If I Can Be Serious for a Moment 08.18.09: TNEh? Part 1 – Take me to the Angle

BANNER!

TNEh? Part 1 – From Every Different Angle

Kurt Angle is an enigma. He is arguably Vince McMahon’s biggest all-around success story and at the same time a poster child for everything wrong with the wrestling injury. Vince took a guy with nothing but amateur skills and a desire to learn and made him into the best new star professional wrestling has seen in the past 10 years. One could argue that The Rock was a bigger star, but although he undoubtedly had more charisma he didn’t have the total package that Angle had. Angle’s ring work far surpasses Rock’s, and Rocky was no slouch. Angle is better than Cena, Batista, Orton…the lot of them. Angle’s professional wrestling career is a perfect example of how everything can go right for a man in his professional life while his personal life goes so, so wrong. Today we’re going to briefly look at the path Kurt has taken, and then look at the recent issues within TNA – his split with Karen, his fight with Jeff and his arrest. We’ll look at how this reflects on TNA and what they should be doing, and also how Kurt’s story is just the fuel that Congress, Marc Mero or anyone else who might want reforms for wrestling can use.

From Olympic to WWE to TNA gold

Something that is often forgotten when looking at Angle’s career is that it could have been so different. Originally Angle was all set to sign with ECW. God only knows what could have happened to him, ECW, WWF and even WCW had that signing happened. Would he have been poached by one of the bigger companies? Would he have stayed with a sinking ship? Could he have become who he is today and rescued ECW? I doubt the latter two, but it certainly makes for interesting speculation. Angle was disgusted by a storyline he saw when he was an invited guest of Paul Heyman, one which included a crucifixion. Angle walked out on his handshake deal with the company as soon as he saw it.

When Kurt was brought to the WWF and on to TV, he was initially pushed as a face. The hope was that his status as a national hero of sorts would get the crowd behind him from the start. That didn’t quite work. The fans didn’t buy in to Angle’s amateur style and largely “boring” offence at a time when the Hardyz, Dudleyz and Edge and Christian were sending them into throes of rapture on a regular basis. Angle quickly became a heel and would remain undefeated until a loss to the debuting Tazz. A sign of some truly great booking, the loss did absolutely nothing to hamper Kurt’s rise, as he would stay in his goofy heel persona and start winning titles by the bunch. He would form a loose affiliation with Edge and Christian (Team ECK, later adding Rhyno to become Team RECK briefly) and feud with Shane McMahon, The Rock, Chris Benoit, Chris Jericho and pretty much anyone who was anyone. As his WWE tenure went on he would stack up titles and accolades: the only major one to escape him would be the Royal Rumble. His flexibility would become evident when he played goofy face, intense face, intense heel, cowardly heel and competitive face to perfection during his WWE run, even enjoying a short but successful run as SmackDown GM while recovering from an injury. Anything Kurt was asked to do, Kurt did. And he did it well. He was pivotal in turning Stone Cold heel, in the McMahon-Helmsley storyline and in the famed “Smackdown Six” era. He played a huge role in making Brock Lesnar a star and lent his credibility to ECW.

On arrival in TNA, he was immediately viewed by fans of the promotion as the key to turning the ratings around. Angle’s penchant for stellar matches seemed to have increased since his arrival in TNA, and he just kept putting out great performance after great performance. Despite the usual barbs that he was not putting over young talent (something that gets levelled at every main eventer from time to time), he gave clean wins to Jay Lethal and Samoa Joe, as well as giving Kaz a ton of offence in a ladder match. Kurt would also be a very vocal (and occasional over-optimistic) pro-TNA mouthpiece, talking about how TNA were close to catching the WWE behemoth

Simply put, Kurt Angle was and is the consummate company man on the face of things, building young stars while at the same time putting on great matches, cutting strong promos and playing heel or face as the situation warranted. And for the majority of his career, we’d never have known anything was wrong. Were it not for a little thing called Wellness…

Fool’s Gold

I wish I could find some proof of the video now, but it seems to have disappeared. Either at the time the Wellness policy was announced or not long after it, a video was leaked to the internet of Vince McMahon having a meeting with WWE talent to discuss the drugs that would be included on the banned list. Although not seen on camera, Kurt Angle’s voice clearly asked about drugs for which a wrestler had a prescription but which were on the list. At the time there was a lot of sympathy for Kurt who, as we all knew, had won a gold medal with a broken freakin’ neck, and had since had a catalogue of injuries that basically meant he was competing due to modern medicine, desire and drugs. It would be 2006 before Kurt would ask for his WWE release, and at the time many people hoped Kurt would just stop. Towards the end of his WWE tenure he had to be assigned a handler to ensure he got where he needed to be, when he needed to be there. This wasn’t because he was unreliable, either. He was on a ridiculous amount of drugs just to get in the ring, and his neck was not going to get any better. His in-ring style was never going to be adaptable, unlike Stone Cold who was able to wrestle relatively safely after messing up his neck, and Angle is not the kind of person to half-ass anything. It’s all or nothing with Angle, and wrestling fans who cared more for people than good matches were praying for nothing.

Of course, we got the “all” option instead. Angle showed up in TNA, a move that lead to numerous questions. Would the ostensibly lighter schedule be a benefit to Angle? Would this enable him to move gradually to acting? Or would it mean he’d try and transition to MMA, which punishes the body in completely different ways and would essentially draw a big bullseye on his neck? And would TNA’s more adventurous in-ring style lead to Angle using bigger and more dangerous moves, or worse yet, taking them? 3 years on we can say that the acting has happened more than the MMA has, which is a positive.
However, he certainly hasn’t taken advantage of the lighter schedule, as he’s made a few trips to Japan and has gone all-out every time he sets foot in the ring. Today’s Kurt is noticeably smaller and less cut than 2005 Kurt, which many took as proof that he was off the steroids at least (having admitted to taking them previously). The painkiller issue was still present, but people seemed to be ignoring it. After all, he was hardly the only big-name wrestler to be on pain meds. Obviously there were still issues, but nobody knew what was coming. Before we get to this weekend, there’s a corollary story that needs to be explored.

Pass the Partner, the game for all the company!

About a month ago, a mysterious call to the Bubba the Love Sponge Show suggested that Jeff Jarrett was now seeing Karen Angle. Almost immediately the fecal matter hit the rotational ventilation device as Dixie Carter told Jarrett to go home on “personal leave” and Kurt refused to re-up with TNA as long as Jarrett had creative power. There was also talk of Kurt vowing to get control of the book in TNA. With the exception of those close to Jarrett, the TNA talent were all behind Kurt Angle in the conflict.

There are basic rules of male comportment to which most men subscribe. One of them is that you ask permission before you go messing with a friend’s ex. Sure, Kurt and Karen were done and divorced, or on their way to being so. But for Jarrett to go ahead and do that, in all likelihood knowing that Kurt still held a torch for her…well, it’s something you’d expect to hear about in Salem, Weatherfield or Erinsborough and not in Nashville or Orlando. Imaginary “guy laws” aside, this was just a bad business decision on Jarrett’s part. Kurt Angle is probably the most valuable commodity in TNA right now, a guy with name value and experience who still has enough credibility that it means something to beat him. He can get a good match out of a broomstick and can fill almost any role. So you go out and sleep with the woman he loves, without so much as a “by your leave”? I might be old-fashioned, but that seems pretty dumb to me. As the founder of the company and a person in a position of authority, sometimes you need to put the company first.

Angle is hardly blameless here though. He has to realise that divorce means fair game, friends or no friends. To get all stroppy and threaten to take your ball and go home does nobody any favours and just makes an awkward situation into an impossible one. Sure, be pissed, but talk it out like a man (there we go again) and don’t go threatening a man’s job to get your way. And it’s not like Angle was an angel in the marriage either, admitting to having cheated on Karen numerous times.

Of course once the news came to light a whole bunch of details started to come out. There were reports that Jarrett took himself away from the situation so as not to be involved any more than necessary. It also came out that Jeff and Karen had been involved for months, since before Jarrett and Kurt’s feud. So now you know why some of those promos from Kurt seemed to cut pretty damn close to the bone, and why the matches always seemed to have an extra degree of realism in them. It also calls into question Jeff’s sanity: if Kurt knew about this, and everything we’ve heard suggests he DID know from pretty much the start, then why would Jeff book himself in that story? And who the hell called the show?

A Disturbing Parallel

I’m not going to sit here and try to defend Kurt Angle’s actions this past weekend, and I don’t want to convict him in the court of public opinion (although many others have). Innocent until proven guilty is still an important part of the justice system, and as of right now we don’t know if he’s anything more than a guy with some poor judgement. However, we have certain facts, and they are as follows: