Scott Hall

The wrestling world lost one of the best of the bad with the passing of Two-Time WWE Hall of Famer Scott Hall, a.k.a. Razor Ramon.

He is a true legend in the business, and one of the greatest to have never held a World Championship. The "nWo" would find its way to WWE television following the collapse of WCW in 2001, but Hall would be released shortly afterwards in 2002 due to drunken misconduct. He leaves behind a legacy of being one of the most influential wrestlers of the pre-Attitude Era (1992-1996) as not only one of WWE's top heels "The Bad Guy" Razor Ramon (a pastiche of Tony Montana of Scarface) and a member of the infamous backstage group "The Kliq," but a crucial signing by World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in the period's later years that would herald the arrival of the legendary "nWo" faction with Hall, Kevin Nash and "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan, and trigger WWE's Attitude Era, bringing about a complete cultural shift in the genre of professional wrestling, with companies targeting younger live and TV audiences by producing more edgy and risqué content.

At a basic level, pro wrestling is about effortlessness, the art of making staged violence look smooth and natural. Nobody made it look easier than Razor ...

He alluded to the fact that he was there to start a war, and the fans filled in the blanks: He was an invader from the WWF sent to take down the competition. In 1983, shortly before his pro wrestling career began, Scott Hall killed a man outside a bar in Orlando, Florida. He shot him in the head with the man’s own gun. When Hall debuted in the WWF as Razor Ramon, he came prepackaged with a full backstory: He was a Cuban American entrenched in the Miami drug trade. (He had a few moments on the cusp: Verne Gagne tabbed him as his Hulk Hogan replacement in the AWA, but Hall took off for WCW, which tried to position him as an alligator wrestling upstart.) He had been a jobber, and so he knew the value of a win and the deeper value of a loss. Everyone wanted to be Razor Ramon, and later Scott Hall. He sublimated himself to the project of changing the face of the industry. In a business full of people “battling personal demons,” it’s too easy to be inured to the diagnosis. He made the nWo—and wrestling moreover—cool, and believable, and bizarrely aspirational. It’s a thing too many others in his position would have refused to do, and it was the rubric of his broader career. He innately knew that the most direct line into the soul of the fan was through the TV screen, and he attacked it. “Say hello to the bad guy,” he would say, injecting a much needed jab of self-awareness into the proceedings and simultaneously ingratiating himself, even as a villain, into the hearts of viewers. The connection between Razor and the fans was central to the portrayal: the look directly into the camera when he tossed the toothpick, the eye contact before his fallaway slam, the thing he did when he jumped up and down sort of jabbing both his thumbs at himself, looking right dead at us watching at home. The presumption of victory was written all over Razor’s smirking face, it was clear in the relative apathy of the crowd, and it was inked in the playbook of the WWF creative team—which is why they were able to pull off a shocking reversal that night at WWF Monday Night Raw. In a flash, the Kid dodged a Razor charge, climbed to the top rope, and hit a moonsault that knocked Razor to the mat just long enough for the famous 1-2-3.

Scott Hall, who wrestled for WWE as Razor Ramon, was a two-time inductee into the company's Hall of Fame.

“But what sucks is when you want to quit and you can’t, and pretty soon you alienate or you hurt everyone around you.” But bad guys do.” WWE and WCW had never acknowledged each other on TV until the rivalry escalated through what became known as the Monday Night Wars, pitting Vince McMahon’s Raw against Ted Turner’s Nitro. But you don’t know why I’m here,” — had fans truly believing WWE had invaded WCW. WWE announced his death Monday night and aired a tribute video on its flagship Raw program. Hall was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame twice, once for his Razor Ramon character and once as part of the NWO stable.