So here’s the good news. I spent my Saturday night a couple weeks back at the release party for Midway’s new videogame, TNA iMPACT! Eager to bring to you interviews with the many TNA stars that were on hand for the event, I made the trek all the way to lovely Princeton, NJ, hauling the latest in Newsday digital video recording equipment, and, on camera, pressed the likes of Samoa Joe, Kurt Angle and A.J. Styles with some of the toughest questions they’ve ever been asked!
But, unfortunately, the microphone didn’t work.
I kicked around the idea of bringing you the video interspersed with Charlie-Chaplinesque title cards that would communicate to you the gist of our conversation. But they don’t make those cards big enough to capture my long windedness.
So, I decided to go with Plan B, and from memory, try to recall and paraphrase for you some of my discussions with the many wrestlers who were kind enough to speak with me Saturday night.
I should note that everyone at the party seemed to be really enjoying the new iMPACT! videogame, which was set up on a couple of monitors in a ballroom of the Princeton Hyatt. It was all I could do to pry A.J. Styles away from it for just five minutes. The game really does look impressive, and does an excellent job of capturing the look and feel of the TNA product – right down to the amazing “Ultimate X” mode in which players precariously hang off of the cable set up above the ring. The graphics are among the best I’ve seen for a wrestling game ever. Midway and TNA both have high hopes for the game, and having seen it up close, they have good reason.
Here’s some highlights, as best as I can remember, from my conversation with Kurt Angle:
Kurt said he was not much of a gamer, but was really impressed with the TNA videogame, and said it was the latest step in TNA’s steady growth. He said TNA is not WWE, and is still years away from being able to compete, but remarked that TNA is now a profitable company, and said for a start up business to be in the black in just five years is incredible.
I asked Kurt about what was the latest on the rumors of him trying his hand at mixed martial arts, and he said he was still seriously considering it, but would it would likely have to wait until he was through with his pro wrestling career. He said it would take an awful lot of money for a company to get him to leave pro wrestling now to fight. He said he had met with officials from all the major MMA promotions, and named UFC, IFL and Elite XC as just a few. He said he had been offered the highest dollar amount ever for a single fight. He said the best fit for him might be Donald Trump’s Affliction promotion. He said he has trained, and continues to train somewhat sporadically, in MMA.
With Brock Lesnar set to take on Heath Herring hours after hour interview, I asked Kurt what the likelihood was of he and Brock having a rematch of their WrestleMania XIX main event, but this time in a legit MMA fight. Angle said they talked last year about doing just that, and that it still could happen. He said that, even thought their WWE matches were a work, they both had gotten angry enough with each other over the years that each man has thrown his hardest punch at the other.
I asked Kurt about what he thought Brock’s chances were against Heath Herring, and he said that he thought Brock would have had a harder time with his originally scheduled opponent, Mark Coleman. He said, regardless of his age, Coleman remains a force and could give any fighter a run for his money.
I asked Kurt if he had been following this year’s USA Olympic wrestling team, and he said he hadn’t been watching them all that closely, although he remains very interested in amateur wrestling. He talked a little about the differences between Grecco Roman and Freestyle, and said he thought the biggest sensation of this year’s games was a high school kid competing on the US boxing team.
I’ll be back with more from my interviews with Samoa Joe, Jay Lethal and others, just as soon as I can jog my memory.
Comments (1)
I knew angle and lesnar had heat those matches were sometimes very stiff, thanks for the insight.