You’re about 800 words and one patriotic singlet away from being a sports entertainment expert. Here, let Total Nonstop Action (TNA) Wrestling superstar and Olympic champion Kurt Angle lift the curtain on the tremendously popular world of pro wrestling. Angle was in town recently getting the word out about his TNA Pay-Per-View event, Lockdown: Cross the Line, coming up on Sunday, April 19 at the Liacouras Center. (Tickets are available here.)

For the intellectually arrogant among us, who maybe haven’t seen a fight in a couple decades, Angle shared the general outline to what he calls “the method to the art of wrestling.”

“Basically, the good guy versus the bad guy,” Angle said. “The good guy shines over the bad guy in the beginning. The bad guy cheats to get the good guy down. The bad guy gets heat on the good guy, so the fans get behind the good guy. Eventually, the good guy starts to make a comeback over the bad guy. Then they have the finish: does the good guy overcome adversity and win or does the bad guy cheat and win?”

Angle broke the script down further, revealing that while one third of the fight is preplanned in the dressing room, the rest is called in the ring. The action follows strict rules to ensure communication and safety of the fighters. “When a guy puts you in a head lock, it is always with the left arm, when you are working  guy’s leg, it is always his left leg,” Angle explained. “That is part of the technique of pro wrestling. That way, if he is flying off the ropes and I call his leg, he knows I mean his left leg. Safety is a big part of it because it is so completely dangerous. If it wasn’t structured, there would be no way for these guys to stay healthy.”

Angle, who began his pro wrestling career with the WWE in 1998 after winning the gold medal in heavyweight freestyle at 1996’s Atlanta Olympics, considers himself an expert at reading the crowd — a necessity for selling the two-thirds of the action that’s called spontaneously.

“I’ll put a guy in a hold, and look around and see what the crowd is doing,” Angle said. “If they’re down, I’ll keep him in that hold until they start cheering. When they do, I’ll tell him, ‘Start coming to life here.’ I’ll give him a spot where he puts me in a hold and then I’ll shut him down — put him in that hold again, wait for the crowd to start cheering again. Once they do, I’ll tell him to do something else. Now I know it is time to go home, so I’ll say: ‘We are going to do this spot next and then get ready for your comeback, because the crowd is ready.’”

“The fans instigate the match,” Angle continued. “They control us. We don’t control them. You need to listen to them and disappoint them at the right time, and you need to please them at the right time. It is a really a neat way of screwing with the people. You want them to be emotionally involved. That comes with physicality and selling with your face. It is all about showing emotion.”

Because of his clout and longevity, Angle, 41, is granted major say in how his fights goes down. For a guy with a punishing track record, however, he takes a very humble approach to his role. My job is not to win all the time,” said Angle. “My job is to make other wrestlers more popular. I am a maker. I help make the wrestler climb up to the main event level. That is my job in the company.”

Angle’s candid when asked to address those who believe that professional wrestling is fake. “Every punch we throw, every body we slam — it’s on plywood,” he said. “We feel it.” He has a major fighting background on which to base such statements: In addition to his Olympic gold medal, he earned top honors at the 1995 World Championships and said he has been offered a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) contract. While he’s trained extensively in combat, Angle has yet to raise his hands in an MMA match.

Angle is confident that this Sunday’s event will entertain everyone in attendance, from the diehard mat fan to the reluctant wife who gets dragged along. “Every match [at Lockdown] is in the steel cage,” he said. “It is a very brutal event, and the stunts these wrestlers do, inside and outside of the cage, are unbelievable. If we are going to have Lockdown anywhere, it should be Philadelphia, where [Extreme Cage Fighting] was born — the hardcore wrestling. The whole night is hardcore.”

TNA iMPACT! can be seen every Thursday at 9 p.m. EST on Spike TV. TNA Lockdown tickets are available here. Contact your cable provider for Pay-Per-View details.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Interview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.