In March 2006, Kurt Angle and The Undertaker had a classic World Heavyweight Championship match on SmackDown that is remembered for its incredible action and its infamous botched finish. Now, for the first time together, the two Hall of Famers have recounted the wild story of what happened that night, which included a missed camera shot, a furious Vince McMahon, and an unprecedented re-shooting of the match’s ending in an empty arena.
As Angle had The Undertaker in a leg lock, The Undertaker rolled him up for a pin. The plan was for Angle to tap out at the exact same moment that the referee counted to three, resulting in a draw. It was a great idea in theory, but a missed camera angle turned it into a chaotic situation.
On the latest episode of Six Feet Under with The Undertaker, the two legends reminisced about the match. Angle explained the finish, and The Undertaker immediately recalled the backstage reaction from Vince McMahon when the camera crew missed the crucial shot of Angle’s tap-out.
Taker said, “So the finish was again, you end up in Hell’s Gate, yeah, and then you stack me, right? Or you stack me up. And it was supposed to be a simultaneous 1, 2, 3 on you and me, tap. We did at the same time. One, two, three, tap, right, yeah. They missed the camera angle….They didn’t get the tap. And that was the end of the night. The bell rings. People start leaving. And Vince loses his mind. He is batshit crazy.”
With the live crowd filing out of the building, a furious Vince McMahon ordered the two exhausted wrestlers to go back out and re-shoot the finish. The Undertaker and Angle then described the surreal scene of waiting for the arena to clear before placing employees in one section to act as a crowd for a single camera shot.
Angle said, “We had to wait till the whole arena left. And then we had to place all the employees in a corner of the arena to make it look like this whole arena. And so they have one camera shot on the opposite side showing our match.”
Taker said, “It was all like the roadies and the ring crew. And they, until they had that one shot, filled up, and they were getting signs off the ground. It was like, Oh my god, okay, this is going to be horrible. Like, we just had this killer match and we’re gonna, we’re gonna ruin it like this. And, right, man, when they edited it, it was like, that’s the magic of TV.”
The full conversation between The Undertaker and Kurt Angle is available on the Six Feet Under podcast.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article, please credit with an h/t to Wrestling News Co for the transcription.
