WCW - Sting

Even though Sting (Steve Borden) is in TNA now, we all remember him from his WCW days.
To cover this man's career would take an entire blog by itself I think.
But here are just the highlights of his career....
NWA World Heavyweight Champion
NWA World Television Champion
WCW International World Heavyweight Champion (twice)
WCW United States Heavyweight Champion (twice)
WCW World Heavyweight Champion (six times)
WCW World Tag Team Champion (3 times with Lex Luger, The Giant and Kevin Nash)

And also the thing I am proudest of....
He NEVER signed with the WWE!
You can respect the wrestler and respect the man.

Did you know that besides wrestling, Sting appeared in "The Nightmare Room", "Walker, Texas Ranger" and "Shutterspeed"?

Glenn Gilberti / Disco Inferno

Glenn Gilberti has has a long and colorful career.
He was a wrestler for the WCW as Disco Inferno, he was a wrestler and road agent for TNA Wrestling and a writer for WrestleZone.
Glenn's pro wrestling debut was on November 20, 1991 on the Georgia independent circuit.
During his wrestling career, he worked for Great Championship Wrestling, Mid-Eastern Wrestling Federation, North Georgia Wrestling Association, Palmetto Pride Championship Wrestling, Swiss Wrestling Federation and WCW among others.
In several of those promotions he held the Heavyweight Wrestling Championships.
He also faced many of the greats of wrestling in the ring like Eddie Guerrero, Kevin Sullivan, Dick Slater, Dean Malenko, Perry Saturn, Booker T, La Parka, Konnan and Sting.

You can read more about Disco at the Unofficial Disco Inferno website

Cactus Jack / Mick Foley - WCW

Michael Francis "Mick" Foley, Sr. was born June 7, 1965 and is an American author and pro wrestler. He is currently signed to theWWE, as a color commentator on its SmackDown! brand.

Throughout his wrestling career, Foley has wrestled for many different promotions, both under his real name and under various personas (most notably Cactus Jack, Mankind and Dude Love). He is the first ever WWF Hardcore Champion and became a three-time WWF Champion as Mankind. He is also one of the most successful tag team wrestlers in history, being an eight-time WWF Tag Team Champion, a two-time ECW World Tag Team Champion, a one-time WCW World Tag Team Champion and a one-time WCWA Tag Team Champion. He is also a one-time WCWA Light Heavyweight Champion.

Foley is a multiple-time New York Times bestselling author. He was also a subject of the documentary Beyond the Mat, which followed him at the peak of his career.

On September 5, 1991, Cactus Jack debuted as a heel and attacked Sting. After feuds with Van Hammer and Abdullah the Butcher, Cactus Jack faced Sting, then WCW champion, in a non-title Falls Count Anywhere match at Beach Blast 1992, which Sting won. For a long time, Foley considered this the best match he ever worked.

Cactus Jack first wrestled Vader on April 6, 1993. Foley and Leon White wanted an intense match, so they agreed that Vader would hit Cactus with a series of heavy blows to the face. WCW edited the match heavily because it was against their policies to show the heavy bleeding that resulted. Foley suffered a broken nose, a dislocated jaw and needed twenty-seven stitches, but won the match via countout. Because the title did not change hands on a countout, WCW booked a rematch. Foley, however, wanted some time off to be with his newborn daughter and get surgery to repair a knee injury. As a result, in the rematch with Vader on April 23, the two executed a dangerous spot to sell a storyline injury. Vader removed the protective mats at ringside and power-bombed Cactus onto the exposed concrete floor, causing a legitimate concussion and causing Foley to temporarily lose sensation in his left foot and hand. While Foley was away, WCW ran an angle where Cactus Jack's absence was explained with a farcical comedy storyline in which he went crazy, was institutionalized, escaped, and developed amnesia. Foley had wanted the injury storyline to be very serious and generate genuine sympathy for him before his return. The comedy vignettes that WCW produced instead were so bad that Foley jokes in Have a Nice Day that they were the brainchild of WCW executives who regarded a surefire moneymaking feud as a problem that needed to be solved.

Foley returned in the fall of 1993 to save the British Bulldog from an attack by Vader. He then proceeded to feud with Vader and other wrestlers managed by Harley Race, Jack's former manager. In one of WCW's most brutal matches of all time, Cactus faced Vader in a Texas Death match at Halloween Havoc. Race won the match for Vader by using a cattle prod on Cactus, knocking him out for over ten seconds. The level of violence involved in this feud caused WCW to refuse to ever again book Cactus Jack against Vader on a pay-per-view. On March 16, 1994, during a WCW European tour, Foley and Vader had one of the most infamous matches in wrestling history in Munich, Germany. Foley began a hangman, a spot where a wrestler's head is tangled between the top two ring ropes, which is usually painful but safe. Unbeknownst to Foley, however, 2 Cold Scorpio had earlier complained that the ropes were too loose, resulting in the ring staff tightening the ropes to the maximum. As Foley struggled to pull himself out, he tore off two-thirds of his ear and underwent surgery later that day to reattach the cartilage from the ear to his head, so that a total reconstruction would be possible in the future. Later that year, Cactus Jack and Kevin Sullivan were scheduled to win the tag team titles at Slamboree 1994. Foley had to choose between reattaching his ear or wrestling in the pay-per-view and winning the titles. Foley chose to wrestle and won his only championship in WCW. Foley has said several times that he was frustrated by WCW's reluctance to work a storyline around losing his ear.

On April 23, in a match with Vader, Foley again took a powerbomb onto the concrete. Expecting a brilliant remark from the commentators about the fact that it was the same move that disabled him exactly one year prior, Foley was left unsatisfied with Bobby Heenan's announcement of "That'll give you Excedrine Headache No. 9." Foley recounts this as the moment that set his intention to leave WCW. At Bash at the Beach, Cactus Jack and Sullivan lost the tag team titles to Pretty Wonderful (Paul Orndorff and Paul Roma), and Sullivan then blamed Cactus for the loss. Cactus Jack officially turned heel when he attacked Kevin's kayfabe brother Dave Sullivan, however, the Sullivan brothers aroused so little sympathy from viewers that the fans reacted as though Cactus were the face. Cactus and Kevin Sullivan engaged in a summer-long feud, which culminated in a Loser Leaves Town match at Fall Brawl, which Cactus lost, ending his WCW career. After losing, Cactus decided to split his wrestling between SMW, ECW, and Japan.

John Tenta

John Anthony Tenta (June 22, 1963 – June 7, 2006) was a Canadian professional wrestler, best known for his work in the World Wrestling Federation as Earthquake.

John Tenta was born in Surrey, British Columbia. Named after his father, he was a large baby weighing 11 pounds, 3 ounces at birth. Inspired by professional wrestlers Gene Kiniski and Don Leo Jonathan, Tenta decided to pursue wrestling at age 6. He learned freestyle wrestling at North Surrey Secondary, becoming a Canadian junior champion in 1981. Shortly after his 18th birthday, he finished sixth in the super-heavyweight category at the World Junior Wrestling Championships at Vancouver.

Tenta won an athletic scholarship to Louisiana State University (LSU), where he competed in NCAA-level collegiate wrestling. At LSU he was nicknamed "Big John" Tenta, lettering on the Tiger varsity wrestling team and participating on the football team. LSU had dropped varsity wrestling to comply with Title IX in 1985, forcing Tenta to choose a new sport.

Tenta then moved to Japan to pursue a career in sumo after being recruited by a former Yokozuna who met Tenta on a trip to Vancouver. In October 1985, he joined a sumo stable, Sadogatake, run by former-Yokozuna Kotozakura Masakatsu (his stable also produced current Ōzeki Kotoōshū Katsunori from Bulgaria). Following tradition, the young sumotori took the name of Kototenta (Koto + Tenta), translated as Tenta the Harp.

Beginning the sport at age 22, he entered nearly 7 years later than many non-college aspirants. However, the combination of his size—he already weighed 192 kg (423 lb)—and training as a wrestler were to his advantage in learning and advancing in the sport. The novice won a string of 17 consecutive victories in his first six months, and was later renamed Kototenzan, Heavenly Mountain Harp. The novelty of being a rare Westerner sumotori in the mid-1980s, and the third-ever Caucasian, garnered him press coverage, and he earned the additional nickname of the "Canadian Comet".

Despite doing well as a newcomer he soon quit the sport due to the difficulty of the sumo lifestyle and the toll the hard ring surface was taking on his body. In addition, the sumo world frowned on the large tattoo of a tiger on his left biceps and, though he covered it during matches, would have required him to remove it via skin graft before moving up to the higher level competitions (in Japan tattoos are associated with gangsters). After leaving sumo, he quickly signed up for puroresu (Japanese Pro Wrestling) under the tutelage of Shohei "Giant" Baba. He made his professional wrestling debut with All Japan Pro Wrestling in May 1988. Tenta had a solid 18 month career, teaming with popular Japanese wrestlers Giant Baba and The Great Kabuki, before getting the attention of American pro-wrestling promoters.

Personal financial difficulties lead Tenta to contact WCW, Hulk Hogan, a longtime friend, lobbied to have Tenta come in, and so Tenta broke his WWF contract to join WCW.

Tenta was introduced as Avalanche and feuded with Sting, but the character name was dropped after WWF threatened legal action over similarities to the Earthquake character. He then joined the Dungeon of Doom faction as The Shark. He was even pressured by WCW management to change the tattoo on his arm of an LSU Tiger to that of a shark. He eventually left the Dungeon of Doom and wrestled under his real name after delivering a scathing promo about the many other names and gimmicks he'd been forced into in the past, including the memorable line "I'm not a fish. I'm a man".

Following a match with the Dungeon of Doom's Giant, half of Tenta's head was shaved by Big Bubba Rogers, another Dungeon member. The two would go on to feud against one another, with Rogers shaving off Tenta's beard as well.

Tenta retired from wrestling in 2004 after it was revealed that he had developed bladder cancer, in which he was given a twenty percent chance to live, assuming he continued with his chemotherapy treatments. During his November 18, 2005 interview on WrestleCrap RadioListen, Tenta announced that a recent radiation dosage did not go as planned, as it had no effect on the tumor. He also announced that multiple tumors had spread to his lungs.

The first public notice of Tenta's death was posted on WWE.com on June 7, 2006 at approximately 12:30 p.m. EDT, which read:

John "Earthquake" Tenta passed away this morning, June 7, at the age of 42 after a lengthy battle with bladder cancer. Tenta is survived by his wife and three kids.

On the June 9, 2006 edition of SmackDown! and the June 12, 2006 edition of RAW, before each show began, the WWE showed an eyecatch that said "In memory of John "Earthquake" Tenta 1963-2006."

WCW: The Minotaur

The Minotaur
Born: Boston, Massachusetts
Resides: Edina, Minnesota
Height and Weight: 6'2" - 310 lbs
Previous Gimmicks: Billy Jack Strong, Steve DiSalvo, Steve Strong, Sadistic Steve, Minotaur, Indian Warrior

Steve DiSalvo was a pro wrestler, best known for his appearances with the WCW as The Minotaur and his short run in WWF as Sadistic Steve.
Steve DiSalvo was trained by Billy Anderson, the man who also had a hand in training future superstars such as Sting and The Ultimate Warrior. DiSalvo's career has taken him to the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. Fighting as Steve Strong in the 1980s, he was a main-event perfomer in Montreal-based International Wrestling, managed by Eddie Creatchman and brawling with the likes of Abdullah the Butcher (who was managed by Deepak Singh), and Rick Martel. At a time when Abdullah was destroying his opponents, DiSalvo battered him in a televised match, giving as good as he got.

Moving on to Stampede Wrestling, he was known as "Strangler" Steve DiSalvo, one of the most hated men in the company's history. Here, he feuded with Phil LaFleur over who had the better physique. DiSalvo would end up smashing a trophy over LaFleur's skull on TV, leading to several matches between the two.

In time though, the Stampede fans would rally behind DiSalvo in his battles against the hated Mahkan Singh, and when Don Muraco arrived at Stampede, DiSalvo would help Muraco win the Stampede North American Title from Singh.

DiSalvo moved onto the WWC (World Wrestling Council) promotion in Puerto Rico, where he again was known as Steve Strong. Again, he had bloody brawls with Abdullah the Butcher, as well as company owner (and father of current WWE superstar Carlito), Carlos Colón. Strong would win the WWC Universal Championship from Colón, only to lose it back to him soon after.

Strong returned back to the United States, this time for WCW, where he was named The Minotaur. Despite his intimidating look and brawling style, he was phased out in a matter of weeks.

He became Steve DiSalvo again and drifted around the independent circuit before retiring.

Steve DiSalvo has also had brief stays with the WWF, where he was seemingly lost in the shuffle due to his style being similar to so many other superstars of the time, and also in the AWA, where he wrestled as Billy Jack Strong, an utterly forgettable Native American gimmick.