On a recent episode of his weekly ‘The Kurt Angle Show’ podcast, our Olympic Hero spoke about his time with Team Angle, Charlie Haas and Shelton Benjamin, who later went on without him as ‘The World’s Greatest Tag Team’.
Here’s what Kurt Angle had to say:
“I always loved working with Team Angle, because they were amateur wrestlers.
They understood my style, we always had great chemistry together.
It was unfortunate that we broke up so fast. We were only together for like 6 to 8 months, which was nothing.
But I’m glad we did because we got to wrestle with each other.
And you know, wrestling Charlie Haas and wrestling Shelton Benjamin, I love wrestling those guys because we have incredible chemistry together.
Because we’re both, we’re all amateur wrestlers.”
Kurt then talked about returning to the ring from after a neck injury before the SummerSlam 2004 pay-per-view:
“I was still confused, man. My head wasn’t in it. I wanted to return to the SmackDown-only PPV the month after SummerSlam.
I thought it would make a bigger impact if Kurt returned to a SmackDown-only PPV because I was on SmackDown. But Vince was adamant about getting me to SummerSlam.
He wanted me booked on SummerSlam. He wanted to make a lot of money with me at SummerSlam. So that’s what I was going to do and I, you know, at this point I didn’t believe I was ready.
But I had to be ready, I didn’t have a choice. I don’t blame Vince McMahon for that but you know, I was trying to talk him into, ‘Hey, put me on a SmackDown-only PPV’.
He’s like ‘No, bulls**t. Yeah, you’re going on this one’.
I’m the one that decided to have the match. I wanted to have a tune-up match before I wrestled Eddie. I was out for 5 months with my neck broken.
You know, I hardly ever trained. I did diet the last month to prepare for looking better.
But I wanted this match just so I was confident I could go into SummerSlam and wrestle Eddie.
So that’s why they booked me against Charlie Haas. I had a strict diet for about five weeks, which worked extremely well.”
Kurt Angle wrestled for the World Wrestling Federation / World Wrestling Entertainment during the Attitude Era and the Ruthless Aggression Era, from 1999 until he left in 2006 and joined Dixie Carter’s Total Nonstop Action! (TNA), where he performed till 2016.
The 1996 Olympic Gold Medalist then returned to WWE in 2017, got inducted into the Hall of Fame and worked for them till he officially retired in 2019.
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