This is one question from an interview with two-time NCAA heavyweight champion, 1996 Olympic gold medalist and all-time great egoist Kurt Angle. To read the rest of the interview, visit IGN.
IGN Sports: With your successful transition from amateur wrestling to sports entertainment, do you see more amateurs following your footsteps into the sport?
Kurt Angle: Yeah, and I’m glad to see Shelton Benjamin, Charlie Haas, and of course Brock Lesnar was here for a little while. We have another guy, I think his name is Lashley, he’s in OVW. I got him a tryout a couple of years ago and he’s going to be coming in pretty soon. Rulon Gardner was interested, so he came in and did a little tryout. I think it’s good for amateur wrestling. And I think that finally, amateur wrestling as a community, they always felt like they took a backseat to pro wrestling and they felt that in people’s minds, pro wrestling was just the next step of amateur wrestling. They were out there trying to say pro wrestling was fake and they were real. But pro wrestling is not fake, it’s sports entertainment. We go out there and we perform, and a lot of what we do out there is real, but we’re not going to insult anyone’s intelligence, there is a predetermined winner. It’s just the fans don’t know who it is, and that’s what makes it so intriguing. Amateur wrestling finally realized that by entering professional wrestling, I wasn’t taking the next step, I was taking another career path and I opened it up for other wrestlers to follow. Now we’re seeing a lot more wrestlers getting involved, and I think one of these days, if we do it the right way, it’ll be all amateur wrestlers. As long as they have the charisma and everything else”¦they obviously have the look. But if you bring your amateur wrestling techniques in and then learn the pro moves, it’s a catapult. You go from Olympic wrestling into pro wrestling, and it’s a very difficult transition, but if you make it, you can earn a great living while at the same time giving amateur wrestling a lot of exposure by being on TV every week. Fans know where you came from.
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