Do you ever remember a wrestler you haven't seen in years and wonder what happened to them? NXT star Kona Reeves, who was trained at WXW by Afa of the Wild Samoans, joined WWE in 2014. He wrestled originally under the name Noah Kekoa and was usually on the losing end of his televised matches.
In 2018 he underwent a bit of a rebrand, declaring himself to be the Finest, with a decent look and pretty cool entrance music as most in NXT had at the time.
After a fairly stop start NXT career, Kona Reeves was last seen on WWE TV on February 19th 2020, losing to North American Champion Keith Lee in just 15 seconds.
As recently as July 2023 at least Kona has worked as a stuntman at Disney's Hollywood studios, playing a German mechanic in Indiana Jones' Epic Stunt Spectacular. For a man who has Hawaiian, Chinese, Dutch, Indonesian, Filipino and Spanish ancestry, playing a German feels like a bit of a reach, but more power to him.
According to Cagematch Reeves has wrestled a match or two a year as recently as April 2024 for WXW's Grand Finale event. The last match I could find that is freely available was on an NWA vs BRCW event in July 2023, where he you guessed it, lost to NWA television champion Thomas Latimer.
Looking back at his time in NXT, the finest could have had a very different run in a different era. He was around at a time when NXT was recruiting much bigger stars, but who knows if he could have done better in the 2.0 era that was built around more home grown talent. We'll never really know.
Sources:
Keith Lee match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w11_nwORDww
Disney pic: https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/137qvqi/kona_reeves_now_works_at_indiana_jones_epic_stunt/
Insta confirms disney: https://www.instagram.com/noah_pang_potjes/?hl=en-gb
US Sun confirms July 2023 https://www.the-sun.com/sport/8712731/wwe-kona-reeves-stuntman-indiana-jones/
NWA last streamed match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06zCNBZgMso 42 min
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