Kofi Kingston Discusses the Importance of Becoming WWE Champion

Kofi Kingston made history at WrestleMania 35 by becoming the first Africa-born wrestler to hold the WWE’s top prize, the WWE Championship. The moment was incredibly emotional for Kingston, who had spent 11 years toiling in the WWE’s midcard and tag team divisions before finally getting launched into the main event scene in the months leading up to Mania. In an interview with USA TODAY on Monday, Kingston talked about how important it was for him to win the title from both a personal and representational standpoint.

“It means a lot, especially from a representation standpoint,” Kingston said. “It’s always important for people to be able to watch WWE, especially because it’s a global product, it’s important for people all over the world to be able to look at the screen and see somebody who looks like them doing great things. And in turn, that inspires them to do great things. For me to inspire people who look like me to do awesome things, and they can look at the screen and say ‘hey, I can do this because I can see someone that looks like me and he’s doing it.’

“It’s equally as important too that people who don’t necessarily look like me and can also look to my story for inspiration, because the main thing is I struggled, you know? To get here it’s been a long, hard struggle to make it to this point, and anybody out there, whether you’re black, white, Asian, South American, whatever, you can look to my story and see I struggled to get here but I kept fighting through,” he continued. “I didn’t give up, I didn’t take no for an answer, and I did it. It took me a long time to do it, but I did it. Anything is possible for anybody if they work hard enough.”

Kingston broke down the hours leading up to his title match with Daniel Bryan at MetLife Stadium went, admitting that he didn’t plan out the match until the final few minutes before both men hit the ring.

“On Sunday we got there so early, I think we were at the building by like nine o’clock in the morning,” Kingston said. “So we still had all day, I had a bunch of things I had to do. I didn’t really give myself a whole lot of time to sit there and think about what was coming. It really wasn’t until maybe 15, 20, a half-hour before the match that I really started to be like ‘OK, now we’re in the red zone. The countdown is really on.’”

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