Kurt Angle reflects on wrestling Mark Kerr before his Olympic journey started.
Mark Kerr’s name is frequently mentioned in the buildup to the release of “The Smashing Machine,” the biopic in which Dwayne Johnson plays Kerr. One thing Johnson and Kerr have in common is that they both wrestled Kurt Angle. Kerr wrestled Angle before Angle won the Olympic gold medal, and The Rock would wrestle Kurt in WWE.
During a recent interview with Sports Illustrated, Angle said that at one time, Kerr was his greatest rival in the sport of wrestling.
“Well, Mark was my biggest nemesis. It was really hard to like the guy because he kept beating me. Same with Mark Coleman, who’s also in that movie, Smashing Machine. Those two guys were my biggest enemies when I was wrestling, and I didn’t have a lot of success against them in 1993 and 1994, and I realized why I didn’t. Actually, I quit after 1994. I quit for about five months because I felt sorry for myself. I was like, ‘I’m never going to beat these two guys, so why even try?’
“So I quit for about five months, and then I started watching videos of me wrestling, and I realized what I was doing. I was wrestling their game. I was going toe to toe with them and trying not to create action, but just a game of chess back and forth. You know, he attacks me, I attack him. What I realized is that if I set the tone in the match and I pick up the pace, I’ll get them tired a lot quicker. So I did something called exhaust training, and that’s when you start. That’s when you train till you’re exhausted, and that’s when the training actually begins. It’s almost a form of torture. I learned this from the University of Iowa head wrestling coach, Dan Gable. He taught his wrestlers this.
“So I started doing that training, and it allowed me to pick up the pace, to go into another gear that nobody else was able to hold up against me. This new gear made me a much better wrestler and more effective. I wasn’t playing chess with those big, strong guys anymore. I was creating the action, and I was getting them tired, and it worked extremely well, because in 1995 I won the world championships, and in 1996 I won the Olympic gold medal. So, those two guys I have the utmost respect for. It’s crazy that I was able to turn it around and beat them, because I had never thought in a million years after 1994 that I’d ever beat them, and I did.”
Kurt Angle also said in the interview that he believes Shawn Michaels is the most incredible all-around performer of all time. Read those comments here.
Learn more about what Mark Kerr thought of The Rock’s performance in the upcoming biopic here.
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