Awesome Kong has opened up about her brief WWE run as Kharma, revealing how matches submitted by other female wrestlers inadvertently helped get her signed and why she believes she was ultimately released from the company.
Appearing on the No Contest Wrestling podcast, Kong explained that she had planned to contact WWE herself after her TNA non-compete period expired. Before she had the opportunity, however, WWE contacted her. “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.”
According to Kong, WWE officials were already very familiar with her work because many women auditioning for the company had submitted matches featuring her.
With TNA allowing Kong to take numerous outside bookings at the time, she frequently appeared opposite wrestlers who would later use those matches as examples of their best work. “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.”
When John Laurinaitis eventually contacted her, Kong initially thought someone was playing a joke. “Didn’t believe it was John Laurinaitis, and was like, stop playing on my phone.”
Her disbelief was partly rooted in years of being told that she did not fit the type of female performer Vince McMahon would hire. “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.”
Despite those doubts from others, Kong said she had always maintained one simple goal: she wanted the experience of making a WWE entrance at least once. “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 as Kharma in WWE in 2011 and was immediately presented as a destructive force in the women’s division. However, her initial run was interrupted almost as soon as it began.
While touring Mexico, Kong became unusually exhausted and initially could not understand what was happening. “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.”
Kong discovered that she was pregnant and immediately informed WWE.
The company subsequently wrote her off television with an angle on SmackDown in June 2011 that saw Kharma break down emotionally in the ring before leaving. Kong admitted she was not particularly enthusiastic about the creative direction and felt guilty about the timing because of how much faith had been placed in her. “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.”
Kong did request changes to parts of the script because she was uncomfortable with certain language potentially being associated with her child in the future. WWE agreed to those adjustments. “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 preference would have been to simply disappear from television without an elaborate storyline. “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.”
Kong later lost the pregnancy and never returned to WWE television as a regular performer.
However, she said her eventual release stemmed from a separate backstage issue. Kong described being unable to tolerate what she viewed as mind games and power trips within the company at the time. “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.”*
Kong recalled confronting an unnamed individual after one such incident and said she immediately expected the confrontation to cost her job. “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.”
Kong did not identify the person involved. She added that there had been discussions about potentially returning to WWE if she followed a particular path, but nothing ultimately materialized. “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 officially released by WWE in July 2012.
She later made a brief WWE return in the 2016 Royal Rumble before eventually becoming part of AEW’s early women’s division. Outside WWE, Kong established herself as one of the most dominant women’s wrestlers of her generation, including two reigns as TNA Knockouts Champion.
She also found success outside the ring as Tammé Dawson in Netflix’s GLOW.
