Kurt Angle's life has been an epic journey. Growing up in a large family in Pennsylvania, Angle followed in the footsteps of his four older brothers when he decided to pursue wrestling. His discipline and hard work were soon rewarded: He won the Junior National Freestyle Championship and went on to become the Wrestler of the Year at Clarion College. In 1996, with many prestigious wrestling honors to his credit, Angle set his sights on a new goal: an Olympic gold medal. Months of grueling training paid off in the most spectacular way when Angle returned from Atlanta with a gold medal around his neck and renewed determination in his heart.

He was just getting started. Angle soon joined the ranks of the World Wrestling Federation and quickly became a main event performer, taunting the crowds with his trademark "three I's": Integrity, Intelligence, and Intensity. These are all qualities that he really possesses, but his character does not always display them in the ring. Through his high-profile matches with some of the biggest names in the business, Angle is now one of the most infamous "heels" in the World Wrestling Federation -- and he loves every minute of it. He has won -- and lost -- the Intercontinental belt and the World title, and he continues to rile crowds and accelerate heart rates every time he steps into the ring. Kurt Angle is living proof that with hard work and determination anyone can fulfill their dreams.

It's True! It's True!

ReganBooks

Chapter One

From Hero to Heel

The silence was killing me. That's what I remember most about standing alone in the middle of the Olympic wrestling mat five years ago, waiting for a decision that would change my life dramatically in one way or another.

Was the gold medal mine or not? I didn't know. Nobody knew. But I couldn't believe that 7,000 people in the Georgia World Congress Center could be so quiet, because the place had been absolutely crazy only a few minutes earlier during my match.

Most of the noise was for me. I was the crowd favorite, the blue-collar kid from Pittsburgh trying to win the gold at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Somebody decided to play the Rocky theme every time I entered the arena for a match, and it was fitting because I looked like the underdog in the 220-pound weight class. I only weighed about 210 pounds, and physically I was nowhere near as imposing as some of the fearsome-looking characters from the Eastern European countries. Yet time and again I had dazzled the fans during the two days of competition, winning match after match in dramatic fashion, with last-minute comebacks or overtime thrillers.

Matter of fact, I was such an inspirational figure at the time, overcoming serious injury and personal tragedy to make the Olympic team, that I never could have dreamed I'd become famous in the World Wrestling Federation a few years later as the red-white-and-blue-covered antihero the fans would love to hate.

Me, a bad guy? A heel? I was always the golden boy. The kid who stayed out of trouble. The guy that fathers wanted their daughters to date. I had dedicated my life to winning a gold medal in memory of my dad, who died when I was sixteen.

Hell, I wrestled in the Olympic trials with two cracked vertebrae in my neck because I wanted that medal so desperately. I was a real-life Disney movie, and the crowd in Atlanta was rooting hard for a storybook finish. At least the Americans were. For the finals, there were three thousand Iranians in the crowd, too, and they were rooting just as hard for their countryman, Abbas Jadidi. The atmosphere in the arena during the match had been electric as the two groups tried to outscream each other.

But now the place was deadly still, and it was terribly unsettling. You could feel the tension. The decision was in the hands of the three referees because Jadidi and I had wrestled to a 1-1 tie. Five minutes of regulation and three minutes of overtime, and neither one of us could pull off a move to win the match.

In my mind I felt I'd won. I was the aggressor, especially in overtime when Jadidi was exhausted. Every time we rolled out-of-bounds he was lying on the mat, gasping for air, while I jumped up and hurried back to the center of the mat. Twice he faked being hurt to stall for time. Everybody in the place could see he was just trying to buy time to catch his breath. I was getting pissed and trying to intimidate him at the same time: I yelled at the ref to "get him in here" as I danced around on the mat, showing him I wasn't tired.

Actually, I was exhausted, too, but I had spent two solid years training eight hours a day, going to extremes like running 200-yard sprints up the hills of Pittsburgh carrying a training partner on my back so that I would never give in to fatigue. I loved being pushed to the limit like this because I knew that I was the best-conditioned wrestler in the world. If it had been up to me, we would have kept wrestling to settle it ourselves, because I knew Jadidi was completely out of gas.

As time ran out in overtime, I had been seconds away from a takedown that would have won the match. I had shot for his left leg and wrapped it up, but he was so strong that he was fighting me off, and I still had my head caught between his legs as the final seconds ticked off the clock. I was so close, but did the referees see it the same way? You can never be sure. And so as a minute passed, then two, while the referees huddled at the scorers' table, it seemed more like hours. As I stood, waiting, trying not to think the worst, I found myself pondering the long, difficult, and sometimes painful road that had brought me to this position.

So much had happened to transform me from a kid who cried often while losing as a young wrestler, from the youngest brother in a family of six kids who was haunted by a fear of failure, to a twenty-seven-year-old Olympic athlete.

My father's accidental death on a construction site had changed me forever. It gave me an inner strength that allowed me to rise above the life of brawling and partying that had destroyed the athletic dreams of my four older brothers in our hometown of Pittsburgh.

And now the memories came flooding down on me: the state championship in high school; the two NCAA Championships in college; the World Championship in '95.

There were the countless trips overseas to Russia, Turkey, and Bulgaria over the years, grueling odysseys that took as long as thirty-eight hours, one way, with connecting flights, all in search of the world's best competition. And there were all those insane days of training when I pushed myself to the brink of passing out, weeks and months and years when I was obsessed with winning a gold medal.

I had gone so far as to wrestle and win the Olympic trials just months earlier with what amounted to a broken neck...

Excerpted from It's True! It's True!by Kurt Angle Copyright © 2001 by Kurt Angle. Excerpted by permission.
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