YouTube, he yells, ‘STUPID!’ with that deep Orton booming voice. And that, Vince, wanted him to be Johnny Cash and present himself, even though everybody already knew he was Randy Orton,  as, ‘Hello… I’m Randy Orton,’ like, yo, that’s exactly like it is from that trailer that you saw for that movie, ‘Yeah, that’s great!’ Vince, we already know, we already know he’s the best wrestler in the world, already know who he is. Anyway, so this spot gets blown meaning the technique, a stunt in the match gets blown. You can tell something doesn’t look good. I don’t know what it is, because I don’t see the spot when it happens. I don’t what happened, I just know something is not good, right?”

Prinze tried to keep the angle going, but he couldn’t: “I’m sitting through this two-hour, three-hour production meeting, my story is dead. I tried to save it for about 10-15 minutes. When I say my story, I mean my team’s story. It’s my job to sell their crap. It’s my job to put it over. That’s my job as your salesman on production day. And when I say crap, I don’t mean bad stuff. I was behind this, I believed in this story. I say that about my crap too, don’t worry. But 10-15 minutes, I’m fighting for it and there’s just no winning this battle. Now I’m trying to fix it. I’m offering alternative solutions, other people are offering alternative solutions. The whole thing is just gone and dead.”

The belief that Randy Orton had something to do with the angle being cut was used ten years later as Orton was challenged Kingston for the WWE Championship: “So finally, I just shut up and we move on. And I don’t even think Kofi even worked that night, and I get out and they tell me what happened. They tell me about this blown spot and Randy’s p*ssed at it. It got shut down. And they ended up — for those who aren’t in the know, they ended up using that real moment of why Randy sort of held Kofi down in the actual story of Kofi winning the title, after winning the Gauntlet match, that I saw ten years later off of Randy Orton. They literally put that into the story.”

H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.

- Advertisment -

LATEST NEWS

- Advertisment -

Related Articles