It took over 10 years and a very unfortunate injury to Mustafa Ali for it to happen, but Elimination Chamber 2019 marked the first time that the immensely gifted Kofi Kingston got an opportunity at the WWE Championship. Now, given my own personal tastes in terms of wrestling and my long-held belief that Bryan Danielson is the greatest wrestler of all time, it feels egregious to say this, but this was the right time for Kingston to get the opportunity because Bryan had never been seen as an infallible main-eventer in the eyes of the company. 

Simply put, Kingston was getting over in his title pursuit and for the first time ever there was someone management saw in a similar light. Think about how Bryan came into WWE, how he eventually won the WWE title, lost the WWE title, refused to die despite the company’s insistence that he would never again hold the WWE title, and then hadn’t really had the chance to reign with the WWE title when he did win it because he was forced onto the sidelines. He was always a WWE World Champion in spite of the company. 

Sure they relented in the face of pressure, but as has been seen time and time again, breaking into the main event is very different to staying in the main event. In fact it was Bryan’s own experience pursuing the WWE Championship that informed this “KofiMania” run, Kingston getting organically over to the extent that anything else would have been panned at the “Show of Shows.” It was a rare stroke of genius to feed into that with Kingston making it to the final two of a six-man field including AJ Styles, Jeff Hardy, Samoa Joe, and Randy Orton. And then the rug-pull win for Bryan over Kingston to retain the title served to advertise the WWE Championship match at WrestleMania. 

The match itself was as good as one could imagine from sticking six of the best wrestlers in the world inside a steel structure. But the story, both deliberately crafted and organically contextual, helped to bridge it into the perfect WrestleMania prequel. I cannot stand the way in which Kingston’s reign ended, and that really speaks to the aforementioned point about getting to the main event as opposed to staying in the main event. But the build to and the eventual moment was the stuff that draws me to professional wrestling.

Written by Max Everett