It's no secret that WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle turned down a lucrative deal to sign with WWE immediately after the Olympics. Then, when he later decided to give pro wrestling a try, he was forced to take significantly less.
We rarely hear exactly how much WWE Superstars are paid, a shame in some ways as it would be interesting to see how much WWE values, say, Roman Reigns compared to Cody Rhodes or Seth Rollins, for example.
In an interview with Chris Van Vliet, Angle reflected on his first WWE run and opened up on exactly how much he earned and, had he been a little smarter, how much more he could have made.
"It comes with merchandise, but you have to be a businessman, which I wasn't. Also pay-per-view buys. If you're main eventing a pay-per-view, you're going to get a hell of a lot more than the other guys are. We're talking significantly more, 50-70 grand more. So yeah that's another way to make more money. But for me, for the most part, I made about two and a half million a year. I did all right, no, I did fantastic, but I wasn't a businessman."
"I didn't promote myself, I didn't do a lot of merchandise. I didn't know. I went into pro wrestling thinking all I have to do is wrestle and that's it, but you have to market yourself, and I didn't do that. I didn't do that at all. And watching Stone Cold Steve Austin, rumor has it that he made 10s of millions of dollars with merchandise. So he obviously was a good businessman, but he was also the most popular wrestler of all time."
Things have changed since then, of course, and WWE Superstars no longer benefit from PPV buys (that went out the window when Vince McMahon introduced the WWE Network in 2014). However, they still make more from merchandise sales so some aspects remain the same.
Talk then turned to whether Angle regrets not making any specific merchandise and, unsurprisingly, the former WWE Champion wishes he'd figured out a way to monetise his iconic Olympic Gold Medals.
"My gold medals. But the problem was, I don't know how this happened, but somebody started making them, and the reason why I couldn't make them is because we weren't allowed to duplicate them, but somebody else did it. Now a lot of fans come to me with these gold medals, I'm signing it and I'm like, Where'd you get this? They say I got it online. And I'm like well somebody snuck in there and made those gold medals without the Olympic Committee's permission."
It was a missed trick not doing something with those but Angle was a heel for most of his WWE career, meaning he was unlikely to ever be one of the company's top merchandise sellers.
You can watch the full interview with the beloved Olympian in the player below.