Angle looks back on his days as SmackDown G.M. in the early 2000s.
While Kurt Angle was sidelined from in-ring competition for a portion of 2004, he was assigned the role of General Manager of SmackDown.
Angle’s time as G.M. came to an end when he was ‘fired’ by Vince McMahon. Angle had been cleared to return to in-ring competition so his removal from the G.M. role was a way to transition him back into the in-ring performer role.
On The Kurt Angle Show podcast, Kurt dove into the aforementioned segment with McMahon and said he pulled his hamstring during it. Angle had been inactive for months and had to duck as McMahon was swinging a crutch at him. Kurt said when he ducked, he could feel his hamstrings tear a little. He went on to add that he was on painkillers in 2004 and part of him thinks that’s why McMahon was swinging as hard as he was.
That was fun but I’m not gonna lie to you, I pulled my hamstring (in that segment with Vince McMahon on SmackDown)… I was inactive for six months, okay? And I know I get injured all the time but, I was inactive for six months. I didn’t do anything because I had to pretend like I was in a wheelchair and I was doing this in airports and outside everywhere. So Vince says, ‘Listen, when I grab your crutch, I’m gonna swing for you. I’m gonna try to hit you. You’re gonna have to duck really hard’ and he was trying to hit me. He was trying to take my head off and every time I ducked, a couple times when I ducked, my hamstrings started to tear a little bit and I was like, ‘Oh sh*t.’ So I was like, oh man, I’m gonna be back on the injury reserve list. This was classic Vince McMahon. This is what he does best and it was a really cool segment.
You know what? I’m gonna be honest with you and a lot of people know this, some people do. The 2004 G.M. role, I was heavily sedated with painkillers. I had a bit of a problem and I think that’s a lot of the reason why Vince was really swinging for me (he laughed).
Earlier in the conversation, Angle stated that the talents of SmackDown did not appreciate that the show they were on was being referred to as the ‘B-show’.
You know what? That was the thing that was always said; that SmackDown was the B-show, Raw was the A-show, it would always be the A-show and a lot of us got really pissed off about it. We didn’t believe that. We believed that we were just as good as Raw, if not better and I think we were much of a more wrestling-oriented show than Raw. Raw was more storyline-oriented. I think that’s why we did so well, because there were times when SmackDown was doing higher ratings than Raw. So SmackDown wasn’t particularly the B-show. Raw talent might’ve thought that but not the SmackDown talent.
This past January, Angle returned to WWE television at Raw XXX as a part of a segment with D-Generation X.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Kurt Angle Show podcast with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
