Heading into Elimination Chamber 2019, Mustafa Ali had to be pulled from the match due to injury, so it was revealed that one member of the New Day would be taking his place.
In steps Kofi – the veteran of the group, but a guy who would not lay down without a fight.
So a gauntlet match was set-up on Smackdown to determine who would get the coveted final entry in the Elimination Chamber and a hefty advantage. Kofi is an underdog, there was noooo way he was getting an advantage, at that event or in this match.
He starts things out with reigning WWE champion Daniel Bryan and they tear things up for 30 minutes, as Bryan’s red-bearded insurance policy made his payout, interfering at every turn.
Kofi then got through Jeff Hardy and Samoa Joe before eventually losing to AJ Styles after an hour in the ring, but in that loss was a glimmer of potential, an image planted in the mind of every fan, a shimmer of a brass ring just within reach.
The roar of the crowd as Kofi bested WWE legends and the frankly terrifying Samoa Joe in a fill-in performance was the kind of noise management couldn’t ignore, or shouldn’t ignore, they definitely would and have ignored this sort of thing before.
Thankfully at Elimination Chamber Kofi lasted until the final two, before ultimately being bested by Daniel Bryan himself who retained his lovely eco-friendly compostship. But that cemented it, that brass ring was clear as day for Kofi and the fans.
And WWE got to do their very favourite thing, make money selling us a bit of old rope, you liked the Daniel Bryan WrestleMania XXX storyline, well here it is again only this time right Bryan’s the villain. Genius.
But because history repeats and this was about as planned as Bryan’s underdog tale, i.e. not planned at f***ing all, thank you Road Dogg, WWE had to cram an 11-year story they should have been telling into two months. And somehow they struggled to fill that.
Kofi was long-serving, hard-working and had won people over in the gauntlet and chamber, people were like put the title on him already, so who is going to get a shot at Fastlane: Kevin Owens.
It’s a classic Vince McMahon swerve, to bump his preferred candidate up the queue, art imitating life and all of that.
But when Owens fell short, Kofi was still a shoe-in, so to prove he wasn’t a B+ player as Vince put it, another echo of Bryan, he would have to win another gauntlet for a one-on-one chance with D Bry. He just wasn’t expecting that one-on-one to come at the end of the gauntlet after he just beat five guys.
So here’s the story of the company telling this guy that even if he proves himself good enough to be the champ, he won’t be the champ in their eyes, and not only that but they won’t permit him to.
And it’s the same thing they told a scruffy-haired, scraggly-bearded Bryan back in the day, but a more important dimension to it is it’s what they told the likes of Booker T with all the thinly veiled racism they could muster.
“Somebody like you doesn’t get to be a world champion,”
Which was obviously totally kayfabe and a ploy to get heel heat, but the worst heat always has a ring of truth to it, because somebody like Booker didn’t get to be champ in WWE at that point.
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