Tommasso Ciampa Talks Steve Austin Influencing His Style, How Glorious Bombs Originated
Tommasso Ciampa spoke to Inside The Ropes recently after his last ever indy match. They sent us these highlights:
His influences becoming a wrestler:
"My first die hard superhero was Bret Hart. When I was a child, he's the guy that I'd cry if he got beat up, i was very emotionally invested in Bret with his win/loss record and what not. Then there was a period where Shawn Michaels started becoming really cool and it really upset me that I started to like Shawn more than Bret. I was torn. But then when nWo came in, I realised there was another product out there and when I started watching WCW, Goldberg was a huge deal to me with the streak and then being introduced to the Cruiserweight division with Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit, that era I started to become slightly smarter to the business. Then of course when you get into the business it completely changes.
"[Steve] Austin was a big one, he's the one I emulate a little bit more in the ring. I'm not the best athlete in the world, so I took a lot of what Steve Austin did and incorporated that into my style."
The Glorious Bombs:
"Johnny [Gargano] is definitely more of the twitter guy in our team. I've joked with him a lot that one of the things I've learned from him in the last year is 'Proper Twitter Etiquette' Not to say we haven't learned from each other in the ring, but I honestly feel the thing I've taken the most from him is how to tweet things out and represent yourself in a proper format.
"So we're here in WWE and our personalities aren't shining through like we want them to, and we have all these funny jokes we make up on the road since we share car rides and hotel rooms, but how do we show that side of ourselves? We always joke around that we're a mix of Edge & Christian and DX. But nobody knows it, so we have to show people.
"So the Glorious Bomb was literally just us riffing in the room about how a Glorious bomb would just be a photo bomb so then we start talking about how we could do it in a gym or a bathroom, or as he enters the ring. So once you get a few out there and the response was insane, you know they were like viral videos, it just kinda took a life of it's own but now we don't know what we're gonna do. We got Ron Simmons who was one of the top guys on our list , we had the wedding thing planned for months & that's out there, so we don't know what the next step is. We have a few ideas but how we pull them off is a different beast. We do have a couple in mind which will top what we did in the past, it's just a matter of time for the stars to align. I think we helped Bobby Roode's career more than we ever planned to (laughs)."
Ciampa also discussed how indy wrestling has changed, working heel and babyface and the experience of NXT Takeover: Brooklyn. You can check out the full interview in the video above.