Eddie Kingston

[Dylan Waco]

Discuss Here.

[JRGoldman]

A great promo, a great character, and a better than average worker. I'm not sure that those things add up being considered for a list of this nature, but maybe he deserves some discussion. Even if your list is going to have a lot of mid 2000s indy guys on it, I'm not sure what his argument is over any of his contemporaries that have been nominated.

[Phil Schneider]

I watched him vs Trevor Lee from January yesterday, and I remembered how much I love his in ring character work, just a great in-ring shit talker and emoter, very good at main event wrestling. I think his best stuff is pretty under the radar, but the Hero feud, the Quakenbush Chikara final and his AAW ace stuff all should put him in the discussion

[Dylan Waco]

I'm the opposite of Case in that Kingston is one of the only reasons I started giving AAW a shot again after yeas of ignoring it because of it being littered with a bunch of other guys I either don't care about, or actively dislike.

 

That said, Kingston is really inconsistent. I don't find bad Kingston to be really bad per se, but he can be mind blowingly boring in the wrong setting. On the other hand, at his best he is better at transmitting the character he outlines in those great promos into his matches than just about anyone else on the indies this side of Mark Briscoe. I could probably rattle off a list of Kingston matches I enjoyed that would be substantially longer than that of indie workers who would more likely come to mind when I'm thinking of good workers on that scene which is kind of interesting to me. Even against a guy like Keith Walker who I have no interest in at all, a motivated Kingston had a legitimately very good match. I can't imagine voting for him, but he's hardly an unreasonable candidate.

[concrete1992]

King has to shoot up most folks boards, right?

In general, probably one of the top ten best US workers of the 2010s. Think the Grand Championship run is maybe a little disappointing considering the original match but would still put as one of the top handful of indie title runs over the past decade. He truly carried that thing. AAW is a promotion that doesn't always bring out the best in folks but Kingston truly turned that promotion into a case enhancer for himself.

One of the great leg sellers of all time to boot.

[El Dragon]

In 2016 I put Eddie Kingston 98th. I put him that low due to being embarrassed and wanting to make a ballot that fit with consensus then with my actual opinion. That won’t happen again. 
 

I’ll go into greater detail when I’m not on clock. But I will lead with Kingston is right up there with Savage, Rhodes, and Guerrero specifically in the element that character work in promos HAS to be included with these guys because they are all in a package. He has a over 15 years of being able to talk me into the building and then paying it off and making me felt like it was worth my virtual ticket. He makes me give a fuck about winners and losers because I either won’t to see him get his moment or his deserved beating. 
 

Id be stunned if he’s not in my top 50.

[micolash]

A lot of people are high on Kingston right now due to his AEW work (and rightfully so), but he's been a great wrestler for roughly 15-16 years. Moreover, he's frequently hit spectacular highs during that period (e.g. the all-time great rivalry with Hero, the Ian Rotten feud in 2005, the Cesaro feud). He's an all-time great at selling, brawling, and strike exchanges. Plus his range is sufficiently wide enough that he can be plugged into a lot of different situations and produce something engaging. Right now I have him as a top 20 contender, but there's a good chance he'll finish in my top ten if he adds a few more great performances to his body of work.

[Phil Schneider]

On 4/10/2021 at 5:39 PM, micolash said:

A lot of people are high on Kingston right now due to his AEW work (and rightfully so), but he's been a great wrestler for roughly 15-16 years. Moreover, he's frequently hit spectacular highs during that period (e.g. the all-time great rivalry with Hero, the Ian Rotten feud in 2005, the Cesaro feud). He's an all-time great at selling, brawling, and strike exchanges. Plus his range is sufficiently wide enough that he can be plugged into a lot of different situations and produce something engaging. Right now I have him as a top 20 contender, but there's a good chance he'll finish in my top ten if he adds a few more great performances to his body of work.

 

I think he has been one of the best wrestlers in the world over the last five years or so. I am actually lower on his AEW stuff then his traveling the world indy work which preceded it (although I am thrilled he got his shot) 

Since 2016 I rated 18 matches of his EPIC in my C+A Eddie Kingston

http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2018/09/complete-and-accurate-eddie-kingston.html

All of these were pretty under the radar, but absolutely incredible, he dropped gems against LA Park, Daniel Makabe, Tre Lamar, Babatunde, Tom Lawlor. It almost didn't matter who he was in with, he was going to elevate it.

I have also dug into his pre-2016 stuff and found some real killers which aren't really super hyped. There is an amazing Low-Ki match which is really minimalist and brutal, a CZW Joker match which is as violent as wrestling gets, in addition to more hyped stuff like the Hero feud. Wouldn't shock me if King ended up being my highest rated US worker of the 21st century.

 

 

 

[NotJayTabb]

Kingston is a lock for my list, and he still feels like a guy where I've not seen his best stuff. But he's a standout in early CHIKARA, someone who stands out as being a smarter worker than his peers, and he's very much a guy where I can type his name into the IWTV search bar and every match that comes up sounds intriguing due to his presence. He's also someone Fight Club Pro seemed to wheel out every time I didn't fancy going to one of their shows: "I'm not really feeling this card. Wait, they've booked Kingston against Dunkzilla? OK, looks like I'm going"

[Cap]

I can't cosign this line of praise enough.  A while back (it might have even been as far back as 2016) a friend of mine said something to the effect of "one day everyone will be on board with Kingston as an all time great". I saw it at the time and I knew what he meant, but I wasn't as enthusiastic on my buy-in of that point as I am now.

I love his AEW stuff, but his case extends far beyond that. He has, in a variety of contexts over the past 15+ years, stood out amongst talented rosters. He is a gifted storyteller with such a knack for understanding who he is, who is opponent is, and how to accent and flesh out their dynamic in the body of a match. He gets a lot of (earned) credit for his mic work, but I am just talking about curtain to curtain. He strikes me as someone who you don't need to know in advance to appreciate in a match.* It is an old cliche; you don't have to believe in wrestling, but Eddie Kingston makes you believe in him. You mix that with his clear love of the craft and you get magic. In a wrestling landscape that has been stacked with physically gifted athletes, his storytelling, attention to detail, and passion of have really set him apart.

Absolute lock for my list. I'm guessing top 50

 

[WingedEagle]

His ring work outside of AEW and a bit of indies before that is a real blind spot for me.  If this were a promos list he'd be at worst top 1/3 or so.  Hopefully someone can provide an extensive rec list for him that we can dive into at some point.

[Reel]

One of my favorite wrestlers over the last few years, but I feel like I'm a bit low on the actual in-ring stuff. He has a presence that is almost entirely missing from modern indies and to a lesser extent modern wrestling. There are few things I enjoy more than when they put him against trainees in AIW, where he gets to beat the tar out of them in front of their friends and family, the Wes Barkley and Tre Lamar matches stand out. On the other hand, I can't say there are a ton of other matches that I would point to as my favorites, outside of the 2017 stuff with Tracy Williams. The recent stuff from AEW that got hype, I thought was good, but not great. 

I haven't seen much of the Chikara stuff though, and that seems like the place that would have the sort of stuff you could make a case for him with. 

[Reel]

45 minutes ago, WingedEagle said:

His ring work outside of AEW and a bit of indies before that is a real blind spot for me.  If this were a promos list he'd be at worst top 1/3 or so.  Hopefully someone can provide an extensive rec list for him that we can dive into at some point.

This seems like a good place to start

http://segundacaida.blogspot.com/2018/09/complete-and-accurate-eddie-kingston.html

[Caljw]

I would need to rewatch a lot of it as I haven't watched it pretty much since it was happening but Kingston  is probably the MVP for the entirety of Chikara.

Even in the early years when it's a bunch of half trained guys having bad matches, Kingston manages to stand out even if it's through just engaging the crowd of 20 people. I'm making my way through Chikara at the moment so I'll try and post a list eventually of his best Chikara matches but by and large it will help strengthen his case. The best matches at least until where I'm up to in 2005 are his singles vs Chris Hero  (August 27th 2004) and the match where he tags with Mickie Knuckles to take on Quack & Hero (Feb 19th 2005) (though that's more about Hero vs Mickie than anything else but Kingston is great in it too).

He'll be my high on my list, not exactly sure where and I think his AEW run will determine his final standing but he's an easy top 50 for me at the minute.

[Marksman]

Will be super-high for me, and wouldn't be massively surprised if he ended up being my highest male wrestler of the last 10-15 years (depending how the next 5 years go, obviously) with WALTER probably being the other likely candidate there, and perhaps Moxley. As NotJayTabb says, search for him on IWTV and you seem pretty much guaranteed to get something interesting. Just watched his sprint with John Silver from 2019, which I would have loved to have gone longer but packs a lot of action into 7 and a half minutes, and his war with Timothy Thatcher from around the same time. I just can't imagine seeing a match of his and being disappointed by it.

[Clayton Jones]

I will say a lot of Kingston's puro tribute stuff felt very disconnected and iffy in execution to me until later in his career. I would agree that AIW Kingston is my favorite War King. Overall I love the guy so much though. I think he makes my ballot, looking forward to watching the footage to make the decision.

[Phil Schneider]

 

Kingston Road matches are specific subset of his big matches and there have been some awesome ones. I think this might be my favorite. Irie is a sawed off asskicker, who is going to hit hard and take a beating but this was Kingston taking what he can do and crafting a classic around it. Standard hard hit start, until Kingston takes an elbow to the ear and collapses. For much of the rest of the match he does some amazing head trauma selling, constantly shaking off cobwebs, unsteady on his feet, but moving forward and attacking. Irie is a force in this match, he breaks Kingston's hand by ducking his head on the backfist so Kingston hits the top of his skull instead of his jaw. Such a simple counter and so awesome looking. He also shrugs off a big lariat, hard to lariat a guy with no neck.  There was a bunch of tough guy selling in this match, but Kingston especially put enough pain behind his eyes that it wasn't just a cheap stunt. Finish had Kingston dumping Irie on his head and Irie popping up to stumble around, it was a tribute to the Williams vs. Kobashi finish and done about as well.

 

[Phil Schneider]

Match above is a better Ishii match then Ishii ever had

[Barbecue]

There is a Kingston match against a 45 year old Masato Tanaka where Kingston has a routine exchange with him but sells a normal blow like Kawada 30 minutes into an epic vs Misawa. Falls out of the ring, clutches his face, and acts like he was hit by Muhammad Ali. All Japan cosplay is appalling when most guys do it but he might be the worst offender of them all. He definitely is among the best promos of his era but he isn't any better than your Elgins or Daveys.

[Childs]

I've bided my time, reading the Kingston reviews by my Segunda Caida buddies and waiting to dive deep. Well, no moment like the present. Watched his cage match with Ian Rotten from IAW-MS last night and what a grimy bit of madness that was. The commitment to close-quarters brawling and deranged verbal selling - aided by the tightest single-shot filming imaginable - was impressive. This was Ian's playground, obviously, but a young Kingston had no problem thriving in it. Also watched a 2006 CZW tag in which he ate a king-sized ass kicking from Necro and Super Dragon with aplomb. So we're off to a good start. 

[Cap]

I really need to get my hands on some of those CZW and other not readily available Kingston matches hyped on SC.  *wink wink, yall.

 

I'm high on him and fairly familiar with his career, but a few of those I remain blind on.

[El Dragon]

It’s actually remarkable how after every single big Eddie Kingston PPV match I come away looking at my list and go “Kingston is too low on my list”, which is mighty impressive as he’s in my top 10 right now. 
 

I’m not sure if there is a wrestler that more speaks to what I want in wrestling ever then Kingston. He can make me forget wrestling isn’t real for stretches of matches. When a crazed bloody zombie looking Kingston staggers out with a can of gas in his hand, I’m not thinking how goofy this shit is, I’m thinking “Oh my God he’s going to burn Jericho alive on fucking Pay Per View” Sure, I return to my senses, but he keeps getting the moment. He makes you care about more then how great the match is and makes you care who wins and losses in a time period basically nobody else does. I think we are at the point we’re having Kingston in your top 5 doesn’t feel like it’s a crazy pick at all. And, well. If it is, I might just embrace the crazy.