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“What happened was Brock Lesnar hit me over the head with a chair, and he brought it,” Angle said on his podcast (h/t Fightful). “I mean, when I tell you he brought it, he really brought it. The thing is, me and Chris Benoit both got hit with a chair by Brock that night. Chris, before the match started, he told Brock, ‘Hey, swing sideways on my head because I had surgery on my neck, and I don’t want you to come over straight over the top.’”
Angle was aware of Benoit’s request, but did not ask for the accommodation himself.
“I didn’t tell Brock,” Angle continued. “So he hits Benoit sideways, and Benoit’s neck is okay. He goes over the top and hits me right on top of my head as hard as he could, and I broke — three broken vertebrae. I had bone chips in my neck, and I had two discs that slid into my spinal cord. So I kind of messed myself up again. This is the third time I broke my neck.”
Weapons-based head shots have been mostly done away with in modern professional wrestling. WWE banned chair shots to the head altogether in 2010, with rare instances like Edge and Randy Orton’s con-chair-tos or Triple H and Daniel Bryan’s ring post-related chair shots breaking that rule. Bryan and Orton were even fined in Summer 2013 for having a chair shot to the head during one of their matches on Monday Night Raw.
Angle returns to WWE programming tonight on Raw is XXX.
