Click Here to Listen: Keep It 100 — Debuts w/ Jay Hunter (OSW Review) & Glacier
Earlier this month, Brian Mann and Nate Milton scrapped their weekly Review-An-Impact podcast over at LAWradio and introduced their new Keep It 100 show that’s more of a free-form, highly produced discussion about a singular topic paired with “storytime” segments and interviews.
Their debut episode is all about first impressions within the world of professional wrestling and Glacier himself called in from the depths of Earthrealm to discuss his career:
Glacier to WCW
“I was an indie wrestler for years, like most people coming up through the ranks trying to get a break, and I actually moved to Atlanta.”
“[I] became friends with [Diamond] Dallas Page, and he kept pitching me to Eric Bischoff. Eventually, we had dinner, just me and Eric. The long and short of it was, he kinda grilled me with questions for, honestly, about three hours: ‘Are you still wrestling on the independent wrestling scene?’
I said, ‘Yeah. I’m pretty much booked every weekend.’
He said, ‘I want you to disappear from the pro wrestling scene for the next few months. Just totally cancel your bookings and disappear.’
So, I really didn’t know until the next several meetings exactly where things were headed or where we were gonna try to go with this.”
Mortal Kombat
“There were some people in Turner Broadcasting that were like, ‘Hey, [Mortal Kombat] is a pretty cool idea, can we bring this into the ring?’
It was very clear to me after the first couple of meetings that this was something that Eric was very determined to do. I remember Eric saying to us, ‘I want you guys to be a video game come to life.’
We just figured, ‘Ok, well, why not go watch people play this video game, and see what they think’s cool about it?’
We actually went to arcades in Atlanta, found ones that had the game, we would stand back and just watch people play the game. Just to get an idea of kinda what the characters were. We talked to gamers, ‘What do you like about the game? What do these guys do that’s really cool?’
Whatever those fans think is cool, obviously could very well transition into the ring… or at least, we hoped it could.”
Blood Runs Cold Vignette
“The first vignette when it ran, I wasn’t even aware that it was gonna run that night on Nitro. I remember sitting with the girl I was dating at the time at her house with her family. We were watching the show, and all of the sudden, they start running the video:
Literally, I remember going to the phone and calling Kanyon, ‘They didn’t tell us they were gonna start running these vignettes!’
We had no idea that they were going to start running them when they did, they didn’t really go anywhere. At first, they did but they only revealed a little bit, then kinda revealed a little bit more, and they got to that point where, ‘Ok, enough already. Bring the guy out!’
That was my first taste of… I don’t know if you want to call it mismanagement at WCW, but it didn’t seem like there was anybody steering that ship. It was supposed to be Eric, but think he was getting really, really overwhelmed at what all WCW was becoming.”
Glacier’s Debut in World Championship Wrestling
“I remember walking out there and literally just almost throwing up, because I was so nervous. This was something that happened literally almost every time before the entrance, and it happened that night. I remember thinking before when I had the mask on going into commercial break, we’re coming back and Bubba gets his entrance… I’m thinking, ‘Please God, just don’t let me fall flat on my face out there. ‘
We played it very straight on TV. We never made it comedic. We never made it laughable even though it could’ve very easily been that. It was twelve or fourteen months, I went undefeated. I didn’t lose a match. Now it’s professional wrestling, so I wasn’t sitting there, taking it in that I was that great. I think every wrestler, every athlete, you strive for that perfect game or perfect contest, that perfect match in pro-wrestling. If you go back and watch Bash at the Beach ’97, that’s where, in my opinion, that’s the closest I ever come to a perfect wrestling match. Just everything clicked on all cylinders. It was just one of those matches where we could do no wrong.”
“[T]he booking committee after that just dropped it. They didn’t go anywhere with it. I felt that they could have evolved it more, maybe even dropped some of the video game look to it and just streamlined it a little bit more. I wonder sometimes if it came on a couple years earlier or a couple of years later what would have become of it, but I went from literally an indie wrestler to that spot overnight. Granted, I was ready for it. I had wrestled nine years, I wrestled in Japan, so I was ready. I wasn’t like some naïve kid.
Arn Anderson is someone who helped me an awful lot in WCW. He really opened up to me and said, ‘Hey, look… when Eric presented this to us, he kinda dumped this in our laps and said, ‘Here you go’. We had no idea what to do with it. That entrance is an entity in its own,’ and I’ll never forget him saying this, he said ‘that you would have to walk on water to live up to that entrance.’
Now, everybody has an entrance like that but back then in ’96, no one had an entrance like that. Not Flair, not Hogan, not Sting — none of those guys. Nobody had an entrance like that where you had lasers, the snow, and the ring is dark. No one had that and as cool as the entrance was, the challenge is: How do you live up to that?”
Afterthoughts
“I look at what good came out of it, and the good that came out of it was that I made it to the top level in wrestling, which was my goal. I made a career out of it. Every wrestling fan that takes a minute to come and tell me that they enjoyed watching me wrestle, I take a minute to sincerely thank them, because I want them to know that I don’t take it for granted.
I thank God every day for having the chance to be Glacier.”
Keep It 100 is a show that is published fortnightly and episode 2 that’s focused on Baltimore is set to be released this Saturday. Definitely worth subscribing to, if you’re not already getting the LAWradio podcast feed, as everything that comes from them is quality.
38-year-old World Championship Wrestling fanatic/collector/hoarder. Safety officer by day, scanner of wrestling magazine by night.
He’s got posters on the wall, his favorite rock group’s KISS.