Kurt Angle Recalls WWE Incident That He Regrets From Early In His Career
Kurt Angle has recalled an incident from his first year on WWE TV that he regrets involving a flag.
When Kurt Angle signed with WWE in 1998, it was about two years after he won an Olympic Gold Medal in 1996 for freestyle wrestling. He may have mentioned that gold medal a “few” times over the last 27 years.
While Kurt Angle’s official WWE televised debut happened at Survivor Series in November 1999, he was actually training well before that and also did dark matches for many months before that.
The first televised appearance for Angle in WWE on the March 7th episode of Sunday Night Heat. Tiger Ali Singh was a heel at the time that was proud of his family background in India and would also insult Americans often.
All of this would lead to Ali telling Angle to blow his nose on the American flag and Singh would give him $5000 for it. Angle refused, then he eventually blew his nose on the India flag. Singh tried to attack Angle, but Kurt him with a belly-to-belly suplex and hiplock takeover. The fans loved it and were chanting “USA” during the segment.
On a recent episode of The Kurt Angle Show podcast covering the early part of his career, the WWE Hall of Famer was asked if there was something he didn’t like doing in those days.
“Yeah, blowing my nose on the Indian flag. Hey, it wasn’t my idea. But I understand. I mean, that is very disrespectful. But it’s something that WWE wrote. And I didn’t think about it beforehand, I didn’t have a problem with it. But once I caught heat for it. I was like, ‘Man, I really messed up.’ I mean, I feel really bad about that. There’s no reason to do that.”
“I do understand that back then, it was a little safer to do that kind of stuff than it is now. But I wasn’t proud of myself for doing that. I should have known better.”
Many years later in 2016, WWE issued an apology for the Angle-Singh storyline from 17 years earlier.