WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle appeared on an episode of Six Feet Under where he discussed various topics, including the reasons behind his retirement following his final run with WWE.
Angle said, “When I watched myself wrestle in WWE my last year, I looked like an old man in the ring. My knees bent. I was like, ‘Wow, this is brutal.’ I couldn’t even look at myself. So I knew I had to have knee replacements, and I had so much pain in my knees, arthritis and so much damage there.”
On Vince McMahon wanting to make him GM when he returned:
“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.”
On how he feels today:
“Yeah, I feel pretty good. The only thing that bothers me now is [that] 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.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
