Glacier On How The Perception Of His Gimmick Has Changed

Glacier (Ray Lloyd) recently spoke with Wrestlezone’s Bill Pritchard about his wrestling career’s resurgence, finding a new stage as a speaker, All Elite Wrestling having their finger on the pulse, Pentagon Jr as his ‘spiritual successor’ and much more.

Glacier talked about his gimmick finding a more positive light in recent years, and how it contrasts from being lumped in with all of the ‘Death Of WCW’ type discussions. Glacier says he’s learned to embrace it all, and says his fans might not have had a voice online during his original run, but he’s seeing how much of an impact he did make now that those fans are grown up.

“When I became Glacier in 1996, it was my big break. And I dove all in and I was like ‘I’m going to make Glacier a part of me and I’m going to see this thing through.’ Even though, obviously, there were critics of it way back in the ’90s at some point, but there were tons of fans of it. But people love to talk about the controversial, the negative. Especially 20 years later, they thrive on negativity. I just never let that completely get me down. I try to take it and build off of it. And say ‘Okay, well, I’m going to keep going with this thing, because I believe in it.’

And gradually, it’s like, in wrestling, some of the biggest stars today I get to meet now, they come up and they tell me—and they’re in their mid-30s now, they were kids then—they tell me that they were huge Glacier fans. And then I started to really put it all together, it’s amazing it took me so long to fully understand it, but that’s what that gimmick was for. It’s easy to say that we know it was more for the younger audience, obviously it was, but my point is that there were a ton of kids watching that nobody was interviewing back then. Now those kids are grown up. And now they come out in droves and tell me how much they love that character. But those voices weren’t really heard back then because they were kids, they couldn’t write articles. But, yes, the last few years, I have just been extremely surprised and humbled as to how many people have come up and told me they’ve been lifelong fans of the gimmick.”

Glacier added:

“And that’s one thing I’ve realized too, after the turnbuckle years with Dusty, when he had Turnbuckle Championship Wrestling right after WCW for about four years, is that there came that period of time where young kids were coming to the show, they’d seen me as Glacier, that had never seen me on TV, they were too young when I was on TV to remember, but the gimmick resonated with them but it really was a superhero-type character.

And they didn’t really care what had happened before. They didn’t really care what my name was. To them, it looked like something really cool. I’ve always taken a lot of pride in that. I tried to live my life in a way that I can still be proud to be Glacier. It’s been something that’s been great to me, and it’s been 23 years now that I’ve been Glacier and I’m extremely proud. It means more to me than I ever could have hoped that I’d have this resurgence of popularity so to speak. So, I don’t take it for granted one day, and I hope it lasts forever. Cause I’m proud to be Glacier and I will be until my dying day.”