Kurt Angle needed a dart gun to put Paul Wight down so he could shave his head for a 2004 WWE angle, and Wight says he was the one who pitched it. The segment happened on the September 23rd, 2004 episode of SmackDown and Wight recalled on Wes & Walker how he suggest the tranquilizer gun as a way to keep him down for it.
On pitching the dart gun: “Everything I’ve ever done, most of it has been my idea on doing a lot of stuff. There’s a famous one where Kurt Angle shot me with a dart gun to shave my head. I was in the production meeting and I first pitched it out, and everyone started laughing. I was like, ‘No, I saw this thing on National Geographic where they had to shoot this Water Buffalo to transfer it to another park.’ I’m like, ‘It’d be great. You’re going to shave my head, and I’m a giant. What are you going to knock me out with that I’m going to lay there long enough?’”
On how the segment played out: “He shot me with a real dart, there was nothing in it, but I wanted the visual of the dart sticking my back because I thought, ‘That’d be great,’ and I could do the roar and the sell and fall down and I’m helpless. How do you tell that story? I was all wrapped up in the mechanics of it and finally talked Vince [Vince McMahon] into doing it. Vince was kind of crazy back then. He thought I was just trying to be tough. When I started to explain it to him more, he really got into it. If I wanted to get out of it, we weren’t getting out of it.
“I was into it, except for that part where my friend Kurt Angle has OCD and instead of pumping the gun once, he pumped it six times. When he shot me in the back with that thing, from five feet away because we wanted to make sure there was no missing and no accident. When he hit me, you’ll see me look over my shoulder at Kurt because, in my mind, I’m like, ‘Oww!’ It was intense. I’ve never been shot before, and I’m sure being really shot hurts much worse, but that’s all I need to know of ever getting shot.”
