An Explosive Pop From Fans Put This WWE Star's WrestleMania Win Into The History Books

WWE fans who have only started watching in the past couple of years won't remember the days when WrestleMania was one solitary event. Forget spreading 14 matches over the course of two nights, all 14 of those matches would take place on one show that would last anywhere between four and six hours, with 2019 being the final year that this happened. 

WrestleMania 35 is a historic night for a variety of reasons. It was the site of Kurt Angle's retirement match against Baron Corbin, it was the first WrestleMania in history to be headlined by women, with Becky Lynch pinning Ronda Rousey to win the WWE Raw and WWE SmackDown Women's Championships, and in the middle of all this, it was the night that Kofi Kingston finally reached the mountain top.

"Kofi Mania" was running wild at the beginning of 2019, and thanks to a badly timed (or in Kingston's case, a very well timed) injury to Mustafa Ali caused Kingston to receive the biggest push of his career, not too dissimilar to the one Daniel Bryan got five years earlier. Fans had wanted Kofi to win the WWE Championship for years given everything that he had already achieved in WWE, and felt like it was the right time to pull the trigger considering the amount of organic fan support he had earned.

Ironically, the match he would end up having at WrestleMania 35 would be against Daniel Bryan, who was in the role that Batista and Randy Orton occupied five years earlier in his big title win. The crowd was firmly on Kofi's side, and the roar from the crowd when he eventually got the win was one of the loudest reactions ever heard at a WrestleMania, and it's all because fans had wanted it for so long.

Bryan and Kingston's match from WrestleMania 35 is one of the most celebrated matches in WWE's recent history, so much so that it made the recent list WWE put together of the top 50 matches in the history of WrestleMania. Not only do the fans love it, but so do the men involved.

Kingston has gone on the record in saying that Bryan is arguably one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, and is an all-around stand-up guy. He also noted the fact that his story of overcoming the odds to defeat the dominant champion who had everything going for them was a true full-circle moment for him, as he was a fan of Bryan's own story five years earlier.

As for Bryan, who has since gone by his real name of Bryan Danielson in AEW, he has mentioned many times how much he adores his WrestleMania 35 match with Kingston, to the point where he, at one point, called it his favorite match of all time and that the whole thing was magic. Danielson wanted to channel that energy in his AEW World Championship match with Swerve Strickland at AEW's All In London event in August 2024, and managed to succeed in winning the title in a moment that was as loud as Kingston's win in 2019.

Danielson has also mentioned that he actually suffered a concussion during the match and doesn't actually remember the whole thing. However, what made the match special to him was going backstage and seeing his family, in particular his daughter, thinking the match was great as well.

Whether WrestleMania 41 will have any moments like "Kofi Mania" remains to be seen, but Las Vegas will have to be pretty loud if they want to top the reaction Kingston got for winning the WWE Championship in 2019.