5 things we learned about Kofi Kingston on Lilian Garcia's podcast
Over the past two years, Lilian Garcia's Chasing Glory podcast has impacted the lives of many people through some incredible interviews. She has the ability to bring people to open up and share their stories of weakness, with many real, raw and inspiring interviews with most of the current roster and some former superstars, including the likes of Becky Lynch, Batista and Corey Graves among so many more familiar faces.
This week, on the milestone 100th episode of the show, the former WWE ring announcer spoke to Kofi Kingston, who is currently reigning WWE Champion. Not a bad get for the century. This episode was another riveting listen among the stark majority of them, as Kofi spoke about how his life was, from moving to the United States at one year old all the way to winning the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 35.
Here are five things we learned about Kofi Kingston on Lillian Garcia's 'Chasing Glory' podcast.
#5 The Ghana-Jamaica connection
Kofi Kingston was born in Ghana, but he and his family moved to the United States when he was one. Kofi went back just a handful of times since then, learning a valuable lesson over there that life was much more than material things. That would be his only trip to the country since returning there as WWE Champion. It seemed like a no brainer for Kofi to portray a Ghanaian on WWE programming, right? That wouldn't be the case initially, as there was a similar character in Ring of Honor at the time, Prince Nana.
This forced the New Day member to brainstorm for a new character. That would be done when he was listening to a Damian Marley album, as he tried out a Jamaican accent in promo class. Kofi eventually became 'Jamaican' to start off in WWE. However, he received some severe backlash from Ghanaians, and even Jamaicans, on MySpace for portraying the character. After over a year of the weird accent, Kofi dropped the entire Jamaican schtick due to a problematic interview with the BBC, which he did entirely in character.
Lilian Garcia would be left confused when she was told to introduce Kofi Kingston from Jamaica one week and Ghana, West Africa the other. She funnily mentioned that she never got any backstory or reasoning for various changes in what she had to say. This was one of the most striking alterations in recent WWE history.
See WWE Smackdown Results, Highlights of event, & more on WWE Smackdown Results page