Disco Inferno Talks WWE/NXT, Steroids and Drugs in Wrestling, More

Former WCW World Television Champion and Cruiserweight Champion and former TNA star "Disco Inferno" Glenn Gilbertti recently appeared on Vince Russo's podcast.

Disco on wrestling fans wanting matches more than storylines: “[WWE Monday Night] RAW on Monday [October 26, 2015] had over one hour of wrestling. One hour! One-third of the show [was] non-wrestling fans turning on the TV, channel surfing, seeing matches, and turning it off because wrestling was on. 33% of the show, okay? Not to mention, the rest of the content [WWE is] filling in is corny backstage conversations [or] long, drawn out, boring interviews…it [has] gotten to the point where fans of wrestling today are a cult, niche audience. All they care about is how good is the fake wrestling match to the point [where] they’ve lost the whole point.”

Disco on fans ignoring face/heel alignments: “Bro, everybody loves [current WWE Intercontinental Champion] Kevin Owens because he supposedly could work great [and] works great matches. Bro, they’re forgetting the guy is supposed to be a heel. Okay? We’re not supposed to like Kevin Owens. As a wrestling fan, we’re not supposed to like the guy. We’re not suppose to [say] ‘we can’t wait to see him because we know he’s going to go out there and wrestle a good match’. We [are supposed to] want to see the guy get his ass kicked by somebody. We want to see the guy get beat up because he’s disliked. That’s lost!”

Disco on WWE elevating NXT: “[WWE] have gotten all of the Ring of Honor wrestlers, all the indy workers, all these guys who’ve been wrestling in front of 300 people. They put them down in NXT. [WWE] are making NXT seem almost as important as the WWE show is. Bro, [WWE] are getting all of these NXT guys and you can’t show me anything in the numbers that say they’re bringing all these guys in and they’re increasing the audience. Okay? They’re losing audience.”

Disco on NXT being overrated: “Everybody blows up NXT like it’s great. Bro, I watch it, see, they’re green guys. These are like the rank amateurs of professional wrestling and they’re blowing it up like it’s the greatest thing and it’s better than [WWE Monday Night] RAW…All the [NXT TakeOver] Brooklyn show did was take every NXT fan around the northeast [United States] and they flew in to Brooklyn [New York] and watched the show. The same people went and watched Summerslam the next night. The cult had a convention. The big shows in wrestling have basically become comic book conventions where all the fans show up. It doesn’t do anything to increase your audience. It just gives something to the fans, like a big show to go to.”

Russo on WWE cutting down on steroid and PED use: “I swear to God, Glenn, [Breeze] looks like a 12 year old kid. He looks like a child! I mean, he looks like he wouldn’t even be like an appetizer for King Kong Bundy. He looks like a kid! He looks like the furthest thing from a wrestling star that you could imagine. But lets face it, Glenn, all these guys coming from NXT do. If [WWE] were a mom and pop company, and guys were on steroids and guys were on PEDs, Vince McMahon would have the ability to sweep it under the rug, put a blanket over it, hide it, [and] nobody would ever know. You can’t do that with a publicly traded company.”

Disco on PEDs: “People like looking at people that look larger than life. When you turn on the TV and see a guy with a potbelly and a t-shirt wrestling another guy without a tan that doesn’t look good and everything and all that and they’re on [TV] for 14 minutes wrestling each other, who are you selling that to?”

Disco on steroid and drug use: “People talk about the steroids and the drugs and everything and all that, ‘professional wrestlers die to early’, lets not forget you can’t ignore the amount of physical stress a professional wrestler has gone under in his lifetime. 15 years of getting slammed down on hard surfaces for 15 years, 200 nights a year. I would suggest that probably has a lot more to do with the breaking down of a person’s physical condition than abusing a steroid or drinking too much or something. You would think just based on what we’ve done for a living that, of course, professional wrestlers would die sooner than other people because of the stress. They can sit there and point out, ‘Well, he [has] done steroids. Well, he was drinking. He took pain pills.’ Bro, that’s all fine and dandy. You can argue that. I can also argue that that’s just a small factor compared to what professional wrestlers do for a living, getting beat up.”