Awesome Kong has opened up about the unusual circumstances that led to her joining WWE, revealing that the company had already become very familiar with her work before she ever had the chance to approach them herself.

Kong, who performed in WWE under the name Kharma, discussed her short-lived run with the company during an appearance on the No Contest Wrestling podcast. She explained that after leaving TNA, her original plan was to wait until her non-compete period had ended, return to the independent scene and eventually contact WWE.

That call never needed to happen because WWE contacted her first.

“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 had already seen plenty of footage featuring her because many of the women attempting to get signed were submitting matches in which Kong happened to be their opponent.

“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.”

Kong said John Laurinaitis was the person who eventually contacted her, although she initially thought somebody was playing a prank.

“Didn’t believe it was John Laurinaitis, and was like, stop playing on my phone.”

The opportunity was particularly meaningful because Kong had spent much of her career hearing from others that she did not fit the type of performer Vince McMahon would supposedly 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 comments, Kong said one of her biggest ambitions was simply to experience walking down a WWE entrance ramp 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.”

That moment eventually arrived when Kharma made her WWE debut in 2011. The company immediately presented her as a destructive force within the women's division, with Kharma targeting several members of the roster during her early appearances.

However, her WWE career took an unexpected turn almost immediately.

Kong recalled travelling to Mexico and becoming unusually exhausted at a time when she felt she should have been enjoying one of the biggest opportunities of her career.

“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 subsequently discovered she was pregnant and immediately contacted WWE to inform the company.

WWE then wrote Kharma off television with an emotional segment in which she broke down inside the ring. Kong admitted she was not particularly impressed with the creative direction, while also feeling guilty because of the investment WWE had already made in her character.

“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.”

Before agreeing to the segment, Kong requested that certain parts of the script be altered because she did not want comments about her unborn child remaining on television for them potentially to see years later.

“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.”

Kong said she would have preferred for Kharma simply to disappear from WWE programming without an elaborate explanation.

“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.”

Tragically, Kong later lost the pregnancy and did not return to WWE television as a regular performer.

While discussing her eventual departure from the company, Kong said the release was connected to a separate backstage incident. She explained that she was struggling with what she described as the political and psychological side of the WWE environment 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 said she ultimately confronted an unnamed person after becoming frustrated with what she viewed as a backstage power trip, and she believed almost immediately that the confrontation would cost her the 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.”

She declined to identify the person involved but suggested there had been discussions about potentially returning to WWE at another point.

“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. Her time with the promotion was brief, but the Kharma character generated considerable interest and remains one of WWE's biggest "what if?" stories from that era.

Outside WWE, Kong enjoyed significant success, particularly in TNA, where she became a two-time Knockouts Champion. She later joined AEW during the promotion's early days and also found success outside professional wrestling through her role as Tammé Dawson in Netflix's GLOW.