Vince McMahon has never been one to shy away from a challenge, including a fight and Kurt Angle recalls a time McMahon wanted to take on the Olympic gold medalist in a fight.
Back in 2006, Angle was soon heading out of WWE as he was dealing with injuries and a painkiller addiction. Angle, who considers McMahon a father figure, went to him to ask for his release and drove up to WWE headquarters to meet with him.
However, the meeting went way different than he had intended. Instead of having a sitdown conversation on him leaving the company, Angle was hit with pages of text messages that he sent him saying he’ll kick McMahon’s ass. The thing is, according to the WWE Hall of Famer, he didn’t remember sending those messages because he was blacked out from taking painkillers.
“Vince has always been a father figure to me. I never wanted to intentionally hurt him. I’ll give you a quick story. [In 2006], I decided to quit and my manager and I made the trip to headquarters and I injured myself real badly, my hamstring and groin. There was blood across my genitals, my hamstring, both legs on the inside and I’m bruising. It was really bad. I showed it to Vince when we had a meeting and I said, ‘We need to talk because I’m not doing really well.’ So he pulls out about five typed pages of text messages and phone call messages that I left them and I’m reading them and it says, ‘Vince, I’m going to beat the sh*t out of you when I see you,’ ‘Vince, you better answer my calls or I’m going to kick your ass.’ Really crazy stuff. I don’t remember it. Unfortunately, I was taking painkillers and every once in a while, I would black out and here I am texting Vince,” Angle told Chris Van Vliet.
Once Angle finished reading those messages, McMahon called out Angle to a fight, taking off his jacket, indicating that he was ready to go. Angle said he had way too much respect for the man to fight him.
“He stood up and he took his jacket off and he said, ‘You want to kick my ass? Let’s go right now.’ I looked at him and thought, ‘Oh my God. Vince McMahon wants to beat my ass.’ This has been a guy who’s been my father figure for the past seven years and I have too much respect for him to stand up. But he wanted to go. I left the room and I came back and I just broke down. I said, ‘Vince, I can’t do this anymore.’ I need you to release me. He did. It had to be done to save my life,” Angle said.
Although Angle left the company in 2006, he would get inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2017 and then became the Raw General Manager soon afterwards. Angle then had his last wrestling match at WrestleMania 35 this past year, losing to Baron Corbin.
You can check out the interview in the video at the top of the page. If you use any of the quotes above, please credit Chris Van Vliet with a h/t to Fightful for the transcription.
