WWE Announces First Competitors in the King of the Ring and Queen’s Crown Tournaments

WWE officially announced last week that this month will see both the return of the King of the Ring tournament as well as the first-ever women’s version of the single-elimination tournament known as the Queen’s Crown. Both tournaments will start on this week’s edition of Friday Night SmackDown (dubbed the “Season Premiere”) and while the brackets have not been unveiled the first four competitors have been officially announced. Sami Zayn will take on Rey Mysterio on the men’s side, while Liv Morgan will face her recent rival Carmella. 

The one wrestler most fans want to see win this year’s KOTR tournament is Xavier Woods, who was drafted to the Blue Brand alongside Kofi Kingston during this year’s WWE Draft. Woods has stated for years that he wants the crown more than anything else in the company and even started shouting “Crown me!” at the camera during this week’s Raw.

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“Seeing things dealing with the medieval times and the medieval era and anything that has those kinds of vibes, there’s usually a situation where the king is like, challenged to a fight or somebody wants to like challenge or authority, whatever. The king selects a champion to fight for him,” Woods said in a recent interview with the Into The Danger Zone podcast. “That tells me champions don’t have kings. But kings have champions. Making kings have more power than the champion, a champion works for a king, a king works for no one. Think about the long, long, long, long lineage of people that have held the Heavyweight Championship that’s a lot. Even to this point, the Universal Championship. That’s a lot of people.

“To me, the crown is a representation of passing the test. The Heavyweight Championship is a representation of climbing the mountain and beating the person on top, extremely important. As an academic. I want to be tested. I want my test, my Scantron, to do my essay. Let me present in front of the class, test me. Test me so I can know if I will pass or fail, so I know,” he continued. “I don’t necessarily think that I’ve earned anything because I have yet to be tested in the way that I feel a king would be tested. That’s why I want it so bad. Because, yeah, it’s cool to have the crown and do a gimmick and all this stuff with it. But on a deeper note as like a human as Austin Watson, I want that test so that I can know. So I’ve talked all this stuff about King of the Ring and all this stuff. But if I went out and just underperformed. Alright, cool. I know now and I’ll shut up. But like, you want a draw? That to me is it. Winning one match? Anybody can win one match on a given day, winning a full tournament on one night? That’s not something that happens at random to anyone.”