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Kurt Angle Says Winning The WWE Championship Was Just As Important To Him As The Gold Medal, Talks Feud With Stone Cold and more

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WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle was the most recent guest on Stone Cold’s Broken Skull Sessions on the WWE Network. The olympic hero spoke about a multitude of pro-wrestling related topics, which you can check out below.

On finding out he was going to win his first world title:

They didn’t tell me about [wrestling] The Rock till about three days before the RAW before the pay per view [No Mercy 2000]. But basically, they worked me up. I won the King of the Ring, the Intercontinental Title, the European Title. I’m moving forward, but now, they’re taking me to the main event level and when [Vince] took me up there, I worked Undertaker, Big Show, but I was losing to them. So, I thought, ‘Okay, I guess this is my spot’. I’m going to be an upper card, right before the main event, and then all of a sudden, I get a call from Vince. ‘Hey, you’re going to wrestle The Rock in 10 days’. I was like, ‘Holy s–t’. So, that was a dream come true. I’m going to beat The Rock, I’m going to be World Champion, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to main event against Stone Cold at WrestleMania [17]’. I really believed that! Not knowing that five months later, I would drop the title to Rock and then Stone Cold and The Rock would wrestle.

How he slowly learned more about the business as he kept working top talent:

I was still following. I followed my whole first year. Even when I wrestled The Rock for the World Title, I still didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” admitted Angle. “I didn’t have the psychology, I didn’t have… I had enough of it, that I knew what I had to do. But I wasn’t that established, that I could be a good in-ring general leader, so I just listened, keep my mouth shut, and I think some guys might’ve taken advantage of me a little too much, wanting to whip my ass. But that’s okay.

How winning the WWE championship was just as important as winning an olympic gold medal:

Well, it’s not just a World Title, it’s the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, so that’s a big difference. I was elated. I was just as excited as when I won the Gold medal,” revealed Angle. “This proved to me that I excelled in something else other than Amateur Wrestling. I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, I’ve been a wrestler my whole life and amateur and pro are the same’ because they’re not. A lot of people do understand that, some people don’t understand that. But the business is much more complicated, so much more thinking, psychology, and knowing that you have to play to the crowd and show your emotions and when in Amateur wrestling, you’re taught to show no emotion. Flat face, don’t look at your opponents, don’t look at the crowd, focus on winning, focus on pinning. That’s all you do. There’s no emotion. So, I had to learn how to include the crowd and become a showman and when I won the World Title, that proved I was becoming among one of the best, even though I still didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

On his feud with Stone Cold:

It was the biggest opportunity of my life. I knew I had to step up because watching you wrestle and you doing your promos and your whole character and persona, you’re the reason I got into the business. I told you that, but you were also the best at it, so I knew this was a great opportunity for me, not just to learn from you, but to develop my character. I didn’t know it was going to help you become more of a heel! I didn’t understand that stuff, but it actually did and we teamed up. I got on your nerves, and people at the beginning they liked you, because I was the one getting on your nerves and you were still Stone Cold and they weren’t really accepting you as a heel. But as we kept going, you started doing some real s–t things and you and I were together and we were a team and they were like, ‘You know what? I hate Austin too.’ And you turned it around, which was almost impossible.

(Thanks to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription)

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