During her appearance on “Talk is Jericho”, Awesome Kong discussed trying to get into the WWE early on only to be rejected and her decision to leave TNA. Here are the highlights:
On Being Rejected By The WWE:
[It was] 2009, 2010. Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mick Foley lobbied to get me in.
We [she and Austin] just met at the Cauliflower Alley Club. He was familiar with my work, and we got to rapping. And he’s like, ‘That’s someplace you need to go!’ And Mick Foley and I had been friends at TNA, and when I left TNA he called Vince McMahon himself and said, ‘You need to hire this girl.’ And then JR lobbied on his social media.
I had to wait out my no-compete clause from TNA … when I left TNA. When I insisted on leaving TNA, I had negative $76 in my bank account, and my pride. That’s all I had. And in fact, people at TNA assured me I would not be going to WWE. And I said, ‘I still want to leave anyway.’
On Leaving TNA:
I had a disagreement [the altercation with Bubba the Love Sponge] … it wasn’t really that. That was just where it [was] ‘Exit, stage left.’ Things had been building up for a long time, because things were just a mess over there, and I didn’t understand why with what Gail and I were doing the pay discrepancy was so large. It was time that I actually earned a living wage. Because in wrestling, you get a finite time to make your money. And I’d like to make enough to at least have a future. And so the struggle was too hard. I came up against too much, and then the one thing that kept me there was, it was the best locker room I’d ever experienced.
On Her Disagreement With Bubba The Love Sponge:
So when someone comes into the locker room and disrespects all the hard-working wrestlers and is speaking like a wrestler as if he earned the right to speak as such, that rubbed me the wrong way. My manager had just died like 48 hours before I was doing a fundraiser for the earthquake in Haiti. I hadn’t slept in literally 48 hours. And so, you know when you get to the point where it’s like, ‘You know what? F that.’ It got to that point. So we had a physical altercation, and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just done with everything.’ They wanted to turn it into a storyline and I’m like, ‘I’m not turning it into a storyline with that man, I’m not — no! I’m not putting that over at all!’
On Finally Making It To The WWE:
Nine months pass, I got a call from Tommy Dreamer and he said, can I give John Laurinaitis your number? I said ‘Yeah.’ And then so I get a call, and oh gosh, it was so horrible because I was actually sick. I was really, really sick. So I get a call from someone who says he’s John Laurinaitis. And if you know John Laurinaitis’ voice, I’m sick with a sore throat and I was like [talks is a raspy voice] ‘I’m so sorry, I’m really sick. Please don’t think I’m making fun of you.’ He asked me my situation, I told him. It kind of just stayed in the air. And then two, three months later, I was living with my now-husband, but then boyfriend in Boston at the time. Two or three months later, he asked me to come down to the Towers. And I do, we had a conversation and he hired me right there on the spot.
You can listen to the podcast below:
Credit: Talk is Jericho. H/T 411Mania.
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