Every WWE King Of The Ring Winner Ranked From Worst To Best
Winning this tournament can be a crowning achievement, or it can be a royal pain.
Don’t look now, but it might be safe to say that the King of the Ring tournament is back as an annual tradition.
The popular tourney was a WWE mainstay throughout the 1980s-2000s, but it disappeared from programming for years at a time during a 20-year period. Between 2003 and 2023, WWE held only six King of the Ring tournaments. But since 2024, the tournament has once again become a summer fixture, with WWE holding its third consecutive edition, which also happens to be the 25th set of brackets to crown a king.
KOTR began as a house show tournament in 1985, with the first six being held in New England. The prize was the title of King of the Ring, which didn’t technically mean anything, nor did it carry any huge benefit – only one of those early winner saw the victory recognized on television. However, the individual winners would find ways to utilize the title.
It wasn’t until 1993, when the tournament got its own PPV, that things really took off for King of the Ring. For 10 years, the annual tourney would become known for being an opportunity to elevate a mid-card wrestler that had seemingly been pegged for a promotion to the top of the card.
But not all kings have been created equal. The tournament winners fell on tough times in later years, with some of the kings being downright jokes.
Still, King of the Ring has produced some memorable winners – 12 of the victors are WWE Hall-of-Famers, and at least three others who are currently active are likely to be enshrined. Let’s take a look at how the 23 men who have won the tournament have fared.
23. Mabel (1995)
When you talk about the worst King of the Ring, you would be hard-pressed to come up with someone worse than 1995 winner Mabel.
As part of the babyface tag team Men on a Mission, Mabel was little more than a midcard act, losing to people higher up on the card. But in 1995, he turned heel, won the KOTR tournament and became the WWF’s top heel. Yes, you read that right. Mabel was a top heel a year before Austin 3:16 began to run amok in the company. Mercifully, Mabel’s run would end pretty quickly.
King Mabel would fall to then-WWF Champion Diesel at SummerSlam (just writing that sentence pretty much reveals the sad state of 1995 WWF) and enter into a feud with The Undertaker. The big man managed to injure the Deadman, which pretty much signalled the end of his run as a serious threat.
Less than seven months after winning KOTR, Mabel was buried in an eight-second loss to Diesel on the 1996 New Year’s Day episode of Raw. After a failed entry into the Royal Rumble, Mabel was gone from the company.