While Kurt Angle has retired from active competition, the Olympic gold medallist still keeps an eye on the happenings of the wrestling world. The rise of AEW has been the biggest wrestling stories of the past few years and the former world champion has big praise for one of the stars that helped start the promotion.
Chris Jericho interviewed Angle for an episode of Talk Is Jericho on Wrestling Rager At Sea Triple Whammy. The episode that was released recently saw the two long-time friends discussing a number of topics including Kurt’s TNA run. Speaking about his decision to join the company, Kurt Angle said wrestling with AJ Styles was one of the things that inspired him to join the promotion:
“You know, I got to wrestle with AJ Styles. That was my inspiration coming into the company. I had my eyes set on AJ. He was one of the greatest overall performers I’ve ever seen. The stuff he can do in the ring. He was great at technical stuff. He was great at high-flying. He had the whole ball of wax.
The great thing about AJ was you didn’t have to do any work. I mean, when you wrestled him it was like a night off. He did all the bumping. He did all the selling. He did all the flying around. All you did was catch him. And I could go an hour and a half with AJ and not even break a sweat. But he’d be exhausted.”
Angle Praises Kenny Omega
Kurt Angle also had some big praise for the former AEW world champion Kenny Omega. He said that Omega reminds him of the Phenomenal one. The former WWE star claimed that both these stars have the it factor:
“Another wrestler that reminds me of AJ is Kenny Omega. Very much so. These guys are a step above everybody. For whatever reason. I don’t know what it is, but they have the it factor. These guys put on tremendous matches.
I’m not buying all the six and seven star matches by Dave Meltzer, but the only person that gets like six, seven, eight, nine stars is Kenny Omega, and he deserves it. It’s really incredible how good he really is.”
Apart from this, Kurt Angle talked about his feud with Samoa Joe. He revealed that he wanted to wait a few months after joining TNA and build the rivalry before finally having a match. Though the officials decided that they didn’t want to wait. Angle ended up facing Joe in his first PPV match for the organization at Genesis 2006.
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