Kurt Angle and Eddie Guerrero have another defining chapter in their SmackDown feud
By July 2004, the Angle-Guerrero program had transcended the usual SmackDown main event trajectory—this wasn’t just a title feud, it was becoming the artistic centerpiece of WWE’s most consistent brand. Their match that night (likely a non-title encounter given the frequent rematches that summer) happened in the shadow of a company still reeling from the Benoit-Eddie storyline fallout, meaning both men carried an unspoken weight: prove that character work and in-ring excellence could sustain a feud without shock value or celebrity guest spots. The crowd was hot because they’d learned to expect 20+ minute sequences of submission holds, near-falls, and the kind of mat psychology that made even the mid-2000s SmackDown faithful understand they were watching something rare.
What made this feud work—and what this particular night exemplified—was that Angle and Eddie brought out a version of each other that neither could access alone. Angle’s intensity sharpened when matched against Eddie’s fluidity; Eddie’s fire burned hotter when pursued by Angle’s relentless technical assault. By July, they’d already had Judgment Day (their WrestleMania XX rematch), so the narrative pressure was to show progression rather than repetition, and they consistently delivered. This wasn’t about surprise finishes or screwy angles; it was about two men who understood that the wrestling itself was the draw.
The tragedy is how completely this particular era—the Angle-Eddie-Benoit triangle that should have defined mid-2000s WWE—has been buried by time and circumstance. Eddie’s premature death and Chris’s horror overshadowed what was genuinely a three-year stretch where SmackDown’s main event scene operated at a level of consistency the brand hasn’t approached since, which makes moments like this one easy to overlook as merely “good SmackDown matches” rather than what they actually were: the last gasps of an institution that believed wrestling itself could carry a show.
