Exclusive Interview with for TNA Knockouts Champion Awesome Kong | No-Contest Wrestling

Wrestling was banned in Kia Stevens' house. Not the matches, not the merchandise, the word itself.

"If I talk about it, if I see it, I would want to get back into it," Stevens told O'Shea Jackson Jr. and TJ from the No Contest Wrestling studio. "And I needed to heal my body."

The wall came down by accident. Her husband sent her a video, she scrolled past it, and her eyes landed on two people of color hosting a wrestling podcast. She started playing their episodes without watching, then turning the volume up while folding laundry. Then TJ said her name out loud on the show while picking a team, and the woman known to a generation as Awesome Kong sat alone in her room and cried.

"Everything about wrestling came flooding back into my heart," Stevens said. She started writing her story down. She started returning texts. She left the gated community she had barely been leaving. "I want to thank you for bringing me out of my broken reverie."

That reverie was earned. Her Tough Enough tryout ended with Jim Ross telling her he did not believe a girl of her size could ever be successful in wrestling. She said thank you, walked out, went up to her room at Caesars Palace and told her mother, "Watch this." Then she sold her business, put all her money on herself and gave the sport five years.

She did not need five. Two months after taking her first bump, she was in Japan, where the women's roster took a wrestler with no bad habits and built her from scratch. Every night, a translation book came out and they went through what she could do better. "Everything was just more," Stevens said.

The name was not hers. All Japan women's wrestling had lost a star and needed a monster for a big card, so a press conference announced her as Amazing Kong before anyone told her. Shinsuke Nakamura said it to her face at training and she nearly took his head off, having no idea it was already in the magazines. What she chose was what to do with it. If King Kong Bundy could be King Kong Bundy, she reasoned, she could be Kong, and be so undeniable that people would have to ask her about it. That was the plan behind Kharma, and this was the conversation she wanted.

In TNA she became Knockouts champion and half of a rivalry with Gail Kim that had to justify the division's existence week to week. "We had to fight for time," Stevens said, because a running-long show cut the women first. The WWE run that followed started with a call from John Laurinaitis that she assumed was a prank, and ended with a pregnancy, a scripted breakdown in the ring she never loved as a solution, a stillbirth, the 2012 Royal Rumble as one of only three women to enter it at that point, and a release two weeks after she declined to play someone's power game.

The tributes stacked up. Mick Foley sent word that she lived up to her name. Mickie James, AJ Styles and Nia Jax all sent video, with Jax putting it plainly: without Awesome Kong there is no Nia Jax.

Her door is not closed. Stevens is near 50, still runs Zoom seminars for other people's students, and says two or three months of training would put her back among them. "I won't rule it out, but it's not going to be my main focus."