Welcome to another eWrestlingNews Question of the Day!
On this day in pro wrestling history (November 14, 1999 to be exact) Kurt Angle made his pay-per-view debut for WWE at Survivor Series, beating Shawn Stasiak in just under 6 minutes. Check out the full match below:
Recently, Angle spoke to WrestleZone and mentioned that he thinks people don’t give enough credit to his run in TNA Wrestling. There’s always a sentiment that he’d be the best of all time if he had stayed in World Wrestling Entertainment, but he thinks he had an even better run in TNA in comparison.
My question for you today is “Do you value Kurt Angle’s run in TNA as being more important to his overall career value, or do you put more weight on his time in WWE?”
Remember to answer with your response in the comments below.
As far as my answer…
One of my big regrets as a wrestling fan is the time I spent on hiatus. Long story short, I was entering middle school in 1999 and I grew tired of the constant barrage of nothing but The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin being the ONLY things talked about in every segment, wrestling was losing popularity among my friend group, I got into other things, and by 2000, I was out of it. I don’t even know if I was around for the 2000 Royal Rumble and I didn’t come back until sometime in 2005 or 2006, whenever DX had reunited.
I regret this because I missed out on the whole back end of the Attitude Era, the purchase of WCW (which would’ve blown my mind, but maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t go through that) and the Ruthless Aggression transition. I didn’t get to see Brock Lesnar at all. The SmackDown Six. Any of that. Eddie Guerrero to me was a cool cruiserweight in the LWO, for instance.
As such, that means I have almost no recollection of Kurt Angle. He was coming in just as I was leaving. If I remember correctly, he didn’t seem any different than a combination of Ken Shamrock (who I liked), Dr. Death Steve Williams (who amounted to nothing in WWE) and how Mark Henry was originally positioned as a big Olympic American hero. I likely thought he would fizzle out and be as important to the history books as Doug Furnas and Phil Lafon.
When I had gotten back into watching, Angle was effectively leaving again, if not already gone. I don’t remember if I caught the tail end of him in ECW. But I quickly was brought up to speed and soon enough, I saw him as the top guy in TNA.
TNA wasn’t something I watched much of. I’ve never been able to connect with the product in any era. But I did give it a shot for quite a while, and started to appreciate some standout talent like AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Robert Roode, and a handful of people who never panned out as well like Matt Morgan. Angle felt like the king of the company, and I could see what people meant when they said he was one of the greats.
Naturally, I experienced some of his classic moments through retrospective lenses, which wasn’t the same as watching them live. And with that, I find it hard to fully connect with those times. Even though I wasn’t a dedicated TNA fan, I could see his legacy unfolding in front of me, as opposed to just being told “this was great” already. I’m sure even though I found his stuff with Edge funny, for example, I would have laughed way harder live.
To me, TNA is more important to his legacy. Without it, he still has a Hall of Fame worthy run, but going to TNA converted him from a Bret Hart “top guy, but WWE was quick to move on as fast as they could to others” level talent and more firmly into the undeniable section of the totem pole. It gave him a chance to just be THE undisputed top draw.
Without that, maybe he is still in the discussion as one of the greats, but more in alignment with an A- instead of an A, and someone like Austin being an A+.
What do you think? Drop your thoughts below!
