Freddie Prinze Jr.’s latest episode of Wrestling With Freddie recapped a storyline idea Prinze had involving Michelle McCool, Beth Phoenix, Awesome Kong (fka Kharma), the Divas Championship and a WrestleMania match. Fans will remember that Kong (real name Kia Stevens) signed with WWE in late 2010 after becoming a major women’s wrestling star in TNA, Ring of Honor and Shimmer. Prinze was tasked with coming up with a major women’s storyline for WrestleMania involving the Divas Championship and he proposed that Kong run through the women’s division by taking down Kelly Kelly, Natalya and Gail Kim before defeating Michelle McCool for the Divas Championship at that year’s Royal Rumble. She would then go into WrestleMania as the dominant heel and take on a babyface Beth Pheonix.
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Most of the storyline wound up getting approved by Stephanie McMahon, Michael Hayes and Vince McMahon, but the plans hit a snag when McCool and The Undertaker (her husband) learned about it.
“So I give it to Steph [Stephanie McMahon] and she really likes it, I give it to Freebird [Michael Hayes] he really likes it and it goes all the way to the top. It goes to Vince and it’s approved but not — the WrestleMania match is not guaranteed but that’s the goal,” Prinze said (h/t Inside The Ropes). “I have Michelle losing the Divas Championship at the Royal Rumble which happens a few months before WrestleMania and I have her losing with dignity and I have her giving us a real match. I’ve been in the company maybe four months, I didn’t realise the belt meant so much to so many different people — it didn’t mean that much to others, if they had the Intercontinental Title belt they weren’t really in on when they were gonna lose it or not. […] I go to work, somewhere in the arena, backstage and Michelle comes up to me and says ‘Stephanie says you want to talk to me about the women’s storyline.’ We sit down in the cafeteria off to the side, and I start pitching to her what it’s gonna be. It wasn’t right on my part. I get to the Royal Rumble and I explain to her that the suggestion is that she drops the title at the Royal Rumble and then I keep telling the story of where it finishes because she deserves to know the whole story.”
“It gets all the way to WrestleMania which would be Beth and Kia [Kharma] and her face just goes pale. All the color just drops right out of her skin and right away I know I’ve done something terrible. I just don’t know what is it yet because this is hindsight and I was in the moment. So I go ‘what’s wrong?’ and her eyes well up and I’m like ‘what did I do? What did I do?’ and she said ‘I didn’t think I’d be losing the belt before WrestleMania. […] She was upset, and in hindsight, rightfully so,” he continued.
Prinze later found out via Hayes that Undertaker talked with McMahon about the storyline and that McMahon agreed to scrap the whole idea. WrestleMania XXVII wound up featuring McCool in a six-person tag team match involving Snooki from the Jersey Shore and Kong didn’t debut until that year’s Extreme Rules event. That same show saw McCool retire from wrestling full-time.
