Kong versus Phoenix was planned for WrestleMania.
Freddie Prinze Jr. pushed out the fourth episode of his ‘Wrestling with Freddie’ podcast. He dove into the promo classes he set up for talents during his time with WWE.
He revealed that there was a plan in place to have Kia Stevens (Awesome Kong) go one-on-one with Beth Phoenix at a WrestleMania. Prinze Jr. got around to that revelation by sharing a story he crafted which would’ve saw Kong defeat Gail Kim and her next challenger would be Natalya. Post-match, Kong was going to beat down Natalya which would’ve led to a Beth Phoenix run-in. The match did not happen because Kong left WWE.
So this is what all these women were going through when I was there and my relationship with Nattie led a lot of the women on SmackDown to come to that class to the point where I began writing for a lot of them and helping them work on their skills to where Steph [McMahon] had me write this whole crazy storyline. They were gonna bring Awesome Kong in and they gave me the story and we had recently signed Gail Kim and I had Awesome Kong like smashing her first three opponents, just killing ‘em, right? Awesome Kong, if you don’t know her, is Kia Stevens and she’s just like 6’2, maybe 6’1, just gigantic, right? And I met her. Ah, can’t wait to tell you this story. So I write this whole storyline about her and she crushes the first three and the WWE had signed Gail Kim and her and Gail had some really, really good matches at TNA so Gail was gonna give her a match and we were gonna get seven minutes. This is what I was promised, right? It would’ve been three minutes but I was promised seven minutes. Wooo! Seven whole minutes. Now they get two commercial breaks and they’re doing 25-minute matches in the last hour of Raw, they’re so gangster now. But, so we’re writing this up and Gail hits her finisher but Kong kicks out and Kong beats her and then she meets Natalya and this is the first real, real test and Kong beats her but then goes off after the bell which brings out Beth Phoenix which is what Vince [McMahon] wanted me to work WrestleMania too and it was gonna be Beth Phoenix and Awesome Kong at WrestleMania — or this is what Stephanie [McMahon] wanted me to do and so I put this whole story together, they brought in Kong and then I wanted to try out some of my ideas in the promo class. So we’d already been working together now a few months and I had a good rapport with them and we were trying out new things. Miz was doing stuff with Alex Riley in there, in the promo class where they would just go off on each other and nobody got to see and I’ll tell that story another day. But, Kia and Beth, I kind of gave Kia more information than Beth and I said, ‘Hey, I want you — because you guys are gonna be going together for WrestleMania and I want the relationship to start in a very sort of Emperor-Anakin Skywalker sort of way. I don’t want you to try to bury her or break her or kill her. I want you to seduce her. I want you to bring her to the dark side so to speak and have the two of you destroy all the rest of these Barbie doll beauties and show the world what women should be’ and Kia’s just looking at me and I swear to God, she goes, ‘I got it baby’ and so I sit down and I’ve never worked with her before, only Beth and the rest. She was brand new.
And Beth’s standing there and Kia comes up to her and she goes, ‘Don’t be afraid. I don’t wanna hurt you. I want to join you’ and she just walks in a circle around Beth and Beth just follows her with her head and while she’s circling around her, she goes, ‘Look at you and look at me and now look at all the rest of these dumb b*tches in this room’ and it’s all the rest of the female wrestlers in there and they’re all sitting there and they’re just — they know it’s not personal. This is how these promos are done. I mean they’ll shoot on each other straight up and she starts naming like their weight. ‘This b*tch weighs 122 pounds. I’m three of her. You could snap her in two. We could break each and every single one of them and beyond that, we could break the whole damn system’ and they go through this whole thing and she circles her about three times and at the end, Beth just looks her dead in the face and goes, ‘You can go straight to hell’ and everybody was like, ‘Oh my God! This is amazing!’ And obviously I was like, ‘Yo, these chicks –’ because Beth wasn’t the best on the microphone, right? So I had to protect her more than I would have to protect Kia. Apparently I didn’t know how much I would have to do with Kia. But she was just fire, like straight fire. Now the story couldn’t play [out] and ended up not going because Kia ended up leaving the company…
Kia Stevens appeared at NWA’s EmPowerrr show and shared the ring with Gail Kim. It was there that Stevens announced her retirement from in-ring competition. She was inducted into the IMPACT Wrestling Hall Of Fame several months later.
If the quote in this article are used, please credit ‘Wrestling with Freddie’ with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcription.
