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From mat to ring, WWE's amateur and pro wrestling connection

Posted: Mar 25th 2019 By: Josh Barnett

Kurt Angle was offered a contract by WWE chairman Vince McMahon after the 1996 Olympics. But Angle wanted a proviso: If I sign this contract, I can never lose.

After all, he had just won the freestyle wrestling gold medal, and how could a gold medalist be beaten?

“He looked at me like I was crazy,” Angle said. “I took the contract home and waited for Vince to call me and he never called me. He thought, this kid doesn’t get it.”

Two years later, after Angle had spent time watching the WWE's television product and becoming a fan, he got it. He approached WWE and was offered a tryout, rather than an immediate contract. The deal came three days after his tryout. He made his television debut a year later — after training five days a month under former wrestler turned top coach Dory Funk and then working independent events around
his hometown of Pittsburgh. Angle is noted for picking up the business faster than just about anyone else.

At the time, some of his peers wondered what he was doing. How could the Olympic champion become a pro wrestler? As Angle notes, the only thing that amateur wrestling and pro wrestling have in common is the word “wrestling.” But pro wrestling had changed from what they saw on Saturdays when he and his peers were growing up.

“By the time I had gotten into it, the cat was out of the bag,” Angle said. “It was sports entertainment. It was a predetermined finish.

“I think when I came in, there was a lot of shock because USA Wrestling wanted me to continue for another four years. Then there was more acceptance for guys (who entered WWE after him). If anything, (the amateur wrestling community) looks at it now where that’s one of our guys. Kurt Angle was one of us. It is more of a pride thing now than it was a disgrace because WWE is so big and it’s such a global company. People will take pride in knowing the wrestler that represented us in WWE.”

WWE continues to search for talent virtually everywhere from all sorts of athletic endeavors — football, mixed martial arts, rugby — as well as watching those who have been in sports entertainment for other promotions. Former wrestlers are just one part of the company's extensive global recruiting efforts, but they are an important one.

Elite amateur wrestlers dot WWE’s rosters, including 2012 Olympian Chas Betts (Chad Gable) , former NCAA heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar, three-time NCAA championship finalist Nathan Everhart (Jason Jordan) and three-time Mid-American Conference champion Nick Nemeth (Dolph Ziggler); the company recently parted with All-American Jake Hager (Jack Swagger).

“It’s almost like a new career path for an amateur wrestler now, which some of us need,” Betts said. “It used to be that this wasn’t so available to amateur wrestlers, I’d say. It was more of a closed business to get into it. Now we’ve got talent scouts that go to amateur wrestling tournaments looking specifically for amateur wrestlers that would be good for WWE.

“Some of us don’t want to go coach amateur wrestling or don’t want to continue to compete until we’re 35. There’s MMA and here’s another option in WWE, which is incredible. We are prime examples that you can be very successful in it.”

Betts signed with WWE less than a year after competing in the London Olympics in the 84-kilogram weight class. He made his in-ring debut with NXT, WWE’s third brand that is focused on development, in September 2014.

He and Everhart, who starred at Indiana University, formed a team now known as American Alpha in July of that year, and the duo was elevated to the WWE's main roster in July 2016 as part of the organization's made-for-television draft. They won the Smackdown tag team titles in late December
before losing them before WrestleMania this year.

“The business has changed, and there’s been a lot more amateur wrestlers that have stood out and broken into it,” Everhart said. “There’s no longer this barrier from being an amateur. No one gave us any problems when we decided to make the transition. It’s been really smooth.”

Key ingredients

Being able to marry a version of wrestling-type moves with a larger-than-life entertaining personality is the key to success. WWE Hall of Famer Gerry Brisco is the company’s talent scout when it comes to amateur wrestlers. He attends tournaments across the world to see if he can find potential
WWE stars.

In broad terms, Brisco shared his initial checklist:

► Size — wrestlers from 190 pounds to “the biggest guy on the mat.”

► Footwork.

► Interaction with officials — “how they react whether it’s a good call or a bad call.”

► Hint of personality, “no matter whether they get upset or get a big win.”

► People person. “The No. 1 thing I look for is interaction with the other guys on the team or the masses of people at a tournament. I watch how they respond when they visit their team section and how they respond to people who approach them.”

Brisco said if he likes what he sees, he’ll approach the coach to get permission and ask questions about any personal issues and demeanor.

“I look to see if the family is there,” Brisco said. “If I can meet mom and dad, brother and sister, that’s great. Usually one or two of them are WWE fans. Once they get over the initial shock that WWE is looking at their kid, they get a good attitude. Then I really start visiting the individual and trying to see the inside of them.

“I also need to explain to them what we do. We’re in show business. This is entertainment, and I want to make that clear and let them know that as long as they take care of themselves, they can have a long career with us.”

Once a potential performer is in line for a tryout, Brisco urges two things: Show up in shape and be ready to cut a promo, a brash oration about one's self or an opponent. As Brisco puts it, “1A is promo, promo, promo.” He often texts the three words to prospective performers.

“That one minute that they get — that’s all they get and need to show us they have the personality,” Brisco said. “I’m not worried about the athletic skills. The kids we’ve been recruiting have been athletes since they were 4-5 years old and in multiple sports. … When I tell them to study, I tell them don’t focus on the in-ring product, focus on what these guys do with a microphone.”

Brisco’s more recent finds are working in NXT and the WWE Performance Center, including the tag team of Heavy Machinery: Levi Cooper (Tucker Knight) was an All American at Arizona State and Nikola Bogojevic (Otis Dozovic) was a Pan Am Games bronze medalist; Jacob Southwick (Sawyer Fulton), a two-time NCAA All-American and former Greco-Roman national champion; and Sunny Dhinsa (Akam of the Authors of Pain), a Pan Am Games silver medalist who just missed representing Canada at the 2012 Olympics.

“I like to keep them stocked down there,” Brisco said, laughing. “The staff tells me they love the amateur wrestlers because they’re well-disciplined and they come from a structured program and don’t just run wild. Wrestling practice is a respectful environment so they know how to treat the staff and the coaches. I get nothing but compliments.”

Differing priorities

But it’s not easy, especially given that being in sports entertainment requires a completely different mindset than being an amateur wrestler. It’s not about winning, it’s about entertaining. And always has been.

WWE Hall of Famer Bob Backlund was the NCAA Division II champion for North Dakota State in 1971 and finished fifth at nationals in 1972. By 1973, he was working for the American Wrestling Association at the start of a long career that included a lengthy World Wrestling Federation title run in the 1980s.

“When I was wrestling in high school and college, I would say, I’m going to beat the other guy by outworking him, and you can’t let up on that,” he said. “You can’t doubt that. You can’t say if or maybe, you have to say I will do it.

“When I made that transition from amateur to professional wrestling, I set different goals. My goal was to entertain at the best level I could every time I went into the ring. If there was one person in the building, I wanted to entertain that one person. If it was Madison Square Garden and 27,000 people were in the building and cheering for me, I wanted them to leave excited them about what I did.”

As much as fans remember Angle’s classic matches and title reigns, they remember his comedic bits with WWE Hall of Famer Stone Cold Steve Austin, the time he tried to dance like Shawn Michaels or driving a milk truck into the arena. Angle used his recent Hall of Fame speech to urge performers
to take chances with their character.

“People knew when I got in the ring I was a gold medalist — I’m more legit than anybody in the company or the world,” Angle said. “That gave me the freedom to do crazy, funny, goofy things.”

Amateur wrestlers know how to land and roll through and apply certain holds that translate. They also bring instinct and timing to make things look more natural in the ring.

“You see that innate athletic ability that they have had burned into them since they were kids and you have to have to been elite level national champion or the Olympic level,” said Paul “Triple H” Levesque, WWE’s executive vice president of talent, creative and live events, who oversees
recruiting and the Performance Center..

“The movement and the fluidity and all that is ingrained. Now the question is can they get outside of that, because we’re entertainers. … If you can find someone in that amateur or Olympic level wrestling environment who has that skill set, but then they have the personality, that It Factor, then it’s just gold.

“Kurt Angle is the primary example of that. And you look at Charles Betts — he’s a little guy who can do anything in the ring, but his personality is just huge.”

Wrestlers with strong amateur backgrounds also need to make sure they remember exactly what sports entertainment is — even if the crowd is cheering and it’s a pay-per-view and the title is on the line. The adrenaline that might take over needs to at least be somewhat harnessed.

“When I started training, I took the approach of being really passive because I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Angle said. “I made it a point to never get flustered. When I got confused or you don’t know what’s going to happen next, your instinct of crushing that other guy takes over.

“I always allowed my opponent to do whatever he wanted to me when a spot got mixed up because I was afraid I was going to hurt someone.”