Brock Lesnar‘s shooting star press attempt against Kurt Angle at WrestleMania XIX is an iconic moment for a few reasons.
First, men the size of Lesnar aren’t supposed to be able to perform backflips off the top rope. Second, the move nearly killed the guy.
And finally, Lesnar managed to finish the match, deliver an F5, and win the WWE Championship from Olympic Gold Medalist Kurt Angle and walk out of the ring by his own power.
An interview with Angle on his new podcast – The Kurt Angle Show – revealed that was in a bad way after the missed attempt, and Angle worried that Lesnar might not make it out of the match alive.
“He wasn’t responding, I said ‘Brock, are you okay?’ He wasn’t saying anything,” recalls Angle.
Angle went in-depth about exactly what went wrong with the move and feels that a moment of hesitation was likely what led to Lesner’s unsuccessful shooting star press attempt.
“When he went to jump, he hesitated and then just said ‘awe f*** it, I’m just going to go.’
I think that hesitation cost him to fall off balance forward so he couldn’t get a full rotation backward when he went to flip.
When he landed, I thought he was dead. I thought he broke his neck, I thought he was dead.”
In the YouTube video below, it’s obvious that Angle is too far away from Lesnar – or maybe Lesnar climbed to the wrong side of the ring.
Michael Cole tries to cover up the botch by stating Angle “rolled out of the way” even though the champion barely moves.
Angle told co-host Conrad Thompson about the events that unfolded after the match and the original plan for after the bell rang.
“Afterward, he was so disheveled. He was confused and didn’t know where he was.
He was supposed to come over and pick me up and hug me, we were supposed to become friends and he wasn’t coming over [to do that].
I told the ref to tell him to come over and he wasn’t coming so I walked to him and hugged him.”
Angle shared on the podcast that Lesnar was refusing to go to the hospital after the match and had to be talked into leaving the arena in an ambulance.
“We got in the back and he had an ambulance waiting for him to take him to the hospital and he wouldn’t go,” recalls Angle. “He was not going to go, he was being stubborn, he was pretty pissed off. I had to talk him into getting in the ambulance and eventually he did.”
[via The Kurt Angle Show]
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