Kofi Kingston has achieved many things during his WWE stint, but ahead of this evening’s Royal Rumble, he looks to erase one of his biggest botches.
The former world champion spoke with Fightful about his early elimination in last year’s Rumble matchup, and how he’s surprised that something like that hadn’t happened sooner considering the amount of high risk spots he’s done in the Rumble for years. Highlights from the interview are below.
Says he was obviously supposed to be in last year’s Rumble much longer:
When you go back and look at the stats sometimes, people will say, ‘Okay, this person was in for this amount of time,’ I think that was the shortest amount of time that I’d been in any Rumble. Of course, it was the shortest duration of a superstar in last year’s Rumble, too. It was definitely supposed to be longer than that. I don’t know how long it was supposed to be, but it was supposed to be longer than that.
Says he considers the botch a learning experience, and is surprised that something like that hasn’t happened to him sooner:
I’ve talked about it where I feel like we have our biggest growth when we fail, right? When we don’t do what we intended to do when we set a goal and we try to accomplish it and we don’t accomplish it. That is where real growth happens. So part of me was kind of excited for the growth, to be able to experience that. It’s a situation where I’ve been doing these Royal Rumble elimination spots for a long time. I’m surprised none of them have messed up to this point.
How the moment added a bit of realism to the match:
I think it just adds to the element of realism to what we do and it reinforces, yeah, we go out there every week and things go off without a hitch, but sometimes they don’t. That’s just the reality of what we do and what we do is not easy. It is actually quite difficult. Sometimes everything has to be 100% accurate. If one thing is off then everything will be off. Yeah, man. It’s all good, it’s all good. Hopefully this year will be different. It can’t be worse.
