Vince McMahon Changed Major WWE Debut Mid-Match

Speaking on his The Kurt Angle Show podcast, Kurt Angle opened up about his debut match for WWE at the 1999 Survivor Series event against Shawn Stasiak.

Kurt Angle explained that after the fans started chanting “boring” during the bout, Vince McMahon told the future WWE Hall of Famer to go to the outside and cut a promo, which wasn’t the original plan:

“I was nervous as hell. I’ve never done it before, this is my first time, my debut, and you know, I was wrestling Shawn (Stasiak), and I was familiar with Shawn because I had been training with Shawn. We had a few matches, dark matches, and stuff that we had done before, but this was very scary because this was my debut, and I was more concerned about getting everything right.

“The crazy thing is, during the match, in the middle of it, the fans were chanting boring, and the referee comes to me and says, Shawn has me in a chokehold, and he says, ‘listen, Vince wants you to beat up Shawn, go outside the ring, grab the microphone and say, ‘you do not chant boring to an Olympic gold medalist. I came here for you’.

“And I was like, ‘Holy sh*t. I never did this before, you know, nobody warned me ahead of time. This was improvisation by Vince, and I paused for a second, and the ref said, ‘listen, you’ve got to do it.’ I said, ‘what does he want me to do again?’ He had to repeat it again, and I went out, and I did. The fans reacted, and they chanted ‘boring’ even louder. So, we got the reaction we wanted.

“I mean, about the match. The match was good. It wasn’t great. It was about six or seven minutes. So, it wasn’t a lot of time, you know, we didn’t have a lot of time on the card. I thought the match was very smooth, and it was decent.”

Many fans and critics are of the belief that Kurt Angle had one of the best debut years in professional wrestling history. The former Olympian won the WWE Championship a year after his debut at 1999 Survivor Series.

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Thanks to Ringside News for the transcription.

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