The Olympic Medalist Kurt Angle recently appeared as special guest on The Hannibal TV and discussed about several topics including about why he rejected an offer to fight in UFC in 1997.
Kurt Angle said that they offered him 10 fight deal in UFC with $15000 for a fight but he felt that money wasn’t good enough.
“It was money. The MMA at the time, the UFC when they approached me it was in 1997. Dana White was not involved at the time and there was a woman there that was in charge. She called me and said, ‘Hey, we’d like you to enter the UFC and we’ll give you a 10 fight deal.’ And the money wasn’t that great. It was $15,000 a fight so I wasn’t going to get my butt kicked for $15,000 for each fight. That would have been brutal,” Angle said.
Later, he involved in WWE in 1998 and UFC became the big company in 2001, then, he thought to crossing over but unfortunately he broke his neck.
“The UFC started coming strong after I got involved with the WWE in 1998. The UFC became like a really big company by 2001 and I was thinking about crossing over but then I broke my neck again. That ended my dreams of doing anything in MMA,” Angle said.
The WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle also trained in 2008 to get back to MMA but he didn’t have enough strength in his upper body after breaking his neck and put an end to his dreams.
“I did some training. This was back in 2008-2009. I did some training at the Pittsburgh Fight Club. I was getting pretty good but I knew at the time that after breaking my neck several times, I had no strength in my upper body. I would have left myself open to submissions with my arms. I just didn’t have any strength. I couldn’t do five push-ups at the time. So it was very difficult for me to crossover into MMA when I wasn’t at a 100%. I knew I couldn’t do it,” Angle said. (H/T: SK Wrestling)
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