Rock Puts Over Angle, Mick Foley/WWE Backstage Update, More
BBC News out of the UK recently conducted an interview with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson talking Olympic wrestling. Johnson mentioned Kurt Angle during the interview. "I've got a good buddy named Kurt Angle who's just an outstanding wrestler," Johnson said. "Kurt won the gold medal in 1996 with a broken neck, he was unbelievable. I'm not kidding, he'd actually broken his neck and still won the gold in his weight class." He also added, "I'm always blown away by the amount of discipline and hard work it takes for those Olympians to get where they're at."
As noted earlier, Mick Foley was originally tapped to be involved in the Hell in the Cell match between Undertaker & Edge as the 10th anniversary to one of the most famous matches in the history of professional wrestling. However, he was told this past week that there was a change of plans and that his services weren't needed for SummerSlam. And it doesn't look like he's returning to his post as an announcer on SmackDown either. Internally, Foley getting beat up by Edge on SmackDown a few weeks ago now constitute his being written off of television as a character. Good luck to Foley and we'll see you soon in TNA and ROH for sure.
As reported earlier today, Jeff Hardy had a pretty bad elbow infection this past week which had to be drained backstage at Tuesday's SmackDown/ECW taping. Also, the "neck injury" was an excuse some Best Buy employees used to cover up his autograph signing no-show at the Rockford, Illinois store on Friday as a number of fans were expecting to meet him.
DailyRecord.co.uk conducted an interview with Randy Orton during his recent media tour in Europe. He visited Europe to promote SummerSlam, as well as WWE's European tour in Scotland this autumn. The article is saying that while's Orton too injured to wrestle at SummerSlam, he will be there to "cause some trouble." They wrote: "After his injury, Randy is missing out on wrestling in the pay per-view SummerSlam event, although he will be there to cause some trouble, so he is now really looking forward to the UK tour, and coming back to Scotland." Of course, the interview was conducted a few days before his apparent motorcycle accident.