How Good Was Kurt Angle Actually?
WhatCulture Wrestling
WhatCulture Wrestling
4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
Three I’s, no Five Star Matches: how good WAS Kurt Angle?! Simon Miller tackles one of the most debated wrestling legacies of the modern era.
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| 0:00.0 | Play Final One Standing by William Hill. It's free to play with a new league kicking off every Premier League match week. Enter and make your first pick your first pick a new team before each following round. You can only pick each team once and if you're the final one standing then the jackpot is yours. Final one standing by William Hill, football's ultimate elimination game. 18 plus wins EPL season, one active league at a time on less prize 100,000 pounds or more, |
| 0:22.6 | minimum prize 1,000 pounds. Prices vary and apply to public league zone. Price split before losing the same amount. Pay within 48 hours online, full teas and season at Williamhill.com play responsibly. Kurt Angle is one of the best professional wrestlers ever. as ever, I want to make that clear before we do start this video and it's why we are sitting down today because there is a discussion happening on the |
| 0:41.8 | internet and I wanted to get serious about this and as we all know you cannot be serious standing up. |
| 0:47.7 | It wasn't just his in ring work either which was amazing in WWE and arguably even more amazing |
| 0:52.6 | in TNA because his run was longer there. But even |
| 0:55.1 | outside of the squared circle, this man was like an entertainment machine. And of course, he had the |
| 1:00.7 | legitimate background too. He must have told you this 42,769 times. He was the Olympic gold medalist. |
| 1:07.1 | And he won that thing with a frickin neck. Not a freaking neck. A freaking broken neck. you see, that's how worked up I get by this. But in case you are confused, you can type it into any social media that you do choose. Some people do not think cut angle is as good as some people say it is, and other people, if you can believe it, say he's overrated. Now, surprise, surprise, what usually triggers this debate is Dave Meltzer's wrestling observer star rating system, which was a stupid way to say that. And I will never understand this. Listen, I probably wouldn't be sat here right today if it wasn't for Dave Meltzer in the work that he did way back when, but it's always just going to be one man's opinion and you are not Dave Meltzer, so you were going to view wrestling completely differently to how he does. So you should just look at those stars and go, well, that's interesting that Davey gave it that one. And then you can sit down and do your own ratings too and you know what? These are equal with each other, even if somebody only ever watched one wrestling match and they wanted to give it five stars. That is cool as well because at the end of the day |
| 2:01.2 | it's just a bit of fun. And yes, the reason we do talk about this is because Kurt Angle never got |
| 2:05.3 | a five star rating from Dave Meltzer. So we are going to have to dive into that a little bit |
| 2:09.7 | today. And we'll start with 2025 because up to this point, which is around about mid-August |
| 2:14.4 | of this year, Mr Meltzer has given 26 matches a five-star rating or higher. Now that feels like a lot, but again, good for him. He can do whatever the flood he wants and we're going to get into that as well. But what people do is they go back and watch a Kurt Angle match and they say to themselves, well, I don't think that's necessarily better than Kemm & Owens versus Sammy Zane from the Elimination Chamber that also got five stars or even |
| 2:34.2 | Gay Kid versus Yot Asugi. |
| 2:36.1 | And ultimately it's your brain, so only your brain is going to be able to make a determination |
| 2:40.0 | here. |
| 2:41.0 | But also, as I do go off on a slight tangent, comparison is the thief of joy. |
| 2:45.6 | You should be able to enjoy those two matches we talked about and sit down and watch |
| 2:49.0 | a cut angle classic and just think to yourself, isn't it wonderful that I found this mad sport and entertainment, by Joe, it makes me happy. Now, I would absolutely say using all these metrics, Kurt Angle has to be the best wrestler, never to receive a five-star rating, but you do have to go back in time to understand the context, because genuinely, you can read these Wrestling Observer newsletters. Getting five star from Dave Meltzer was like pulling teeth. I suppose this happens to all of us. He was just way more strict than his younger years. Even when Kurt Anger was totally on fire in 2000 to get that score, you basically had to change wrestling forever. And also, let's face it, let's call a spade a spade. Mr Meltzer is just more of a fan of the New Japan type style. |
| 3:26.9 | I ain't got a problem with that. And my preferred style is goofy wrestling. Somebody once told me it's for life. |
| 3:32.1 | Much really funny is if you do use your way back machine, you will see Meltzer talking about cut angles saying, my gosh, WWE has an absolute star here. |
| 3:40.0 | Whereas when you go on to message port, you can read |
| 3:42.2 | a lot of posts, and again in the early days, of the IWC, of the 2000s, go, oh man, this |
... |
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