During his long and glittering career Kurt Angle has appeared in dream matches all over the world.
From facing the likes of Brock Lesnar and Shawn Michaels in WWE to tangling with Samoa Joe and AJ Styles in IMPACT, Angle has shared the ring with some of the best to ever do it.
However, the Olympic Gold Medal winner has now revealed that he still has one dream match that he never got to tick off his list.
In conversation with Forbes, Angle named Kenny Omega as his dream opponent, comparing him with former adversary AJ Styles. During the interview, Jooshua Dudley who was conducting proceedings, commented that Angle would do well with Omega, causing Angle to launch into praising the AEW World Champion.
“Oh, gosh, that’s one of my dream matches! Kenny is extremely talented. I saw a match with him in Japan and I thought “wow this guy’s incredible.” He reminds me a lot of AJ Styles. They both have the same style where they can fly and do groundwork equally well.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Kurt Angle reminisced about his early days in the WWE, and how he made the switch from the amateur to the professional ranks. Reflecting on that early phase of his professional career Angle noted:
“It was fun. I had the time of my life, especially the Olympics and my WWE rookie year. I didn’t expect to be as successful as I was my first year, which was arguably one of the greatest rookie years of all time. I won just about every title within 10 months and making the transition from amateur wrestling to pro wrestling was extremely difficult. One of the reasons is that in amateur wrestling, you don’t show any emotion, and in pro wrestling you want to show you’re angry or excited or scared or hurt.”
“You have to portray that to the crowd because you want to get them emotionally involved in the psychology of the structure of the matches and the bumping and the selling.”
“I never had to do that in amateur wrestling.”
“I always went by instinct, and because I trained so much I didn’t have to think, I went by reaction. In pro wrestling, you have to remember everything. You have to memorize your match and your promos. It was completely opposite of what I was used to, and I had to turn off my instincts. A lot of amateur wrestlers have tried pro wrestling in the past but they weren’t successful at it because they couldn’t turn off what they learned their whole lives with the giving back and forth like you do in pro wrestling. I just decided to forget everything I learned because I was learning something new, and since I was starting from scratch I was able to pick it up a lot quicker.”
Kurt Angle’s first year in WWE has become the stuff of legend, as the rookie won pretty much every championship that there was to win. Speaking on his own podcast, The Kurt Angle Show, Angle revealed that his first year was also incredibly lucrative, netting him over $1 million.