Awesome Kong wanted wrestling to be the thing that got her out of the house after losing her son. Instead, her attempt to return to WWE ended with a backstage confrontation she knew almost immediately was going to cost her the job.
While speaking on the No Contest Wrestling podcast, Kong opened up about the difficult stretch that ultimately ended her run as Kharma. She had gone on maternity leave after WWE wrote her off television, but late in her pregnancy, she went into labor and her son was stillborn.
“I went on maternity leave and unfortunately, late into the pregnancy, you know, I went into labor and he was stillborn, you know, so I lost the baby. And so I wanted to come back to work immediately after that, and I actually did. We did the Royal Rumble.”
That return came at the 2012 Royal Rumble, where Kong became only the third woman at the time to enter the men’s match. Afterwards, WWE asked what she needed to come back full-time, and Kong’s answer was simple: she needed to work.
“What happened was WWE asked me what did I need to come back. I was like, ‘Just let me come back. I need—I need to not be at home and just [be] in my own whatever. Put me on the road.’”
WWE wanted Kong to lose some weight first. She wasn’t opposed to it and even offered to go to a Colorado facility used by The Biggest Loser.
“‘Well, we want you to lose a little weight.’ I mean, okay. Yeah, that’s fine. All right. There’s a fat camp out in Colorado that The Biggest Loser use. Send me out there. I’ll drop some pounds.”
Kong also had a specific idea for getting herself back into wrestling shape. She wanted Sara Del Rey and two weeks at OVW. WWE wanted to handle her preparation differently.
“They asked me, ‘What do you need?’ I said, ‘Okay, this is what I need. You want me to be ready? Get me Sara Del Rey.’ ‘Who’s Sara Del Rey?’ I know y’all know who Sara Del Rey. Yeah, just find Sara Del Rey. Get me—let me go down to OVW two weeks. I’ll be ready. That’s not what they wanted to do. They wanted me to—they wanted me to get ready the way they wanted me to get ready.”
That’s where everything started falling apart. Kong was still dealing with the loss of her son and said she simply didn’t have the bandwidth for what she considered the “mind games” surrounding WWE at the time.
“I just—I had no bandwidth. I had no tolerance for the—I couldn’t do it. It’s a mind game there and I couldn’t participate.”
Kong made a point of saying she doesn’t know whether WWE operates the same way today. Back then, however, she felt certain people went on “power trips,” and when one of those situations reached her, she wasn’t interested in playing along.
“So when someone—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, you know. And when someone pulled their power trip, you know, I had to put on my clown suit and drive down there and let them know what I thought about that, you know.”
She didn’t identify the person involved or reveal exactly what happened during the confrontation, but she knew she’d crossed a line WWE wasn’t going to ignore. About two weeks later, the call came. At that point, Kong wasn’t pretending she had handled WWE’s backstage environment the way the company wanted. She simply wasn’t in a place where she could.
“So I got let go about two weeks after that, and I knew it was coming. I was like, ‘Oh, oh, they’re going to let me go after that. They’re about to let me go after that.’”
“But, like, there was—there was all the games. I couldn’t—I couldn’t play. I could not play all the games.”
The release wasn’t necessarily supposed to be permanent. WWE told Kong there were changes it wanted her to make and left open the possibility of bringing her back afterwards.
“They said, ‘We want you to do this and come back and we’ll sign you again.’ But that just never happened.”
That second chance never came, leaving Kharma as one of WWE’s biggest what-ifs from that era. Kong arrived with enormous expectations, but after losing her son and trying to throw herself back into wrestling, she reached a point where dealing with WWE’s backstage games was something she simply couldn’t do anymore.
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Do you think Awesome Kong could have become one of WWE's biggest women's stars if her return had worked out differently? Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comment section below.
