YMMV / Kurt Angle

• Angst? What Angst?: For a wrestler who can be quite Hot-Blooded on screen, Kurt has so far been shown to be remarkably calm and almost dispassionate when guys like Samoa Joe and Triple H physically attack his son Jason Jordan right in front of him. Sure he looks concerned and checks up on Jason after the attack but you'd think as a father, Kurt would go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against anyone who attacks his son almost immediately. However, Kurt doesn't even put in the minimal effort to try to physically restrain people trying to attack Jason.
• Awesome Music: His TNA theme "Gold Medal" is catchy as all hell. And there's the iconic horn stabs of his WWE theme...which you almost can't unhear the "you suck" chants.
  • Funny as it may be, there's no denying that "Sexy Kurt" is just as awesomely crafted.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Angle lampshading WWE's inability to get him over as a heel by declaring that he hates black people and wants to make Jesus tap out, then getting a huge pop for saying that he can say anything he wants and still get cheered because everyone knows that he is the greatest wrestler in the world.
  • To be certain, a white man stalking a black woman, physically assaulting her husband, and threatening to rape her through "bestiality sex" crosses all kinds of moral lines. But Kurt Angle playing the role of the stalker, hamming it up with all kinds of psychotic Narm with Booker T and Sharmell, and acting extremely over-the-top as a sex fiend? You might just find yourself laughing too hard at Kurt's performance that you'd find the entire storyline to be unintentionally funny or So Bad, It's Good. Even fans who don't like the storyline tend to think of it as a minor blemish in Kurt's run that doesn't otherwise hurt Angle's career. To put things into perspective, a wrestler being given a wife stalker angle tends to be a kiss-of-death to their career like with Diamond Dallas Page. But Kurt? He bounced back fine from this kind of angle and him crossing the line with Booker and Sharmell in such an over-the-top and unintended hilarious way probably helped. It helps that Kurt Angle is occasionally visibly surprised and uncomfortable with the lines Vince McMahon is putting in his mouth before blurting them out.
• Designated Hero: Gets this treatment in the infamous WWE Tough Enough incident with rookie Daniel Puder. Fans usually point out how douche was Puder for putting Angle on an illegal Kimura lock in their shoot-amateur wrestling match, but they rarely acknowledge that Angle was blatantly the first to break the amateur rules just minutes earlier when he submitted Chris Nawrocki with a similarly illegal neck crank - and they often even overlook the fact Angle actually broke Nawrocki's ribs in their bout despite being supposed to take care of the rookies as the veteran in charge. Kurt was engaging in some pretty brutal and nasty hazing, and Puder had reason to see what he did as A Taste of Their Own Medicine.
• Evil Is Cool: The secret behind his insane popularity in the ring was that he was a rare heel in the business who didn't need run-ins or heel tactics to win, but could instead defeat the babyfaces simply by being better than them. The best example of this is Royal Rumble 2003, when he won a clean victory over Chris Benoit in one of the greatest matches of all time. He once said in a promo that he could say anything he wanted, including not being a fan of "the black people" and wanting to make Jesus tap out, and the "idiots" would still cheer him because he was the best wrestler in the company. The crowd, of course, cheered because it's true, it's damn true.
• Franchise Original Sin: Kurt Angle is almost undeniably the greatest signing TNA ever made. He was also the beginning of the end of the company; after Angle was signed, he became the focal point of the show to the point that TNA was literally nicknamed Total Nonstop Angle at one point. He ended Samoa Joe's undefeated streak literally in his first match, and was constantly put over much of the younger, homegrown talent. This set a bad precedent, as TNA started hiring other older wrestlers from the Monday Night Wars afterwards and constantly put them over the younger talent as well (see: the Main Event Mafia). This trend reached its absolute zenith, when Dixie Carter made the very poor choice to hire Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff and allowed them free reign over her company. Hogan and Bischoff pushed damn near everyone under the age of forty barring Jeff Hardy and Ken Anderson down the card (including "Mr. TNA" himself, AJ Styles), hired their friends, and put them over at the expense of all the other talent.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Can you believe the Olympic Gold Medalist who won with a freaking broken neck wasn't really over when he first debuted as a pro wrestler? In fact, he was quite the opposite of over, as fans found his mat based style generic and boring. Then he snapped and became the violent "shoot style" wrestler everyone loved to hate.
  • More like "Shaved the Head"; Angle was always considered a great wrestler, but the WWE never gave him a great reign as champion, and he always seemed to be more of a goofball than a badass, until he lost a Hair match against Edge and shaved his head in 2002. The same year, he got his first great world title run, and people started to see him as not just a great wrestler, but one of the greatest wrestlers of all time.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Running Gag through his first WWE run of him having milk as a substitute for alcohol can become this after his repeated arrests for driving under the influence, to the point that he had to take a hiatus from TNA to go to rehab due to it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • If you've witnessed him in the height of his Eagleland gimmick in the early 2000s, it's hard not to chuckle seeing him in Warrior, where he's a Fake Russian.
  • In 2007, he said WWE would be better off if Triple H stopped wrestling and just ran things behind the things with himself out of the picture. Come 2014 where Triple H runs NXT and people are not only calling for Triple H to stop wrestling, they want him to take over WWE's behind the scene operations completely.
  • Him not being a fan of "the black people" was an attempt to be audacious to prove a point (that some fans would cheer for him no matter what he said), and already not taken that seriously given he tried to seduce Booker T's wife Sharmell over a year prior. Then it became even more worthless as a statement years later when both Booker and Sharmell were made part of his Main Event Mafia in TNA, and even more years later when American Alpha member Jason Jordan became his black son.
  • His "Sexy Kurt" impersonation skit definitely counts as this, considering what Shawn Michaels looked a few years after he had retired from wrestling. The following Youtube Comment on WWE's top 10 Funniest Angle Moments sums it up:
    Youtube Comment: Kurt was so ahead of the times, he knew what HBK's hair would look like one day.
• Iron Woobie: Kurt Angle has not had an easy life, not at all. His life has been littered with tragedies and suffering, as neatly summarised in this video- father died in an accident when he was 16, best friend and mentor murdered in the infamous Foxcatcher incident, famously broke his neck, doing damage that he never fully recovered from and which led him into alcohol and painkiller addiction, lost his sister to a heroin overdose, brother jailed for manslaughter after killing his own wife. It's an incredible testament to his strength of will that he's managed to make it through all the crap that life has dumped on his plate.
• Love to Hate: The famous "YOU SUCK" chant sung in-beat with Kurt's theme. Then there was that time he kept re-doing his entrance because of the "YOU SUCK" chant.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Regardless of whether Kurt was a face or heel, the WWE fans would always chant "You suck!" in time with his music. When he was a heel, they meant it. As a face, it was a weird sign of affection by the fans.
  • Angle can do anything "with a broken freakin' neck!"
  • "Where's your gold medals? Oh, that's right — you don't HAVE any!"
  • My black son.^ExplantionThe early summer 2017 mystery storyline involving a potentially "career-ruining" secret for Angle turned out to be a college fling that produced Jason Jordan. Given that race is the main thing separating Angle and Jordan's looks and almost everybody expected an affair storyline instead, references to the original Family Guy gag instantly exploded.
  • Kurt Angle went Raw on Jason Jordan's momma.^ExplanationA less-PG version of the above. Within 12 hours of the illegitimate son reveal, Jordan's Wikipedia page has been repeatedly vandalized with either Angle's name being added to Jordan's ring name or the obvious unprotected sex "Raw" pun, forcing the page to be protected.
  • "You're a boy in a man's world! And I'm a man who loves to play with boys!"^Explanation Kurt's Freudian Slippery Slope series of gags from this segment where he's taunting Rey Mysterio has seen a lot of traction and sharing around by wrestling fans.
  • I MUST MOONSAULT ^ExplanationAn Alternate Character Interpretation on /wooo/ is that Kurt has an unhealthy obsession with performing moonsaults
  • Perc Angle. ^ExplanationA pun on Angle's name and "perc", slang term for the opioid painkiller Percocet/Percodan, in reference to Angle's painkiller addiction. It became common as the title of compilation videos of the most outrageous moments of Angle's career (and clips of some matches in which he appears to wrestle while high) set to rap songs, perhaps the most well-known being "Perc Popper" by Shoreline Mafia, such as the one.
  • Kurt Angle's Thousand-Yard Stare. ^ExplanationKurt Angle's debut on Tik Tok featured him briefly staring into the camera for a while, which was swiftly used as a reaction video whenever someone witnesses something that Crosses the Line Twice. Here's a compilation using Kurt Angle's stare.
• One-Scene Wonder: He wrestled one match for Ultimate Pro Wrestling in California; a match with Christopher Daniels that was considered a candidate for the best match of the year 2000.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: He was such a corny, squeaky-clean babyface that it was almost embarrassing to watch. And then he started wrestling: not "pro" wrestling, but collegiate/Olympic style wrestling, with even more drawn-holdsholds than usual, and downplaying what few showy and impressive bits there were. This went on for weeks, to the point that the fans didn't need any prompting to begin the "BORING" chants. Then Angle snapped under the constant verbal abuse, yelled at the fans, and switched to a brutal form of technical catch-as-catch-can pro wrestling. Angle was and still is one of the greatest pro wrestlers ever from an in-ring perspective. His later career in WWE included him main eventing pay-per-views and being a focus of storylines due to his excellent interviews and the fact that, even as his beaten-up body finally started breaking down for good, he could still make a leg-hold look like torture.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • While Kurt would still go on to become a mega-star in his own right in other feuds, many were disappointed that Kurt's love triangle storyline with Triple H and Stephanie McMahon-Helmsley ultimately went nowhere and sputtered out after a while, with Stephanie ultimately staying with Hunter. During this time, Kurt was getting a lot of great heel heat and many felt if he had really stolen Stephanie from Triple H, he would've reached a new level of wrestling villain superstardom. However, that never occurred and the love triangle unceremoniously ended, ultimately going nowhere.
  • Samoa Joe vs. Kurt Angle was the most financially successful feud in TNA history, the most common criticism being that it could have made more money if it had not been rushed through, damaging Joe's drawing power in the process. It would become a running theme with similar subsequent TNA feuds also being rushed through, to diminishing returns (while things like Aces And Eights seeming to stick around forever).
  • The general consensus is that the "Kurt's illegitimate son" angle would have had a much better chance of working with Chad Gable as Kurt's bastard offspring rather than Jason Jordan. Adam Blampied (formerly of WhatCulture Wrestling and Cultaholic) even made that the basis of his first fantasy booking video after returning to the business in 2020.
    Adam: Most of the time the obvious call is the right one.