Kofi Kingston put himself in WWE‘s history books on Tuesday.
The reigning SmackDown Tag Team Champion and member of The New Day set a new record for most days as a tag team champion in the WWE at 954 days. The record was previously held by Billy Gunn at 953 days during his 11 championship reigns with Bart Gunn, Road Dogg and Chuck Palumbo.
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Originally debuting in WWE’s reincarnation of ECW in 2008, Kingston has gone on to become a nine-time tag team champion. Along with his five reigns with the New Day, Kingston previously held tag team championship gold with Evan Bourne, R-Truth and CM Punk.
Big E celebrated Kingston’s accomplishment on Tuesday by tweeting “(Kofi) has the most days as a tag team champion in the history of WWE. Never failed a drug test. Never had a brush with the law. Always a professional to the highest degree. Give this man his flowers while he can still smell them.”
Kingston jokingly responded with “I will gladly accept all flowers given to me. Blue Bonnets are out of season, but hydrangeas will do just fine.”
He also thanked each of his former tag partners in a separate post.
“What a strange accomplishment, lol,” Kingston wrote, tagging each of his partners’ Twitter handles. “Nonetheless, I’m thankful and grateful for all the teammates I’ve had along this crazy journey. 🙌🏾 Salute!”
In a recent on Booker T’s Heated Conversations, Xavier Woods went into detail about the origins of New Day. He said the hardest selling point when pitching the idea to Vince McMahon was whether or not the fans would boo Kingston, given his years of being a babyface.
“He was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think they’ll ever boo Kofi,’” Woods said while recalling his conversation with McMahon. “I think it was the next week I went in and talking to him and was like, ‘I strongly believe we can do this. If you give me a microphone, four weeks straight, I can make them boo Kofi Kingston,’” said Woods. “And he goes, ‘And if you don’t?’ I said, ‘You have 70 dudes in NXT ready to take my spot and I shouldn’t be here.’ And he goes, ‘You believe in this that much?’ I said, ‘100 percent.’ He said, ‘Ok, we can try it out.’ After the third week, they started to boo Kofi a little bit. Vince came and gave us the head nod. And we were off from there,” he said.
At SummerSlam in 2015, the trio won the Raw Tag Team Championships for the second time as a group and went on to defend the titles for a record 483 days. The trio also have the record for most combined days as Raw tag team champions at 532 days.
