Pro wrestling may be fake — pardon, worked — but that doesn’t mean pro wrestlers don’t get hurt. From Angle: Beaten and battered:
“My body is so beat up and run down, I can’t even think straight,” Kurt Angle tells WWE.com in an exclusive interview Saturday concerning his early release from his contract with World Wrestling Entertainment. Angle and WWE officials mutually agreed to end Angle’s relationship with the company on Friday.Angle says nearly 30 years of non-stop wrestling (between amateur wrestling, the Olympics and his WWE career) has taken a major toll on his body, his mind and his family. “I need my body to reheal and rehab, I have done this for too long without a break. I haven’t been able to really enjoy my life. I haven’t seen my family, I’ve had problems with medication — I’m just fried physically and mentally.”
Angle’s business manager David Hawk claims, “Kurt’s in a tremendous amount of pain, he’s used prescription medication to deal with it. Kurt has come to the conclusion that unless he can get in the ring without the use of pain medication then he doesn’t need to be in there. He realizes he was just endangering himself and his opponents.”
The last straw for Angle seems to have occurred on August 13th, 2006, at an ECW live event in White Plains, New York. Angle was wrestling Rob Van Dam in a match where both competitors were fueled by the passionate ECW fans. “The crowd was wild,” Angle says. “Early on in the match, I pulled my groin, but I kept going, feeding off the crowd. Then I pulled my abdominal muscle off the pelvic bone, but I kept going as the crowd grew more wild. Finally, I blew out my hamstring, but we finished the match. The crowd stood and applauded — a standing ovation and that meant so much to me.”
More:
Look at my face,” Kurt Angle says. This, he figures, is the sacrifice — one of many. His head is bald, famous and abused, a cranial cutting board. “It looks like I’ve aged 15 years in the last five.”He points to a fleshy scar running past his brow. That’s where Stone Cold Steve Austin stuck him once with a pointed razor, a prop for the bloodthirsty, and jerked the blade forward. Angle geysered blood that day. Another day, in another pro wrestling match, he smacked a concrete floor with a thud — followed by church silence — when a table, designed to break his fall, collapsed just as he landed on it. Angle couldn’t move for 15 seconds. He needed days to regain his memory and lose the headaches. He continued with the match.
Angle can no longer hear with his left ear, drained of fluid 80 times. He has nerve damage in his face. He’s had six knee surgeries and a broken neck. He’s dislocated his shoulder and ripped ligaments in his ankle. In every way, he has followed the vagaries of an intractable desire — it’s lifted him up and broken him down, sometimes all at once.
What kind of athlete works through such injuries? Where does he get it? Probably from his dad:
In 1985, David Angle, 55, fell from a construction site and landed on his head. The drop broke both of his shoulders and cracked his skull in three places. He then walked to the hospital with the injuries that would kill him.