We’re starting off the week with a forlorn story from a business that lost two of its great icons over the summer — “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper — from an icon of a different kind: WCW’s Glacier.
If you’re a regular reader of The Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro, you know Glacier as a karate-fighting gym teacher in Sub Zero cosplay who took six months to debut and made “blood run cold” as part of a cartoonish gang of mid-carders during pro wrestling’s boom period of the late ’90s. I think he was great — we’re still trudging through his Gabbo-style “GLACIER IS COMING” videos, so I haven’t actually gotten a chance to write about him– but he’s mostly remembered as one of the worst decisions of the era.
In an interview that happened for some reason at AL.com, he decided to break any hearts left unbroken with this sad bit of reflection:
“He was such a driving force in my life. I got married in 2003 and he was a groomsman in my wedding, which was a huge honor. Dusty was one of those guys you just knew who had a magnetic personality. He was a great guy and he was Dusty Rhodes all the time. Sometimes the volume was turned up, sometimes it was turned down. He could be an ornery old Texan, too. I went to his memorial service in Tampa. It was sad. We lost one of the greatest ever. But it wasn’t just a sad occasion, it was a celebration of his life. That is the memory he wants to leave this world with … how much I entertained you and made you laugh. If you look at Dusty, you felt he was immortal. Him and Piper both. I don’t know if it’s fully sunk in with me. I still have his name in my cell phone.”
Oh, Glacier, no. :(
In less soul-crushing Glacier-related Rhodes family news, he loves Cody Rhodes’ “Stardust” gimmick, and doesn’t get why some people hate on it. As a guy who tried to make lemonade out of the world’s most frozen lemons, he’s empathetic to people doing their best with a silly idea:
“A lot of people don’t like it for some reason. I like it because I know Cody and he’s an extremely creative person. I think he’ll have a great career as a motivational speaker once his wrestling days are over. He’s a talented individual and has the charisma of Dusty, but he channels it differently. He’s having fun and finding a way to stay employed.”
You can read the entire interview here, so make sure you click over and read the part where he says Eric Bischoff didn’t want people laughing at the Blood Runs Cold Guys. Sorry, everybody.
If you can’t get that far, pretend Ernest Miller shows up about 1/3 of the way through the interview to make it more exciting.
