Awesome Kong says WWE signed her because every other woman auditioning was submitting matches against her, and that she was released two weeks after telling someone backstage what she thought of them.
Kong, who worked in WWE as Kharma, was on the No Contest Wrestling podcast. She had been planning to call WWE herself once her TNA non-compete expired, and never got the chance.
“I was like, I’m gonna wait a while, get back on the indies, and I’m gonna give WWE a call. About as soon as my non-compete was up, give it a couple of months, I’m gonna get in shape a little bit, I’m gonna call. However, they called me.”
The reason they had already seen her work was that TNA had her working everywhere.
“Evidently all the girls that were sending in their tapes were sending in their best matches, and their best matches on the indies, because TNA was pimping me out left, right, and center. All their best matches were me. So even though I hadn’t sent my stuff in yet, they had seen my stuff.”
The call came from John Laurinaitis, and she did not believe it.
“Didn’t believe it was John Laurinaitis, and was like, stop playing on my phone.”
She had spent her career being told it would never happen.
“Everybody would always assume they knew Vince and knew what Vince liked, and people would always say, yeah, I’m sorry, Vince would never hire you. Vince likes this, and Vince likes that. And that’s all I would hear from my peers through my whole career.”
She said she wanted one entrance from the job.
“Even through all that time, every night to Dan I was like, I just want to walk down that ramp one time. I just want to at least one time, so that JR can shove it. I said, I just gotta walk down one time. I said, Lord, just one time.”
Kong debuted on Raw in April 2011 and had a run of squash matches, which was the one walk down the ramp she had described wanting. Almost immediately afterward, she went on a tour of Mexico and could not work out why she was exhausted.
“I couldn’t, like, move or wake up. It got to the point where it was like, I’m just gonna live in Mexico now. I’m so tired. And then I was like, something’s wrong. There’s something going on with me that I’m this tired, and when I should be so excited that I’m on the road.”
She was pregnant and rang the office straight away.
WWE responded by writing the angle in which she broke down in the middle of the ring on the June 2011 SmackDown, crying and eventually leaving. Kong did not rate the idea, and said her main feeling was guilt about the timing.
“I didn’t think it was the most creative way to do it. But I felt bad that that’s what they had to do, because at the time Hunter had put, it was like he was at the beginning of his reign. He had put everything into me. He was so excited for me. And then it was like, okay, now I pop up pregnant.”
She asked for changes to the script before agreeing to it.
“I did ask them to change some words because I was like, I’m not gonna say that or have that said about my child if they were to see that later. And they accommodated me, and we went out and did that, and I went on maternity leave for a while.”
Her own preference would have been to disappear quietly.
“I wanted just to moonwalk quietly home. Just, like, can’t we just have me disappear for a while while we gotta do all this crying and whatnot? Man, okay, I’ll go out there and cry. Y’all want me to cry on cue? Okay, I’ll go out there and cry on cue, which was hard with the damn lights just beaming on you.”
She lost the pregnancy shortly afterward and never returned to television. She said the release came from something separate.
“I just had no bandwidth. I had no tolerance for the bulls***. It’s a mind game there, and I couldn’t participate. So when someone did what they used to do, I don’t know how it is now, but back then there were people that were on power trips.”
“When someone pulled their power trip, I had to put on my clown suit and drive down there and let them know what I thought about that. So I got let go about two weeks after that, and I knew it was coming. I was like, oh, they’re gonna let me go after that.”
She named nobody.
“There was all the games. I couldn’t play all the games. They said, ‘ We want you to do this and come back, and we’ll sign you again, but that just never happened.”
Kong was released in July 2012. She returned briefly for the 2016 Royal Rumble, and later appeared in AEW’s first women’s match. She is a two-time TNA Knockouts Champion and played Tammé Dawson in Netflix’s GLOW.
