Nigel McGuinness learned a lot from his matches in TNA with Kurt Angle.
As Desmond Wolfe, the English wrestler grappled with the Olympic gold medallist numerous times. He even picked up some wins over the WWE legend, in what were some of Nigel McGuinness’ best matches.
Nigel McGuinness spoke with Chris Van Vliet about his matches with Kurt Angle. He asked what McGuinness learnt from those TNA bouts, to which the Englishman said “self-confidence”.
He went on to explain it was the first time he experienced the house show circuit in TNA. The opportunity to wrestle the same match night after night was something he’d never experienced, with the chance to tweak it slightly being a great way to improve.
“I learned self-confidence, I think as well. I’ve always found the best matches I had were where I could go to someone and go, ‘I got this idea, I got this idea,’ and they’d take it and they’d put it in the right place. Brian’s a perfect example of that as well.”
“And so I learned timing. It was one of the few times in my career where we had a very small European tour, so I was working with him a lot of nights there. We ostensibly worked each other every night, and so the ability to, I say, have the same match but to tell the same story and then tweak it just a little bit, just a little bit. This is what changed so dramatically when we got away from the house show way of making money in business.”
“It used to be—and maybe it still is in WWE, I’m not sure—but it used to be that you’d work the same guy night after night after night and just tweak it a little bit. Developing the ability to ad-lib on the fly was crucial. Whereas now, with the advent of YouTube and other platforms, your match is out there immediately. You can’t do that anymore.”
“You know, people watch a match and think of the great British wrestlers of the past, Johnny Saint for example, who, God bless his soul, did his stuff week after week after week. He didn’t need to change it because it got over. People weren’t watching it back going, ‘Oh, he did this last week,’ or ‘He did this at the same time.’ He didn’t need to change it because it worked. But now, the business has changed dramatically. The world has changed dramatically. Entertainment has evolved.”
