10 Fascinating WWE King Of The Ring 1999 Facts
7. Shawn Stasiak Defeated A Future Star In The Dark Match
In 1999, Stasiak portrayed the dead-end character "Meat", a walking sex toy for a trio of women known as P.M.S. Ahh, those innocent times. Anywho, Stasiak took part in the untelevised dark match of the 1999 King of the Ring tournament, defeating a novice wrestler that was still acclimating himself to the WWE style.
That man would go on to win the 2000 King of the Ring a year later: Kurt Angle. Angle was still a wet-behind-the-ears grappler when he took to the road in the spring of 1999, sanding his edges in dark matches with a wide variety of wrestlers, from Matt Hardy to Bob Holly, to even local indy wrestlers. Angle even wrestled Owen Hart before the May 10, 1999 episode of Raw, just 13 nights before Hart's tragic death.
The Wrestling Observer Newsletter reported on an arena-goer's assessment of Angle's match with Stasiak, saying that Angle, "look[ed] like someone who would have been a major star as a babyface in the 70s." Clearly at the time, our Olympic hero wasn't quite the suplex-doling cyborg that he would eventually become.