It’s been over three years since WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle had double knee replacement surgery.
In an interview on The Undertaker’s Six Feet Under podcast, Angle talked about the pain he was in that led to that surgery, and how it was clear from his disappointing final run in WWE that something needed to be done. Kurt said he would have had much better matches if Vince McMahon let him wrestle right away when he returned in 2017. However, Vince kept him out of action for the better part of a year
as the Raw General Manager, and unfortunately his knees went to hell by the time he finally got the call to lace up his boots again.
Kurt knew it was time to retire when he realized that he “looked like crap” in the ring.
“When I watched myself wrestle in WWE my last year, I looked like an old man in the ring…I was like wow, this is brutal. I couldn’t even look at myself. So I knew I had to have knee replacements. I had so much pain in my knees, arthritis and so much damage there.
The thing is, when I came back to WWE after I left for 11 years, when I came back I was wrestling really good. But Vince had a different idea. He wanted to induct me into the Hall of Fame first, before I wrestled. So I did the Hall of Fame, and then Vince came to me and said hey we want to make you the GM of Raw. And I said, ‘Vince, I want to wrestle.’ He said we’ll get to that. So he makes me GM of Raw. And during this time, my knees are arthritic, and they’re getting tighter, and I’m less active. And for eight months I didn’t do anything.
Then all of a sudden he’s like, Kurt, I want you to wrestle. Uh, that’s gonna be a problem [laughs]. I literally, when I got in there, I looked like crap. I mean, I couldn’t do anything. It made me want to retire earlier than I wanted to. That’s why I retired with Baron Corbin at WrestleMania…because I didn’t want people to look at me and say, gosh, he used to be great, but now…I didn’t want that. So I decided that this is it.”
Undertaker asked Kurt if he’s feeling good today. Kurt said his knees are fine, but there are problems related to his damaged neck that he’ll never be able to fix.
“Yeah, I feel pretty good. The only thing that bothers me now is I have motor skill problems. My hands shake ’cause my neck is so bad. And there’s nothing I can do about it. My neck naturally fused together, I think I already told you that. So I don’t have any more discs in between my vertebrae…I went to have a disc replacement surgery. The doctor took an MRI and he said you don’t have any discs. Yeah, he said it’s all fused together. It’s all bone.
And so I have a hard time, I get pain going down my arms. My pinkies, I can’t feel either one of my pinkies. They’re gone. So, I just have a lot of functional problems. You know, it just sucks. There’s nothing I can do. I tried stem cell, I tried disc replacement. There’s just nothing. I have to deal with it…Hey I’m just glad my knees work. Honestly, I’d rather have my neck hurting than my knees.”
Undertaker said people who have never had knee pain might not understand just how bad it feels. He responded to Kurt’s update on his current physical condition by saying, “That’s the price we pay for the game we play.”
Do you think Kurt’s final WWE run would have worked out any better if Vince let him get the ring right away instead of going with the GM angle? Let me know in the comments below, Cagesiders.
