Freddie Prinze Jr. On What Led To Kofi Kingston’s 2009 Push Being Scrapped

On this week’s Wrestling with Freddie podcast from iHeart Media’s My Cultra Network, former WWE creative team member Freddie Prinze Jr. discussed the evolution of Kofi Kingston in WWE.

Freddie revealed that after Kofi Kingston’s breakout NASCAR promo in 2009, the creative team were assigned to come up with a storyline that would ultimately see Kofi capture a mid-card title. Kingston had trashed the custom made motor made for Randy Orton in their feud. However, plans were eventually derailed because of an incident that occurred during a Kofi-Orton one-on-one match on RAW.

“The whole team was motivated,” Freddie Prinze Jr. explains. “We [the creative team] finished the whole thing up, and everybody thinks we have this great run to the title. We bring it and it gets approved by Steph [McMahon]. She’s right behind it. I don’t think Shane was back in the company at that point, I think he was over in China at that point in time. In the meantime, Randy Orton and Kofi have a match. This is a week later [following the NASCAR promo]. In the match, a spot gets blown.

“So a spot gets blown and Randy gets p*ssed on live TV. And you see him, you can check this on YouTube, he yells, ‘STUPID!’ with that deep Orton booming voice. And that, Vince, wanted him to be Johnny Cash and present himself, even though everybody already knew he was Randy Orton,  as, ‘Hello… I’m Randy Orton,’ like, yo, that’s exactly like it is from that trailer that you saw for that movie, ‘Yeah, that’s great!’ Vince, we already know, we already know he’s the best wrestler in the world, already know who he is.

“Anyway, so this spot gets blown meaning the technique, a stunt in the match gets blown. You can tell something doesn’t look good. I don’t know what it is, because I don’t see the spot when it happens. I don’t what happened, I just know something is not good, right?”

Prinze Jr. explained that the incident in the match immediately affected their…