Kurt Angle On Shane Douglas Contacting Him To Join ECW

During an interview with PWInsider, Kurt Angle talked about how it was Shane Douglas who brought him into ECW initially.

"Shane Douglas called me, I didn’t even know who Shane was. He called me and said, “Hey Kurt, I’m Shane Douglas, I’m in ECW, I’m from Pittsburgh, from your hometown, um, we have a new wrestling company that is structured more like amateur wrestling, more like your sport than WWE and [laughs].” So he sucked me in that day, this is a new pro wrestling that was mirrored from amateur wrestling. So I thought I was going to a wrestling meet.

So I got there, I was like holy crap, um, you know…the only match that had wrestling in it I believe was Taz and Guido, and they wanted me to, you know…they introduced them to me, I shook their hands and all that stuff. I think they did that to make me happy, to say “Hey, we’re doing this for you,’ but you know as the night went on, everybody kept coming out with weapons, it wasn’t even wrestling, it was all gimmicks, you know – kendo sticks, chairs, ladders, crucifixes, that was the one that got me, you know, when Raven crucifixed Sandman up on the cross I was like “I need to leave [laughs]. This is not good for me.” And I talked to Paul Heyman, and Paul said he didn’t know about the crucifix under the ring, which I knew was, you know, I knew he was BS’ing me."

He then explained why he chose to go to the WWF.

"You know, the thing is, back then I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand pro wrestling, I didn’t understand what they did in it, I thought they were, you know, pretending to be kayfabe and that it was…that they were trying to make it look real. By then they kind of came out of the closet and said “Hey, we’re sports entertainment, we’re not wrestling,” Vince McMahon did around that time and decided, you know, bury the kayfabe thing, but I just thought, “Geez, I can’t be any part of this. And you know…I don’t know, ECW was running pretty hard back then, they were doing pretty well, I mean, you know, if Paul Heyman would have offered me a deal, you know, as popular as it was back then, you know, I would have possibly considered signing it, just like I did WWE’s contract, but um, when that crucifix thing happened that was it – no way I was going to go there, so that’s when I reapproached Vince McMahon and decided to go to WWE."