NXT Star and former ROH TV Champion Tommaso Ciampa recently appeared on the Inside the Ropes Podcast and talked about his early wrestling influences, as well as the popular 'Glorious Bombs' that he and Johnny Gargano conduct at the expense of Bobby Roode. You can see submitted highlights below, and the full podcast above.
Who influenced him:
"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 realized 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."
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 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)."
