Remembering The Bad Guy...

When time marches on, those steps often echo with a blunt thud. Scott Hall dead at 63. Wasn’t Razor Ramon an active WWF star in his prime just a few years ago? It was decades ago, but those decades feel like weeks. It’s a grim reminder of our own mortality. Even though Hall was one of the wrestlers often pegged as one who was at high risk for dying young, he found a turnaround in his life. 63 isn’t young, but these days it isn’t exactly old either. My own observations of the man tell me that heart is what kept him going and what allowed him to remain in the hearts of others even in tumultuous times. 

Even when a television program, one of two that are both quite infamous for witch hunts disguised as documentaries, “profiled” Hall a few years ago and pulled out every skeleton that there was in the closet, fans and friends never seemed to give up. Credit should be given to these shows for building audiences with a topic so similar to “shooting fish in a barrel” that they barely have to try. Hunting down and damning bad behavior of professional wrestlers is just about second in ease only to doing the same for NFL stars. My hat is off to those scammers, but that’s another story for another time. What matters is that despite this occurring just several years before his death, Hall is getting the positive posthumous recognition that he truly deserves.

 I often point out the wrestling names of the 1980’s that literally everyone who grew up in that decade would know: Hulk Hogan, The Macho Man, Jake “The Snake” Roberts and Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake fly to mind. Say what you want about any of them, those are the characters and names that stuck out. For the 1990’s, the name Razor Ramon is at the top of the list with Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. While he fit the often still cartoonish world of the WWF, he brought a certain mystique and coolness that stood out. Wrestlers have often used a variation on the phrase “the men want to be me and the women want to be with me.” That was the Razor Ramon character to a tee without ever having to utter it. 

It's interesting to think that Hall spent nearly a decade in the business before becoming “The Bad Guy.” Some fans probably didn’t have a clue at first that the cool and cocky Ramon was “Big Scott Hall” of the American Wrestling Association and other territories just several years earlier. He was essentially a Magnum T.A. character who didn’t fit the role like Terry Allen did. Why? Because it wasn’t Scott Hall. It took the WWF’s ways of promotion and character development, with a bit of thanks to WCW’s gimmick for Hall of The Diamond Studd, to bring out the star in the man. 

That WWF promotional and marketing machine is also what leaves us with so many mementos of the man. While Hall did have a great figure in the Remco AWA line and a few program and magazine covers, Razor Ramon’s marketable visage found itself all over the world and continues to be on store shelves to this day. That wave continued when Hall became one of the founding members of the nWo and pretty much adapted the Ramon character to that role. If you don’t own an actual figure of Hall in some form, are you really a collector? From Remco to Hasbro to even a Funko Pop, he’s out there for you to add to your shelf. 

I had the pleasure of meeting the man several times over the years and have nothing but good memories. My favorite would be when, while signing his March 1993 WWF Magazine cover appearance, he told me how he actually signed a few in random visits to 7-11 stores and left them in the stores for fans to find a signed copy. He was that proud of the issue. Honorable mention would be when he stopped me while I was walking through a convention to admire the Dusty Rhodes t-shirt that I was wearing. He went on to praise “The Dream” and talk about how much he owed to the late legend. If you know me, you know that I loved that moment. 

Some of the other stars who’ve fallen pray to personal demons and similar traps of the business will never fully escape the scrutiny that follows them and their legacies. Scott Hall rose above it, I do believe, in part due to the fact that he never said that he was perfect. He was never going to come out and say “I’m 100% perfect and fixed and cured.” It wasn’t reality and it wasn’t the type of person that he was. He owned up to the fact that changing who he was would be something that he dealt with for the rest of his life. He didn’t seem to take it for granted and when he slipped up there was full admission by the man himself. To me, that’s truly what it means to be “oozing machismo.”

Scott Hall -- "Razor Ramon"

1958-2022