Awesome Kong has told a story about Dixie Carter that she says she had been saving for a book, and it involves Carter walking past her partner in a hotel lobby to shake the hand of an elderly Black porter.
Kong was speaking on No Contest Wrestling, the podcast hosted by O’Shea Jackson Jr. and TJ Jefferson, and raised it while discussing what she describes as the ignorance a Black woman encounters in wrestling. The account is hers alone. Carter has not responded to it, and nothing in it has been independently verified.
“I have never told this story ever. I don’t think of that interview. Because I always said if I wrote a book, I would save it for the book.”
The incident took place the night before Bound for Glory in Los Angeles. It was the first time her then-boyfriend, now her husband, had been around the roster.
“We’re all at, all the wrestlers chilling in the hotel lobby, and Dixie was there. So I introduced Dan, and they got up, and everybody had shook Dan’s hand, and then Dixie came over.”
Kong said Carter was standing close enough to touch when the introduction was made.
“I said, Dixie, this is my boyfriend Dan, and she’s like, ‘Hey.’ And she goes about to where that camera is, and she shakes this old Black porter’s hand. Now he’s in an old, like, a porter outfit with the hat and everything.”
“And I go, wait. Everybody’s like, wait, what? He’s way over there, and I’m like, this is my boyfriend.”
Her own explanation was that Carter had gone looking for the only Black man in the room and had picked the wrong one.
“She’s like, I gotta find the only Black person here. Oh, there he is.”
“That must be embarrassing, because we’re all like, that just happened.”
Kong said the response she got when she repeated the story at the next television taping was what stayed with her. She declined to identify the colleague involved.
“I was like, yeah, then she shook some Black porter’s hand. And he was like, shame on her. Of course, you could get a white man. You could get a white man.”
Kong said she did not understand what was being said to her.
“What does that even mean? Can I get a white man? Like, what? That I’m good enough to get? I was like, I don’t know, something in the water. Call catering.”
This is not the first time Kong has spoken publicly about Carter. On the season seven premiere of Dark Side of the Ring in July, which covered the history of TNA and Jeff Jarrett, she said she had been refused a pay rise while making less than a manager at McDonald’s, and that other Knockouts champions were working second jobs while the company was signing veterans to large contracts. Carter did not respond to that either.
Kong worked for TNA from 2007 to 2010 and returned for a spell in 2015 and 2016, with occasional appearances since. Carter was the company’s president throughout Kong’s first run and held an executive position there until 2017.
The story came up in the middle of a longer answer about the name she was given when she started. Kong was sent to Japan in 2002 and found out she had been announced as Amazing Kong from a magazine.
“I didn’t know, so I thought they just saw a big Black girl and was like, yeah, we gonna call her Kong. And I was like, what? That is rude.”
Samoa Joe and others explained the context, including the existence of Aja Kong, the Japanese wrestler she had not heard of at the time. She then decided to take the name deliberately.
“I thought about Josephine Baker and what she had to go through and accept. I thought about all the Black people, Nat King Cole, and what they had to go through, Sammy Davis Jr. And so I said, who am I to not take my punches in the entertainment industry and connect that bridge for the next person?”
Her plan from the start was to explain it later.
“When I get famous, I’m gonna change my name and talk about why I had to be Kong. And that’s what Kharma was all about. Talk about becoming Kong and having to be Kong and being assigned that and not having the voice.”
“If I’m gonna take this name, I’m gonna have to kill it. And then when people ask me about it, I want to talk about it.”
Kong worked in WWE as Kharma in 2011 and 2012 and played Tammé Dawson in Netflix’s GLOW across three seasons.
