Kurt Angle

[Tetsujin]

What's the Angle/Mysterio match from Japan? Never heard of it before, it's not on cagematch either. Was it while on a WWE tour, or working for another company after 2006?

[BigBadMick]

Smackdown 10th February 2005.

 

Haven't seen it in years, but I remember enjoying it

[BigBadMick]

I'm watching a lot of WWF 2000-2001 at the moment.

 

Would it be inconceivable that Angle was better in those years than when he seemed to be given agency to call his matches more in later years?

[ohtani's jacket]

What I'd like to know is who do people wish Angle wrestled like? Do people wish he was more like Jack Brisco or Bret Hart? Do they want him to be like Nick Bockwinkel? Buddy Rose? Billy Robinson? It's confusing. Some people like him as the goofy, three Is guy. Some people like him as a wrestling machine. Do folks want him to be Bryan Danielson? Ric Flair? 

I don't get it. The guy by all rights should have been a bust, but he became a star. It's always like this with the polarizing types whether it's Shawn Michaels, Manami Toyota, Keiji Mutoh or Hiroshi Tanahashi. They don't do this, they don't work like this wrestler, they're not as good as this person... At some point you need to accept them for who they are. 

[Childs]

During this burst of Angle discourse, it hit me that I've hardly watched him in the last 10 years. Even during the last GWE, he wasn't someone I looked at with any focus. Might take a spin through a few matches just to see what I think of him now. I guess the greater point is that it's easy to become frozen in positions from decades-old debates. 

[funkdoc]

Angle has really had an uptick legacy-wise in recent years, i think in part because of TNA nostalgia emerging as a non-ironic thing (remember, they were big in the UK back in the day and i think that's where a lot of it comes from) and in part due to the specific popular legend that has formed around Perc Angle.  There's also him becoming a massive TikTok meme that i still see posted all over the place (the "jacked bald guy intently staring into your soul" image).

Not stuff that would matter for this board's main demographic, but if this were a Youtube project that drew in a lot more late millenials & zoomers he would likely rate pretty darn high overall now!

[Kadaveri]

On 3/18/2024 at 12:46 PM, ohtani's jacket said:

What I'd like to know is who do people wish Angle wrestled like? Do people wish he was more like Jack Brisco or Bret Hart? Do they want him to be like Nick Bockwinkel? Buddy Rose? Billy Robinson? It's confusing. Some people like him as the goofy, three Is guy. Some people like him as a wrestling machine. Do folks want him to be Bryan Danielson? Ric Flair?

I'd really like it if he wrestled the way he did against Rey Mysterio all the time. Angle's true disposition is he's a super-intense bully and bringing that aspect of his personality to the forefront created much better flowing matches than when he got obsessed with trading finishers/pretty reversals for the sake of it with Benoit etc... Or that brief 2006 WWECW run was also a much more optimal version of Angle than his default mode. The more frustrating thing about him really is he does show potential to have been a real top tier wrestler, in some ways I think he did actually get it, but there's just this aggravating bit of brainworms going on that stops him ever reaching his potential except in some specific circumstances.

He's a very high-level prop wrestler, by which I mean wrestlers who have a certain set of talents/abilities but needed to be used in the correct way to really get high-level stuff out of them. There's certainly room for in wrestling, might even make towards the bottom of my list if I'm feeling generous towards them in 2026. The Summerslam 2001 match vs. Austin I think is a great example of Kurt being in that kind of role. Austin is the main driver of the match narrative and his performance is the best thing about it, but calling it a "carry job" or something like that would be grossly unfair. Angle's talents elevate the whole thing to higher level that the vast majority of wrestlers are capable of. For all the criticisms of his selling, he has a great selling performance in this match, and that's not his only great selling performance, his flaw is more than he doesn't seem to have a good sense of when he should be selling, so left to his own devices we often get total messes like those TNA Jeff Hardy matches.

 

[Microstatistics]

Angle really is a weird case. Perhaps the intense DVDVR backlash towards him has eased and he appears to have new defenders (including me to some extent), but he is still considered a middling pick around here, relative to established greats. But in traditional circles, he remains this legendary, Tier 1 worker, a paragon even for modern greats. 

Even his inputs are odd. No doubt he was credible and athletic but his offense wasn't particularly dynamic, his selling didn't jump off the screen, and he wasn't exceptionally creative or ambitious (storytelling wise at least).

Still, this is all sounding misleadingly negative because I will probably ended up ranking him in the 75-100 range. 2001 was his peak year, with the Shane McMahon street fight as his masterpiece. 2002-2006 WWE and the early TNA run had a solid amount of quality output vs. Benoit, Rey, Lesnar, Eddie, Undertaker, Samoa Joe, AJ Styles as well.

 

 

[Boss Rock]

There's still a lot more that I have to see, but Kurt always struck me as more inconsistent than downright bad. He absolutely has the ridiculous, finisher spam matches like No Surrender 2010 that make you question the guy's instincts, but sandwiched between those he'll have some really good, more methodical matches like against Nagata in Japan.