Kali Armstrong wasn't thinking about professional wrestling when Grammy-nominated rapper Wale started messaging her on social media. She was working a 9-to-5 as a marketing specialist at a Metro bus station in Los Angeles, fresh off a professional track and field career that had run its course.
Then the DMs started arriving.
"I'm good friends with rapper Wale. At that time he was doing Rallymania and stuff," Armstrong said in an interview with Peter Rosenberg and Stat Guy Greg for Cheap Heat.
"So anytime I'd post for track and field or just being charismatic, he'd hit me up like, 'Hey man, you're beautiful. You have this charisma. You have the physique. I really think that you'd be a good WWE wrestler.'"
Armstrong laughed it off at first. Wrestling wasn't something she'd considered as a career path.
"When you first hear it the first time, you're like what? Like that's not something you could be. So I just kind of brushed it off. I laughed it off."
Wale Wouldn't Let It Go
But Wale kept messaging. Two or three more times, he made the same pitch.
"After that second or third one, I was like, 'Okay, let me really look into this,'" Armstrong said. "So I started looking into it. I started watching wrestling. I started seeing their NIL deals and things they were doing with current athletes. And I was like, 'Wow, so they're really big on athletes at this time.' So I reached out to a recruiter, they got me into a tryout, and that was all she wrote."
Perhaps most notably, Wale refused to use his industry connections to help her get in the door. When Armstrong asked for an assist, he declined.
"He's like, 'No, whatever you do, whatever you get, I want it to be 100% you. If you get to make it to WWE, I want it to be solely because of you and your talents.' He didn't want to have any influence."
From Evolve Champion to NXT
Armstrong went on to win the inaugural WWE Evolve Women's Championship in May 2025 and held the title for 139 days before dropping it to Kendal Grey at the Succession special. Now she's heading to NXT full-time after WWE aired a promotional package announcing her arrival during Stand and Deliver weekend.
The adjustment from track and field to wrestling wasn't smooth. Armstrong's athletic instincts worked against her in the ring.
"Who falls on purpose?" she said. "I'm purposely just falling, how do you even do that well? None of it was making sense. First I had to make it make sense, and then I had to learn how to do it well."
Her coaches are still telling her to slow down. Speed was her greatest asset in track, but wrestling requires patience.
"Once I hear the gun and you say go, I'm ready. When the bell rings, I'm ready to go. He's like, 'You don't have to just get right to it just 'cuz the bell rang.'"
Wale hosted the annual WaleMania event each year during WrestleMania weekend for a decade after ending it last year. The rapper has been a public wrestling fan for years, appearing on WWE programming multiple times including hosting a rap battle between The Usos and The New Day in 2017. He now has a WWE prospect to add to his resume, even if he won't take any credit for it.
