WWE Tried To Sign Eddie Kingston After He Debuted In AEW

Back on July 16, Eddie Kingston shockingly debuted in All Elite Wrestling and was revealed as Cody's mystery challenger for the TNT Championship. The Mad King then faced The American Nightmare and the match received such a positive reaction online #SignEddieKingston started trending on Twitter. Kingston subsequently signed with AEW one week later.

The War King was a recent guest on Talk Is Jericho to discuss signing with the young promotion and his time on the indies. During their conversation, Kingston revealed AEW asked him to come back for more dates after his match with Cody. Kingston accepted the offer, but around this time WWE renewed their interest in him. He noted they have been trying to sign him as a Performance Center coach for years, but they were suddenly offering him more than a teaching role. 

Eddie ultimately told AEW about WWE's offer and the young promotion presented him with a contract soon after.

He said: "Christopher Daniels… he calls me up. He goes, 'Hey man, we want to bring you back.' I said, 'Yeah, sure.' Again, just a booking, at the time I'm thinking. I come in, I get a call from the competition. To be honest to them, they were trying to get me to coach for years. But my thing was and I told them, 'I can't collect a paycheck if I didn't earn it.' And they were like, 'What do you mean?' My thing was I was gonna go in there, coach, be bitter and angry about coaching, not getting a shot. And these guys, they love wrestling now because they're at the Performance Center, no offence to them… I would have been so bitter and angry I wouldn't have done a good job and I would have been detrimental to those kids. So, I was like, 'No, I'm good.' So anyway, now they were talking about other things besides coaching.

"And, yeah, I had to weigh my options and I came here and I told a couple of people, 'Hey, look, competition hit me up. Just letting you know. I'm not begging for a job. Just letting you know'… I just said that to them and next thing you know Christopher Daniels just goes, 'Hey, here's the contract.' I said, 'Excuse me?' He says, 'Here's the contract.'

"I said, 'Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna read it over. But let me digest this real quick.' After 18 years of busting my ass, loving this, seeing guys who I've helped make it. And that's fine but let's be honest, there's always a little bit of hatred there. Like, 'I helped these motherf*****s. Now they're in WWE or AEW and I'm still stuck. Okay, okay.' You know you're happy for them but there's still a feeling there because it's competition.

"Yeah, I was just blown away. I was blown away by the reaction. I didn't deal with the reaction until last week where in front of my lady friend I broke down crying."