Kurt Angle On When He Was Contacted For RAW GM Role, Relationship With Vince Now, AngleStrong App
As noted, Wrestling INC's Raj Giri recently spoke with WWE Hall Of Famer and General Manager of WWE Monday Night RAW Kurt Angle. Among other things, Angle discussed his current on-air role being last minute, his relationship with WWE Chairman Vince McMahon since being back with the company, and the response to the AngleStrong app.
According to Angle, the GM role came together rather quickly.
"I have a great opportunity to be the GM of RAW and I wasn't expecting this. This came very recently and I think it had a lot to do with Mick Foley having to have hip surgery, so taking this opportunity takes me that one step further in the WWE to where I want to be and I like the position for now."
Moreover, Angle found out about the gig at the WWE Hall Of Fame ceremony over WrestleMania weekend this year.
"It was right around that time when I met with Triple H and he gave me the news. He wanted me to start on Monday. I believe it was Friday night, right before my speech. And I wasn't surprised. There were a lot of rumors going around and Triple H reassured me they were just rumors. There was never any talk of me becoming General Manager until recently." Angel added, "a lot of sites that were saying that I was going to be the RAW GM, but they were wrong because I would have known at the time and nobody contacted me."
With respect to his relationship with McMahon since being back with WWE, Angle said that he does not know what type of greeting he will get from McMahon from one day to the next, though he is glad to have been received as warmly as he has been.
"With Vince, you have to remember he's always thinking. He always has something on his mind. So you don't know which Vince you're going to run into. Now, one day, he's going to hug you and talk to you for 20 minutes. The next day, he doesn't have time to do it. Vince is a very lovable man and when you're good to him, he's good to you. He [has] always been that way and he was my father figure for a long time. When I stopped listening to him is when the heat started between us. But we didn't talk for 11 years, but once I saw him, the first thing he wanted to do was to hug me and hold me close. And it was really cool. I just thought that, 'wow,'. We parted and it wasn't ugly-ugly, but it was? we both didn't get what we wanted. That's basically it. I didn't want to leave and Vince didn't want me to leave. The issue was that I didn't want to stay under his circumstances, he didn't want me to stay under my circumstances. I didn't want to get clean and I also didn't want to work full-time, so there's a battle there and we just couldn't agree. And Vince lost his best wrestler, but I also lost the company that made me who I am and gave me the opportunity to be able to perform the way I did. Vince is the one that came up with the Kurt Angle character and he had a great writer named Brian Gewirtz that worked very hard at molding that character, so I give Vince a lot of credit for the success I've had in pro wrestling."
Despite experiencing a few hiccups along the way, the response to his Anglestrong app has been positive, in Angle's view.
"It has been good. With anything, you're going to have glitches. At one point, it was on the Android, but it wasn't in the App Store and the iPhone because they didn't like that we were GPS-enabled. The app does everything for you. You follow it. You follow the structure. You check in every day. If you don't check in, your lifelines are notified, that's your family, your loved ones, your sponsor. So it holds you accountable and it is also GPS-enabled and that's what iPhone didn't like, that we were tracking our patients. So, we want that because if you do relapse, we're going to find you. And if you don't check in in a few days, we can still find you. It's the one thing people value more than anything whether they are addicts or not is their phone. You've got to have it for communication and most likely that phone is going to be with them whether they relapse or not. So we thought it was a tremendous idea and eventually, iPhone came around and said, 'okay, let's do this', so it was a hard process. I think we've had about over 5,000 members after about six weeks. But also we've been doing a lot of seven-day free trial periods, so we're going to get the real number soon, but my goal is to have as many people doing this as possible and the only way to do that is by going out to the public and doing speeches, doing media, talking about my story and how it relates to other people. And the most important thing I want to do is to save people's lives."
You can listen to Angle's comments in the video above or the audio player below.