Kurt Angle On Wrestling For Large Amount Of Money In Saudi Arabia – “I Would Do It In A Second”

Kurt Angle has said that even though he is retired as an active wrestler in WWE, he would wrestle again in Saudi Arabia if the price was right.

At the November 2018 WWE Crown Jewel event in Saudi Arabia, Kurt Ange competed in his first WWE singles match in 12 years. It was part of something called the WWE World Cup Tournament with Angle facing Dolph Ziggler in the quarterfinals of the match. Ziggler won the match to move on to the semifinals.

The main event of that Crown Jewel event saw Shawn Michaels & Triple H team up together as D-Generation X against the Brothers of Destruction duo of The Undertaker & Kane in a match between four men that were no longer full-time wrestlers. For Michaels, it was his first match in over eight years and there was a report that he got paid $3 million just to do that one match, which is a lot of money for one match.

On a recent episode of the Kurt Angle Show podcast, the WWE Hall of Famer Angle reacted to Michaels reportedly getting paid a huge amount of money for that one match.

“Well, you know what, I’m not a WWE lifer. Shawn is. His loyalty is still with the WWE, and they paid him very well for it.”

Angle was asked if he would take the same kind of payoff for one more match and Angle responded with this:

“What are you talking about? I would do it in a second. Good knees or bad knees, I would do it in a second.”

As he continued, Angle spoke about getting to wrestle at Crown Jewel 2018.

“I love that and the main reason is money, money, money. You know, when you go to these places, they spend a lot of money. These were bought shows. Saudi Arabia bought them from WWE and I believe it was like, like a billion dollars for five years where they did two shows a year. So you’re talking $200 million for two shows a year. That’s incredible.”

“You know what? The fans didn’t have to pay for it. The government paid for them. Everything was paid for, for the wrestlers, the WWE, and all the fans. The country, actually the government, paid for everything so the fans could enjoy themselves. There were 75,000 fans, it was incredible.”

While talking about the match against Dolph Ziggler, Angle pointed out that while it was only a seven-minute match, the pay he received was like what he would get if he was main eventing a pay-per-view show.

“I will say this. They didn’t put me in great spots. You know, I think I did a Royal Rumble. I was an entrant of a battle royal. I also did like a seven minute match with Dolph Ziggler. The match wasn’t, you know, Dolph was great. Don’t get me wrong. But me at this point in time, I wasn’t so great because I kind of lost a step at this particular time in my career, but it wasn’t where I wanted to be.”

“I was hoping more main event status, but still, the money was still really good. It was like I main evented a pay-per-view. That’s the equivalency.”

Another story that Kurt Angle told on his podcast is that he almost drowned in a jet skiing incident, but his daughter saved him when he needed it most.

Thanks to Fightful and WrestlingNewsco for the transcriptions above.