Kurt Angle On Which WWE Star He Would Want To Have One Last Match With, If He’s Done Wrestling, More
2017 Hall of Famer Kurt Angle was the special guest on Lilian Garcia: Making Their Way to the Ring today, revealing how he and Shawn Michaels prepared for their legendary WrestleMania 21 bout, who he’d like to have one last match with, and whether he’ll ever wrestle again. You can watch the full interview in the video above or download the podcast version on iTunes, they sent us these highlights:
Kurt on how he got into wrestling:
“[My sister] was a wrestling cheerleader. My brothers were all wrestlers. I was kind of forced into it. I wasn’t very good as a kid. I was more of a crybaby, and that really bothered my brothers. But little did they know I was going to be the best one in the family.”
What set him apart from his brothers:
“They got disqualified a lot. They had a lot of penalty points against them, because they had tempers. I didn’t have a temper. I looked at it from a technique standpoint. That’s how I attacked my opponents, and it worked for me. A lot of guys would try to hurt me, especially in the Olympics, when my neck was broken. A lot of athletes knew my neck was broken so they were going after my neck. While they were focusing on my neck, I was focusing on scoring on them. So it really helped that I wasn’t that kind of animal. I was more of a technician.”
On why he thinks he spiraled into addiction:
“For me it was my injuries. It was my injuries and also being in a pretty bad marriage at the time. I didn’t want to feel anything. But breaking my neck again in WWE I started on pain killers. The first pill I took I loved it. I loved how it made me feel. It made me feel indestructible. The more I took, I kept getting injured. You know, Lilian. I broke my neck four times in two and a half years. I just got more and more depressed. It was like, why is this happening to me? I didn’t want to feel the pain anymore. I felt like my career was being taken away from me.”
How Kurt was able to compete in Olympic trials six weeks after breaking his neck at the US Open:
“No doctor would clear me until I talked to Dr. [Joseph] Maroon. He said, listen we’re going to do something really simple. Don’t train. We’re going to go to the trials and whenever you’re ready to wrestle, we’ll shoot you up five minutes before your match with nova cane, and then you won’t feel your neck for about an hour. But afterward you’re going to be in excruciating pain. We’ll just do that every match. So I did that in trials and at the Olympics.”
His response to Vince McMahon offering him a ten year WWE deal after he won the Olympics:
“I didn’t understand pro wrestling. I never watched it. I said, well you know Mr. McMahon, I’m an Olympic gold…