Freddie Prinze Jr. On What Led To Kofi Kingston’s 2009 Push Being Scrapped
On this week's Wrestling with Freddie podcast from iHeart Media's My Cultra Network, former WWE creative team member Freddie Prinze Jr. discussed the evolution of Kofi Kingston in WWE.
Freddie revealed that after Kofi Kingston's breakout NASCAR promo in 2009, the creative team were assigned to come up with a storyline that would ultimately see Kofi capture a mid-card title. Kingston had trashed the custom made motor made for Randy Orton in their feud. However, plans were eventually derailed because of an incident that occurred during a Kofi-Orton one-on-one match on RAW.
"The whole team was motivated," Freddie Prinze Jr. explains. "We [the creative team] 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 [McMahon]. 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 Jr. explained that the incident in the match immediately affected their upcoming creative plans for Kofi Kingston, which led to Kofi's push being scrapped.
"I'm sitting through this two-hour, three-hour production meeting," Freddie Prinze Jr. said. "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.
"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."
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit Wrestling with Freddie with an h/t to Wrestling Inc for the transcription.