Awesome Kong opens up about her difficult departure from WWE and what she needed from them to stay.
It was reported at the closing end of 2010 that Awesome Kong had signed with WWE. She made her debut at the 2011 Extreme Rules PPV, attacking Michelle McCool after a match. A few weeks later, Awesome Kong shocked the WWE Universe when she revealed that she was pregnant and needed to take a leave of absence.
It was confirmed in July 2012 that Awesome Kong was released from the company. Although Kong has remained quiet on the subject for quite some time, the former Knockouts Champion has finally broken her silence regarding her WWE departure.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Awesome Kong opened up about what occurred leading up to her departure from the company and how she struggled emotionally following the loss of her child. She also discussed the politics in WWE, saying it was ultimately too much to handle.
“Well after losing my baby emotionally and psychologically, I was not in the place physically, emotionally, and physiologically to deal with the okie doke. Now I say the okie doke, anybody who has had a WWE contract knows what that is. It is the politics, the mind games, the expectations, and the standard that you have to live up to. I’m not saying that it is bad, but it is vigorous, and I wasn’t up for the okie doke.
“I’m not into playing games, especially with what I had gone through. First my mother had gone, cancer, then my grandmother gone, my best friend from high school suddenly, my manager, God rest his soul, gone. Then now my baby was gone, and that is a lot of death back to back. I hadn’t taken time off, I was just me being me.”
“The day we buried my mother, I went straight to the airport for Bound for Glory. So it was working, and the way they wanted me to come back was not healthy. I was like you can bring me straight back so I can go into autopilot and work, or let me go somewhere where I can really process all of this.
“A lot of people like to paint WWE as the villains, but it is not as easy as that, it is very nuanced and archaic. For the most part, they were extremely supportive, they were invested in someone, excited about it, and it didn’t turn out the way that they wanted it to. And of course just my luck, Mystico had to go and fall every damn week. I’m like get it together, Triple H just got this job, you are falling and it’s not looking good right now, this sucks!”
“At the end, they asked me what do you need to come back, and I told them what I needed. It was very simple, it wasn’t money, I felt bad that they were still paying me. But no they were going to pay me, and I told them I needed to go to a facility in Colorado because they wanted me to lose the baby weight. There is a facility where The Biggest Loser people train, it was just a coincidence. It had what I needed to get my physical and emotional well-being in alignment so I can go back quickly.
“I told them and I told them I would pay for it. They called me back and said that they were going to send me down to Florida for a while, and that’s the opposite of what I need! They send down there to a hotel that was filled with roaches and bed bugs. They do change and send me to a nice place, but it was so not what I needed, it was never going to work.”
After departing from WWE, Awesome Kong wrestled on the independent circuit and in Japan for years. She would later be signed to AEW but ultimately left the company after taking a hiatus to film scenes for the popular Netflix series, GLOW. Awesome Kong announced her retirement from professional wrestling in August of 2021.
In recent news, Impact Wrestling announced that Awesome Kong will make her in-ring return on September 9th at IMPACT 1000.