Bruce Prichard On Brock Lesnar And Kurt Angle Backstage Incident, Angle's Fight With Eddie Guerrero - WrestlingInc.com
With respect to the Daniel Puder incident, Prichard admitted that it was a huge mistake to set up that situation for WWE Tough Enough.
"It was a s--tty idea. It was s--tty execution. And it was old school wrasslin' type booking. And, yes, I had a huge part in it." Prichard added, "you don't mix work and shoot. And by doing that, you're teaching guys to work in a shoot environment, a contest environment, that if they win this contest that the audience is voting on, they win a WWF contract. That all was real. In that, you take somebody to go out and beat them up or stretch them, just that was the old school thinking in us that got us in trouble."
While The
Big Show and
Mark Henry were WWE Superstars considered for the spot, Angle asked to do it.
"Kurt volunteered for the spot and wanted to do it." Prichard continued, "Kurt was adamant. He came and plead his case to Vince, plead his case to all of us, that he was the guy, that he would be able to handle anything that anybody threw at him and like the suckers we were, we bit and said, 'okay, yeah, Kurt, Olympic gold medalist. He'll be fine.'"
According to Prichard, Angle was specifically instructed not to engage anyone other than the winner; however, after defeating Chris Nawrocki, Angle would go on to challenge the rest of the finalists and Puder accepted.
"You've got Kurt out there. He's riddled with injuries. He's not the Kurt Angle of 1996. This is a different Kurt Angle, different shape, a lot of injuries. And we didn't really know what the hell we had on the other side, so when Kurt went out, the instructions were very clear and very simple: you take the guy that wins the contest, you have your little match with them, and that is it. You don't do anybody else. You don't do more than one. You just do the one guy and that is it. It could not have been clearer."
Fortunately, WWE official Jimmy Korderas had the wherewithal to make the three-count in favor of Angle while Puder had 'The Wrestling Machine' in a kimura lock.
"Puder got in and he got him. He got his arm hooked, so Kurt had nothing else really he could do at that point. He didn't want to break his arm, so got him down on the mat on his back and went for the pin." Prichard said, "it was embarrassing. It was not a good scene and it all could have been avoided with better judgment on our part, having more foresight as to what the hell could have happened."
What is it with you? Do you understand what a shoot is or not? You say shoot, that means a real fight/match, there is NO implied caviat of "obviously we meant shoot but not like a real shoot, you still gotta lose." That's nonsense.
He'll probably more likely talk about what's the best position to fukk Karen in than to speak on this humiliation
