How Good Was Kurt Angle Actually?

Time’s Test

You can easily watch a peak Kurt Angle match back now and love it.

It helps that the relentless, lung-bursting pace he set is the norm these days. In that sense, Angle’s work hasn’t drifted out of style - and he was a generational athlete, probably the best to ever compete inside the squared circle. Even if he took the odd shortcut towards it, he almost inevitably arrived at high drama. There’s an emotional component missing from his work, outside of that masterclass opposite Shawn, but Angle made you feel a primal urge to see violence, if not an unbearable sense to see him win or lose in the same way as a Kenta Kobashi or Ric Flair. Angle’s matches were often pure spectacle, not a deeply-felt blow-off to a grudge programme, but it’s really hard to make pure action feel timeless. Angle did it.

Angle’s work withstands the test of time - but did Angle himself?

Increasingly, as modern wrestling often eats itself, slurping down homogenised athletic sludge in a greedy pursuit of critical acclaim, the better “old man” wrestlers stand out. Watching a veteran work around their physical limitations is an impressive and rewarding experience. The wrestlers who can’t do what they used to do must cast true working magic to draw a response from the crowd. This is a deeper, more earnestly felt reaction, the effect of incredible selling and the ability to slowly convince the fans that they are still, somehow, in the fight. Ric Flair - unpleasant as it is to praise him in 2025 - was remarkable at this, on some glorious occasions, in the mid-2000s. Before his knees disintegrated entirely, Hiroshi Tanahashi’s latter role, in which he refused to go gentle into that good night, produced some of the most emotionally intense matches of the New Japan resurgence - a beautiful counterpart to the increasingly formulaic, counter-heavy main event style.

Angle was not a great old man wrestler, truthfully. There was no pathos to his work as he left Impact Wrestling in 2016 and, before rejoining WWE, embarked on an indie run. His matches between 2016 and 2019 ranged from admirable to passable to bleak. He essentially tried to wrestle like the Kurt Angle of old, playing the hits with no lead connected to the amplifier. He didn’t toy with the crowd in the spaces between the moves, and the moves lacked the snap of old.

In some fan circles, his retirement match loss to Baron Corbin at WrestleMania 35 was considered a disgrace - but was there really a better alternative? Angle had already lost to Chad Gable on the March 18, 2019 edition of Monday Night Raw. While many fans might have dreamed about seeing this match against his spiritual successor on the grandest stage, it wasn’t particularly good. Angle was thrashed, unable to use that as an emotional hook nor offer any of his opponents the rub.

This isn’t necessarily a big criticism. Angle went harder than most at his sensational peak; it was little wonder that he had virtually nothing to give by the end. When determining somebody’s case as the greatest of all-time, however, the margins are yarn-thin.