Mr. Kennedy had all the makings of a top WWE Superstar, but in 2009, he was fired by the company. Various backstage issues may have contributed to the decision, but the straw that broke the camel's back was a 10-man tag team match on RAW.
Kennedy hit Randy Orton with a belly-to-back suplex, but lost his grip and injured The Viper. Labelled an unsafe worker, the writing was on the wall for the former United States Championship, and that was it for him in WWE.
Talking to Chris Van Vliet, Mr. Kennedy—also known as Ken Anderson—revealed whether he wanted to come back to WWE after making a name for himself as part of the TNA roster.
"I didn’t want to, I swear to God, I had no desire," he revealed. "I think that I never wanted to blow the bridge up completely. But I really had no desire. When I was at TNA, I was like, I'll never go back there. I'll never work for them again. Now it's changed. I would definitely [go back] now."
"I think the animosity was, instead of looking at myself, I was looking at this person did this, and that person did that, and they screwed me," Kennedy added. "Then at some point I realized I played a hand, a huge hand, in all that."
"Those guys who went to Vince and said, 'Hey, we can't work with this guy anymore.' Had I been doing all the right things up until that point, that conversation would have gone differently," he acknowledged. "The fact was that that was just the straw that broke the camel's back, and Vince was tired of [it all]. There was a lot of negativity around things that I was doing, my attitude, and then that, like, get rid of him."
One of the biggest missed opportunities for Kennedy came when he was forced to relinquish the Money in the Bank briefcase due to what proved to be a misdiagnosed injury. With that, the door closed on him becoming WWE Champion.
As he explains in detail below, the plan had been for Kennedy to cash in on The Undertaker to become champion. However, with it looking like he'd be on the shelf for the better part of a year, WWE pivoted to Edge.
"I had won the briefcase, and they had me say on TV that I was going to cash it in next year at WrestleMania, and that was the plan. At the time, I don't know if things have changed, but it's literally week by week, the writing for the most part, because things change so rapidly. So it's just kind of like, 'Hey, we're thinking about doing this, but you never know what curveballs are going to be thrown at you.'"
"So then one night after SmackDown, I got a call from Michael Hayes. He said, 'Vince needs to see you in his office.' So I walked in and Vince and Stephanie laid out the scenario. 'Hey, Taker’s hurt.' I think he tore his biceps. He was the champion at the time. 'He needs to have surgery. He needs to go away.' Then they laid out the scenario for the next week on SmackDown. He was going to have a cage match with Mark Henry, or Batista or somebody like that. He was going to barely squeak out, somebody else was going to come out and do some more damage to him, and then I was going to come out and pick the bones, cash in the briefcase, cover him, 1 2 3."
"I'm in an eight-man tag. Batista gives me a little clothesline, I went down, and I felt something pop in my tricep, and I rolled out to the floor, and it just started swelling up, right away. And I remember Finley standing there going, 'That doesn't look good.' By the time I got downstairs, my arm was swollen, was starting to change colors, which is weird, because that usually takes a couple of days. Honswoggle drove me to the ER in I think it was Erie, Pennsylvania, then I went to the hotel room. Next day, Stephanie called me. She said, 'Ken, you tore your tricep off the bone. You're going to have to have surgery. You're going to go away for nine months. We still need to get that title off of Taker, though, so we're sending the jet to come pick you up. You're going to come to Penn State. Edge is going to challenge you for your briefcase, and then he's going to go on and do what you were supposed to do.'"
"Okay, that's the way the cookie crumbles, whatever, that's business. Flew there, got wrapped up. I couldn't move my arm. It was kind of like, what can you do? Not much. So Edge beat me up, I think he jumped me on the ramp, rolled me in the ring, ding, ding, ding, spear, 1 2 3. So then the next day, I go down to Birmingham, Alabama, sitting on Doctor Andrews' table, and he just feeling my arm, and he goes, 'That's not a tear.' Excuse me? 'No, I don't think that's a tear.' Then he took another MRI. It was just a large hematoma. It was just a bunch of blood vessels that popped. So MVP says you were a misdiagnosis away from becoming World Champion."
You can watch the full interview with Kennedy in the player below.