Ranking All 19 WWE King Of The Ring Winners

5. Booker T (2006)

King Of The Ring Winners Bret Hart Brock Lesnar Kurt Angle
WWE.com

The last truly great King of the Ring has to be Booker T, who won the 2006 tournament.

At the time, Booker was a five-time WCW World Champion and multi-time WCW and WWF/E tag champ, but his career had leveled off by the time 2006 rolled around. Winning KOTR that year would lead to a dramatic shakeup for King Booker’s career. The Houston native started speaking with a faux (and deliberately poor) British accent, recruited a “king’s court” and reinvented himself as a result of being WWE King of the Ring.

King Booker then went on to win the World Heavyweight Championship, his first (and only) WWE world title. He’d continue to use the king moniker well into 2007, battling Jerry “The King” Lawler and Triple H due to their use of the royal title. He would maintain his king title until he left WWE in October 2007.

Booker probably used the KOTR title better than anyone since Harley Race, as he rejuvenated his career, became a world champion and changed his entire persona due to the crown. That’s getting some serious mileage out of a single tournament.

Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.