On April 7th, 2019, Kofi Kingston made history.
For the first time in 67 years of the WWE, it had a World Champion who'd been born in
Africa.
From his humble beginnings to an almost six-month championship reign, here's the truth behind
Kofi Kingston.
Kofi Kingston — or to use the name he was born with, Kofi Sarkodie-Mensah — is not
Jamaican.
But in the world of pro wrestling, people have often claimed backgrounds that weren't
their own.
In the '90s, the legendary Mick Foley cut a promo referencing this particular phenomenon,
noting he'd, quote, "seen it all a hundred times" through the magic of pro wrestling:
"I've seen a tough Jewish kid from Brooklyn become a black man from Macon.
I've seen a farm kid from Nebraska become an overnight rap star sensation.
I've seen a kid from New Hampshire become a Frenchman."
When Kofi debuted in WWE in 2006, it wasn't as someone who had been born in Ghana and
grew up in Boston, as he really was.
It was as "The Jamaican Sensation," Kofi Kingston, decked out in Rastafarian colors and putting
on an accent to match.
But unlike most cases of wrestlers playing characters with significantly different origins
than their own, this wasn't a gimmick given to him by a promoter.
Instead, it was a joke Kofi came up with himself on the spot.
In an interview with New York's Hot 97, Kofi talked about a moment during his wrestling
training where each student had to cut a promo.
These "promo days" allow wrestlers to cut loose, but it's also a chance to show you
can work the mic as well as the mat, and do something that lets you stand out.
Kofi had been listening to Damian Marley's Welcome to Jamrock album, and decided to cut
a promo in a Jamaican accent.
"They told us we were gonna have a promo day, so I was like, 'Oh, what am I gonna do?'
Let me try this Jamaican character out.
I said, 'Hey, what's goin' on, y'all, I'm Kofi Kingston!"
The other wrestlers loved it, Kofi kept performing the character, and soon after, he was signed
to WWE.
As he played the Jamaican character, Kingston was getting heat from both sides: Jamaicans,
who were justifiably angry that WWE was billing him as the first-ever Jamaican superstar to
work for the company despite the fact that he'd never even been to the island, and Ghanaians
who assumed that he was playing a Jamaican character because he was ashamed of his actual
heritage.
That second group found the gimmick pretty easy to spot, too, since, as he said,
"Kofi is a very Ghanian name.
It's like Mike or John.
You know what I’m saying?
It's the name given to a boy born on Friday."
Then came the October 19, 2009 episode of Monday Night Raw.
During a segment where a team of superstars were fighting amongst themselves, Kofi grabbed
the mic and said — in his real voice — that they all needed to come together and work
as a team.
The response, from a very confused Triple H:
"I got a question.
Matter of fact, I have a problem.
Aren't you supposed to be Jamaican?"
With that, the gimmick was dropped, aside from Kofi continuing to use his very Caribbean-flavored
entrance music.
If you've seen one clip of Kofi Kingston in action, it was almost certainly from one of
his appearances at the annual Royal Rumble, a crowded battle royal where wrestlers are
eliminated if they're thrown over the top rope and both feet touch the floor.
The feet-touching-the-floor rule is built for dramatic moments where someone is almost
thrown out before making a recovery.
Kofi, always goes just a little bit further than most in skirting the rule, and it's become
his annual trademark.
In 2012, Kofi saved himself from elimination by walking on his hands.
In 2013, he landed on the broadcasters' table, then used one of their chairs to hop his way
back.
2014 saw him caught by a fellow wrestler who then draped him across the barrier separating
the crowd from the ring, leading Kofi to make an incredible leap back.
In the years since, he's crowd-surfed, been carried by his tag team partners, and even
hopped on one foot using a platter of pancakes to avoid touching the floor.
Yet even with all that, Kofi Kingston has never actually won the Royal Rumble, or even
made it to the final four.
Early in his career, Kofi Kingston often traveled with fellow wrestler CM Punk, and — perhaps
ironically, given his typical role as a squeaky-clean good guy in the ring — the two wrestlers
often found themselves having to deal with the police.
At a panel at a comic book convention, Punk told the story of what he called one of many
times that he and Kofi had been pulled over while traveling together, as the heavily tattooed,
formerly long-haired wrestler and MMA fighter said:
"Because of how I look, and I'm with an African-American gentleman with dreadlocks, and you cannot
tell that cop that there is no weed in the car."
The ironic part?
Punk, in both real life and in-character as a pro wrestler, is straight edge.
Those heavy tattoos include "DRUG FREE" across his knuckles.
Punk was driving when the pair got pulled over, and when the police officer insisted
that Kofi get out of the car, he did so, and was promptly handcuffed while Punk stayed
in the driver's seat.
By the end of the night, there were a total of eight police cars, including K-9 units,
surrounding the two wrestlers for what had been a simple traffic stop, leading Punk to
seriously worry that they would be arrested on false charges.
Fortunately, that didn't happen, and while Punk says that he went off on the cops with
a scathing, promo-style rant, the ever-polite Kingston kept a much cooler head.
The one brief blip in Kofi's status as the eternal good guy came in 2014, with the formation
of the New Day, a trio made up of Kingston, Big E, and Xavier Woods.
For the most part their particular brand of "villainy" involved playing the trombone and
derisively calling their opponents "booty."
Originally, though, it seemed like the group was going to go in a very different and much
more serious direction.
On Raw in summer 2014, there was a segment where Kofi and Big E, having lost a tag-team
match, were approached by Xavier Woods.
Woods, wearing a white suit with glasses — a very uncharacteristic look for him — told
them that they couldn't get ahead in pro wrestling by "shaking hands and kissing babies," and
that "we do not ask any longer.
Now, we take."
From that original segment, it appeared that the concept for this new stable was going
to be three black wrestlers who had become fed up with not getting opportunities despite
their hard work, with at least a few undertones about the company's real-life history of undervaluing
black wrestlers.
It's a premise that WWE had used before to varying degrees of success in the '90s, and
it's a far cry from what we eventually got when the team made their official debut a
few months later.
So what happened?
Those original segments aired in late July 2014.
On August 9th, in Ferguson, Missouri, a black teenager named Mike Brown was fatally shot
by police officer Darren Wilson.
The incident brought issues of racism and violence sharply into the public consciousness.
It's entirely possible that this had nothing to do with the way the three wrestlers were
eventually debuted as the New Day in November with no real mention of the storyline from
over the summer.
Given the timing, however, it's easy to speculate that someone at WWE realized having a team
of black wrestlers railing against racial injustice and portraying them as the bad guys
would be an even worse idea in 2014 than it had been in the '90s.
When Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, and Big E re-debuted in November of 2014 as the New
Day, it was a far cry from those first few segments over the summer.
Instead, they were introduced with a series of bright, energetic videos that paired the
wrestlers up with a gospel choir, embracing the power of positivity.
Unfortunately, there's no faster way to get wrestling fans to boo someone than to tell
them they should be cheering, and the New Day wound up becoming bad guys just by virtue
of being overbearing.
But then the more ridiculous their antics got, the more the crowd embraced them.
That happens pretty often in pro wrestling; characters like the Rock, Stone Cold Steve
Austin, and, more recently, Kevin Owens, all became beloved superstars by just being too
entertaining as bad guys.
Before long, the New Day followed the same route, and it turned out that they had actually
used that "power of positivity" that had initially annoyed the audience to become fan-favorites,
which only made their antics get bigger and more ridiculous.
At one point, they even made their entrance at WrestleMania by popping out of a ten-foot
tall box of Booty-Os cereal while dressed as DragonBall Z characters, which is like
three different layers of goofiness going on at the same time.
But they weren't just a comedy act.
Those years also saw some fantastic wrestling from the three performers, including a lengthy
span as the SmackDown Tag Team Champions — their third of four championship reigns was, at
the time, the longest since the title's inception — and a series of matches with the Usos
that culminated at Hell in a Cell 2016.
In the lead-up to 2019's WrestleMania 35, Kofi found himself — and his partners in
the New Day — embroiled in a storyline that saw Kofi being denied a shot at WWE's highest
championship despite earning it time and time again.
The chief obstacle here wasn't Daniel Bryan, the defending champion who, like Kofi, had
once been denied opportunities despite winning over the crowd with athleticism and charisma.
It was WWE Chairman Vince McMahon himself, or at least, the fictional version of Vince
McMahon that the real-life guy plays on the camera.
He was the one who took Kofi out of a promised championship match in favor of another wrestler,
and then told him he could only earn his shot at the title if he defeated a gauntlet of
five other wrestlers, one right after the other.
Kofi did that, wrestling for over an hour, but McMahon then added a sixth match, against
Bryan, that Kofi lost.
He was given insurmountable odds, but in the end, he finally got his shot at the biggest
show of the year.
Of course, that was all the fictional storyline that was playing out on TV every week.
It did, however, have some basis in real life.
Kofi had, after all, been with the company for eleven years, and even had a history of
real-life conflict with Vince McMahon.
As wrestler Chris Jericho noted in his book, Vince had taunted Kingston as a rookie, telling
him that "maybe one day" he'd "get over," or become popular with fans.
Kofi was encouraged by Jericho to fight back, and during their altercation, Vince went for
a double-leg takedown and kicked off a brief fight with a happy ending.
Vince wound up telling Kofi that he was glad he stood up for himself, and after a decade
that's seen him win every active championship in the company, it's safe to say that Kofi
got over in a big way.
"This is all I've ever wanted to do ever since I was a kid, man.
This is like, literally, my childhood dream becoming true."
WrestleMania 35 was one of the most significant WrestleManias in the history of the WWE.
It was the first 'Mania to be main-evented by female wrestlers, with Becky Lynch defeating
Charlotte Flair and Ronda Rousey to win the company's two women's titles, cementing Lynch's
place as the top star in the company, regardless of gender.
And it was the show where Kofi Kingston won the WWE Championship, becoming the first African-born
World Champion in the company's long history.
It's not just the fact he was born in Ghana that puts Kofi into rarefied air, though.
On April 7th, 2019, he became only the fourth black man to hold the WWE's top title — and,
if you want to be really precise, only the second to hold the specific WWE Championship.
The first black man to hold that title was Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who won his first
championship in 1998.
The only other black men out of the 51 to hold the championship were Booker T and Mark
Henry.
"Representation is so important, to be able to have people that look like us to be able
to look at the screen and see that it's possible to do great things."
The unfortunate fact, and one that came up throughout Kofi's chase for the title, is
pro wrestling has often been slow to recognize black performers, a problem not limited to
the WWE.
There wasn't a black World Champion anywhere in wrestling at all until 1992, when Ron Simmons
won World Championship Wrestling's top title.
Kingston lost the title to Brock Lesnar in a very short match on the premiere episode
of Smackdown on Fox on October 4th, 2019.
But even with that loss, Kofi's 180-day title reign was incredibly meaningful to a lot of
wrestling fans, and no one can take that away.
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