The most physically dominant man in professional wrestling is about to win the King of the Ring tournament and the WWE booking machine is going to take all the credit, despite spending the better part of two years doing everything possible to convince you Oba Femi didn’t matter.
I cannot believe we are still doing this. I cannot believe that a man who ran the longest NXT North American Championship reign in the title’s history — 273 days, a record that still stands — who beat Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 42, who won a Fatal 4-Way against Penta, Carmelo Hayes, and Solo Sikoa to open this tournament, still needs to prove himself every time he walks through a curtain. Oba Femi King of the Ring 2026 is not a coronation WWE planned. It’s one they stumbled into because even they couldn’t bury this man deep enough to stop him.
Monday Night Raw on June 15th, Femi had a semifinal match against Dominik Mysterio. Judgement Day — because of course — tried to make it a problem. JD McDonagh attempted a cheap shot. Dom pulled an actual hammer out of his boot, which is a sentence I just had to type with my adult hands. And Oba Femi absorbed all of it, hit Fall From Grace, won the match, and then — after the bell, just for the hell of it — double-chokeslammed both Dominik Mysterio AND JD McDonagh simultaneously. Not because he had to. Because he wanted to. Because that’s what you do when you’re the most powerful person in the building and some guy tried to curse you with “human monies” before the match.
Yes. Danhausen was approached by Judgement Day with money to put a curse on Oba Femi. Danhausen refused. Even the eccentric man who curses people for a living looked at the assignment and said no thank you. When your heat-seeking strategy for stopping a man involves paying Danhausen, you have already lost.
https://x.com/WWE/status/2066711492758495559
Here’s what Femi said after the match: “I used to look up to Brock Lesnar. Now I look down at him. His legacy will be remembered as someone who ran from Oba Femi.” Consider that for a moment. This man beat Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania — the same Brock Lesnar’s retirement story that the entire industry treated like a major event — and now he’s burying Lesnar in a post-match promo like it was a Monday night house show. That’s not a heel being petty. That’s a man who has fully internalized his own scale. “The Ruler.” “The Destroyer.” “The Bringer of War.” He says these things and he means all of them because he has the receipts to back every single word up.
The final at Night of Champions on June 27 in Riyadh is against Jey Uso, who beat Je’Von Evans on SmackDown after Evans was already compromised from a Bron Breakker spear. Jey is over. Jey is genuinely beloved. Jey is also going to get destroyed in Saudi Arabia in front of the Kingdom Arena and that is not a knock on Jey — it’s just physics. You are talking about a man who threw a shot put competitively at the University of Alabama, won SEC Indoor titles in 2021 and 2022, and decided the next logical step was to become a professional wrestler via the WWE NIL program. Isaac Odugbesan from Lagos, Nigeria, built like a comic book character made flesh, and WWE’s answer to this has historically been to shuffle him into their same old champions problem while running the same recycled names at the top of the card.
The winner gets a world title shot at SummerSlam 2026. That’s the stakes. That’s what Oba Femi King of the Ring 2026 actually means — not just a trophy, but a guaranteed seat at the biggest table of the summer. And he is going to walk into that arena, dismantle Jey Uso with approximately the same energy he used to dismantle everyone else in this bracket, and then stand there while they put the crown on his head.
He’s called The Ruler. He’s been right about himself this whole time. The rest of us are just catching up.
