In news that broke during our Pro Wrestling Planet Podcast, TNA has terminated the contract with personality Bubba The Love Sponge for an incident that involved him and Awesome Kong on his radio show earlier in the week.  Bubba has responded that he was going to take the high road but TNA fired the first shot and Awesome Kong tweeted that "Karma is a bitch".

This all happened this week as Bubba and the afternoon host on his flagship station worked Kia (Awesome Kong) into believing that she would get airtime on Bubba's station to trash him for the incident where she hit him backstage at TNA.  However, Bubba set it up to confront her about that and other things that she had done including insinuating that had called her on her personal phone with racist remarks in a lawsuit she filed against AT&T in order to obtain phone records.  This along with other comments she had made on twitter and through other media.  In fact during the first part of the interview with Cowhead she freely admitted and was proud that she assaulted Bubba because of his opinions.

This led to more anti-Bubba tweets to Dixie Carter as well as an article in the Baltimore Sun that incorrectly described the phone call with Kong as well as the replay on Bubba's show, which I heard first hand on Howard 101 on XM Satellite Radio.   The writer calls Bubba classless and claims that he "ambushed" Awesome Kong by luring her onto Cowheads show, even though Kong actually did ambush Bubba backstage at TNA.  However the writer is completely reckless when he said that Bubba "During the verbal exchange, BTLS called her a word that cannot appear on a family Web site seven times and also made remarks that had racial overtones"  This is simply not true. He did call her a bitch, however the only person that had racial overtones in the interview was Kia.  Also the writer of the article omits the fact that she ended the call by telling Bubba to "Kiss her black ass".  On his Sirius show on Thursday (which is a replay of his terrestrial show), Bubba's on air team did not encourage him to go beat her up at her apartment.  In fact what Bubba suggested to Kia was that they have a charity event sanctioned under MMA rules where 100% of the proceeds would go to the charity of her choice. She flatly rejected that offer.  Bubba's on air staff told him, that would be a no win situation, and did not encourage him to fight Kong like the author of the article said.

Bottom line is Bubba probably should have let things go with Kong, even though what she had put in the filing with the courts was slanderous and untrue.  However, the over-reaction from TNA is just as bad, especially since it seems to have been based upon the writings of a clearly biased individual who took things out of context and completely misrepresented the facts.  This could hurt TNA the most from a promotion standpoint as well, not only from the potential loss of a media outlet but because of the negative press TNA will receive online from Bubba's followers on Twitter as well as the radio show (known as the Bubba's Army).  One rule of marketing is that when you lose loyal followers from a negative situation such as this (from the standpoint of Bubba's Army his release is negative) it has 10 times the effect of a positive.  It will be interesting to see how this affects Hulk Hogan's show on Howard 101, if at all.