Notes

Scott Hall, one of the key characters in the late 90s pro wrestling boom, someone known for his intelligence when it came to his profession but was also very self-destructive outside the ring, passed away on 3/14 at the age of 63.

Hall had suffered a broken hip last week and underwent surgery at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, GA. During the surgery, he had a blood clot. This led to suffering three heart attacks and he had to be put on life support. By the morning of 3/13, family members confided to those close to him that he was not going to live through the ordeal. Family members and friends were alerted to come see him, or to say goodbye by phone when he was put on life support. At about noon Eastern time the next day, he was taken off life support, where it would have taken a major miracle for him to survive. He passed away in the early evening.

Perhaps because this wasn’t a sudden death, but about 36 hours of people knowing “The Bad Guy” was fighting for his life, there were more general public questions and interest in this than any pro wrestler death in recent memory. On Monday, the single most searched term on the Internet was Scott Hall, with more than two million searches. That number dwarfed the figures for better known wrestlers who were considered bigger stars like Randy Savage, Roddy Piper, Dusty Rhodes and Ultimate Warrior, whose deaths were more sudden as far as the public was aware.

His closest friends knew this was coming, but it probably made it worse because there was nothing they could do about it. Sean Waltman noted that he called Hall a month ago to come out to stay with him because Hall had been deteriorating for the past two years due to drinking.

“The pandemic did him in,” said Waltman. “It was hard enough for him as it was, but he was isolated in his house with no social interaction. He was down to 210 pounds. We called Dally (Dallas Page) and he went over. It was really bad..”

When Hall fell and broke his hip, he was unable to move and was laying on the ground, unable to get to the phone. He laid there for a few days before friends told Page to check on him since they couldn’t get in contact with him. Page found him and got him to the hospital.

While largely kept quiet, he was in bad shape the night before last year’s WrestleMania for the NWO Hall of Fame induction, as he passed out in the bar, but no sold it the next night on stage. He was also in rough shape at an appearance late last year at the Stockton Comic Con, and of late had not made bookings.

While the story the public thought was that he had horrible drinking issues, but through working with Page, he had licked it and turned things around. And according to Waltman, there were times that was at least close to being the case. But things got really bad over the last two years.

Hall was thought by promoters to have superstar potential from early in his career, largely due to being 6-foot-5, having a great body and movie star looks. But a few years later, when he never had the success envisioned, he was considered a major underachiever.

Then, in 1992, things changed overnight. He was christened Razor Ramon in WWF, playing a large macho Cuban with slicked hair and a toothpick that he would often flick at his opponents. He debuted with a series of vignettes playing a macho tough guy heel. His natural first opponent was Savage, who he nicknamed “Mach,” of which he won the matches which immediately made him a superstar.

He had what, at least at the time, was generally considered the greatest match in WWF history, his 1994 WrestleMania X ladder match with Shawn Michaels, which he won. But really Michaels won by his performance. It led to Michaels’ career getting stronger based on his performance in losing. The lesson from that match, that the person who gets over and goes over and the person who wins and loses are not the same thing. The person who really gets over and goes over is the person the audience remembers when it’s over and for how long they remember. It’s a key lesson that should be obvious but it is sometimes lost. Nobody understood that more than Hall, who would at times lose matches, often by choice, when he didn’t have to, to guys who at the time were lower card wrestlers. But when the match was over, it was people remembering Hall losing and the surprise of it, which made the matches far more memorable, and actually beneficial to him, so long as he did it rarely (he did it twice famously in his WCW run, once to Hector Garza and once to Chris Jericho), than if he had won as expected. Jericho’s career didn’t benefit at all from the fluke win, while Garza’s was actually hurt, although one could argue with the people in charge of WCW at the time that Garza would have never gotten an opportunity to be a star under any circumstances, even though house show promoter Zane Bresloff saw him on his debut and predicted Garza would be one of the biggest money draws in the business based on his look and athletic ability. When the matches were over, people talked about Hall, and the other guy was still the jobber.

Still, something seemingly similar, yet altogether different, was among his most memorable WWF matches, his loss to Waltman, who then became called the 1-2-3 Kid, on Raw in 1993. This was a carefully crafted program designed to get both men over, and on a national basis, it was the match that made Waltman’s career.

The two knew each other but were not good friends at the time of the match, but they became the kliq, a name Lex Luger and Davey Boy Smith came up with for the group, shortly after.

Waltman noted he first met Hall when he was 10 years old and Hall was just starting to train with Hiro Matsuda in Florida at the Tampa Sportatorium. He said that Hall wasn’t a wrestler, but he was bigger and more muscular than any of he wrestlers there except Superstar Billy Graham.

Hall also did a similar thing with Hiroshi Tanahashi in 2001, when Tanahashi was just starting out. It wasn’t really all that much different than the Jericho or Garza matches, but did mean more since wrestling results were in the sports newspapers that were widely read, and far more people saw the results than would have watched the match. Hall was supposed to win the match as the far bigger star, but made the call to put Tanahashi over. It didn’t jump start Tanahashi’s career or anything like that, but later, when Tanahashi started his rise to stardom, it was viewed as his first major win over a heavyweight superstar. Tanahashi did have a win over Negro Casas previously, but Casas was a junior heavyweight, and while a legend, heavyweights in that era pretty much always beat Mexican junior heavyweights in singles matches. Hall told Tanahashi he did it because he saw great things in the future for him and said “that kid is money.”

One person close to him noted that he had no qualms at all about losing, but as a student of the game, also thought there were times that he had to go over. In particular, he felt, since he had just arrived, that he had to beat Steve Austin in their match at the 2002 WrestleMania, and he wasn’t happy that it didn’t go that way. The finish of that match was highly discussed at the time, with some feeling Hall needed to go over as the newcomer, although in every version of that it would have been due to NWO interference. Others felt that Hall’s track record was such that he never should have been booked with Austin in the first place on that show, and that they certainly shouldn’t have Austin lose to him. And it was only a short-time later that Hall was fired for incidents on the Plane Ride from Hell regarding both stewardesses who filed suit against WWF, and as documented on the Vice special.

There were other situations where based on timing and such he absolutely felt he had to win, but at other times he was “always happy to lay there like Cool Hand Luke and let the credits roll over him.”

It also led to the two being close friends, linked together by a match and later as traveling partners in a group they named the kliq, with Michaels, Kevin Nash and Paul Levesque (HHH). The group worked together to control many of the top positions in WWF for several years, and then Hall, Nash and Waltman went to WCW, where they joined with Hulk Hogan to form the NWO. The NWO exploded in popularity, and led to a gigantic rise in popularity of the WCW promotion. But in the aftermath, the company collapsed. Less than one year after packing stadiums, WCW was in a money-losing free fall, and just over two years later the company was sold for a mere $2.5 million to WWF.

“He was the smartest of us all,” wrote Waltman. “Maybe all of us combined. And that was a car full of smart motherf***ers.”

“He was just a brilliant guy in all kinds of ways,” said Waltman who said he’d put Hall’s innate knowledge of wrestling up there with the smartest people in the industry. “He was just a high IQ motherf***er.”

Waltman said he was the master of the squash match and of knowing the moment. He would grab a hold, knowing that you do that to give the announcers a chance to put you over rather than just calling the action. If something went wrong in a television match, he’d stay cool, look at the camera and stay “take two” and just do it right over again. Of course, that was in the days when all television was taped and you could do that.

“He taught us how to figure out how to reach the people, know what they want and predict what they want. He made everyone better. Shawn was better after working with him. Jeff Jarrett was better, Kev (Nash), me, a lot of guys.”

Waltman also noted Hall was very good at picking who had the talent to make it and teaching and nurturing that talent. When he was sober, he also taught his friends how to treat the fans when they come to see you, to always go above and beyond to make them feel good. Waltman noted, for example, that when Will Hobbs was a young kid, Hall went above and beyond for him as a fan getting autographs and such, and he never forgot it.

At first when the NWO was formed with Hogan, Nash and Hall, and it was known Waltman would join the group, many were against it feeling it watered down the group with three top superstars since Waltman was not considered nearly at their level of a star.

But Hall and Nash explained his importance, noting that Waltman was the best wrestler of the four inside the ring and could make the matches more exciting than the other three. Waltman also could lose without hurting the invincible aura Hogan, Nash and Hall had at the start of the run. Waltman himself noted there was negativity from some about him joining the NWO at the time he did, but that nothing was going to stop it from happening.

“You never know how much you love someone until you can’t anymore,” said Nash, who was taking the loss hard. Friends of Hall noted that Nash had at times dropped everything to try and help Hall when he was battling drinking or drug issues that led to depression.

Konnan, even after a run in Mexico where he was one of the biggest draws in the business would come to Hall for advice, and would talk of how he was the expert at making the television cameras work for you. He understood how to be unique and how to play to the camera in a way that few others fully grasped.

He influenced a generation of wrestlers in the U.S., as well as being one of the wrestlers Chael Sonnen, one of the greatest pro wrestling style talkers in UFC history. Sonnen copied extensively from Hall, along with Len Denton, Roddy Piper and Superstar Billy Graham. In Japan, during the heyday of the Hustle promotion, its main star used Hall’s ring name as Razor Ramon HG (Hard Gay), a spoof of the macho Razor Ramon used for someone who played an overt gay stereotype.

“I wasn’t very close with Scott in his later years, but upon reflection, I can flash back to many happy and fun memories of the days when he was my friend,” wrote Bret Hart. “I think Scott carried many heavy crosses long before I ever knew him. He was a good friend to Owen, long before he became Razor Ramon (the two worked in New Japan and CWA in Germany and Austria together). Wrestling life can be so much fun, and at the same time, it can take all you have. I will always remember Scott in the better times with his cool, dry, sense of humor while playing gently with my sons. We had many matches and he was a hard worker. I loved my matches with him at Royal Rumble (1993 in Sacramento for the WWF title) and the first King of the Ring in 1993. I fondly look back on so many terrific matches he had with Owen, Davey Boy, Sean Waltman and Shawn Michaels.

“We’ve lost so many wrestlers from my era, and this is just one more to a list that’s far too long,” Hart continued. “I won’t blame any one thing, but I do believe that if the days of wrestling 300 days a year had been kinder and more considerate, if we could’ve been home with our lived ones more, many of my old friends and brothers would still be here. I think Scott would smile to know that so many people really loved him and will truly miss him.”

“Scott came from an era of pro wrestling where wrestlers were the biggest and toughest men on the planet,” wrote Dwayne Johnson. “Scott was a big man who was athletically gifted. Tough as hell. And inside that ring, he was an extraordinarily talented and intense athlete. Before my match here with Scott, I made sure to tell him how much his in-ring work influenced me. When I was a rookie in wrestling, I would study Scott’s matches. His style, intensity, crispness and his excellent in ring IQ and psychology. I studied his matches, frame-by-frame.”

“Scott always felt he wasn’t worthy of the afterlife,” Nash wrote. “Well God, please have some gold plated toothpicks for my brother. My life was enriched with his take on life. He wasn’t perfect, but as he always said, `The last perfect person to walk the planet they nailed to a cross.’ See ya down the road, Scott. I couldn’t love a human being any more than I do you.”

Before Hall’s death, but when Nash recognized it was imminent and would end as soon as everyone got to say goodbye to him and they would take him off life support, Nash wrote, “I’m going to lose the one person on this planet I’ve spent more of my life with than anyone else. My heart is broken and I’m so very f***ing sad. I love Scott with all my heart, but now I have to prepare my life without him in the present. I’ve been blessed to have a friend that took me at face value and I him. When we jumped to WCW, we didn’t care who liked or hated us. We had each other and with the smooth Barry Bloom, we changed wrestling both in content, and pay, for those a lot that disliked us.”

Hall, born in St. Mary’s County, MD, on October 20, 1958, was the son of an Army soldier who moved almost every year before settling in Orlando, FL. He went to high school in Munich, Germany.

He became a wrestling fan in Florida. He and the late Ed Gantner used to sneak into the weekly matches presented by Championship Wrestling From Florida in Orlando to see Dusty Rhodes. Shortly after Hall got into the business, Gantner followed him. Gantner had a brief career as a pro wrestler in Florida before health issues forced him out of the business, kidney failure due to steroid use dating back to his junior year of high school, and then leading to heart failure. With his health failing, he committed suicide at the age of 31.

An ESPN special looking at his drug issues that had nearly killed Hall on many occasions, saw him trace things back to when he was 24, before he started pro wrestling. He was in a fight outside a night club fight which ended in a death and with him charged with second degree murder.

He and another man got into a fight over a woman. The other man pulled a gun on him but he wrestled the gun away from the man and shot and killed him. Hall maintained it was self defense. The charges were later dropped against Hall due to lack of evidence. The guilt from this remained with him for the rest of his life.

While Hall seemed fine, based on the standards for pro wrestlers in the 80s, he developed a reputation for drug and alcohol issues in the 90s, far and above industry standards. He went to rehab more than a dozen times, paid for by the WWE’s program. Traditional rehab wasn’t for him and the best he did was outside the box help from Page. He would joke to friends that he would drink heavily before heading to rehab because he was looking to win most improved. He was suspended countless times and fired many times due to those issues and other legal issues.

But because he was Scott Hall and part of the big NWO run, TNA, always looking for ex-WWF and WCW stars, took him back over-and-over, until 2010, when they stopped using him for the last time after an arrest made the local news.

He had a number of near death experiences that he survived. He admitted steroid use, which was very common in the business during his era. Waltman noted that Hall had incredible genetics in that during the period in WWF when testing was real, Hall didn’t use any steroids but he still looked like he did.

He had heart issues many years earlier and had a pacemaker put in in 2010. He needed a difibrillator at one point. He later had seizures and epilepsy. He had another heart scare in 2011. He was on a bad downward spiral until Diamond Dallas Page brought him into his home to try and get him sober in 2013. Page started a fundraising drive and raised $110,000 to pay for mental work and get him hip replacement surgery so he could start yoga training less painfully.

The public story was that, similar to Jake Roberts, Page took someone in a dark place, brought him in to live with him and cleaned him up. And at times that was true, but for the most part, while he was certainly better off after 2013 than he was before it, he was always battling those demons and more often than not they were winning.

Those close to him said that wasn’t as all as it appeared. He left the house and would stay with son Cody (who, at 6-foot-7 with legitimate agility seemed destined for stardom in Japan but it didn’t happen) and it was a constant cycle of him spiraling out of control until someone like Nash, or Chasyn Rance (who owned the Team Vision Dojo in Orlando that Hall often dropped by to teach at) got him out of his funk and then he’d go back in it.

The bright spot is that he was never arrested after that point.

In Orlando in that period, he often hung around with the Team Vision Dojo crowd, like Larry Zbyszko, Rance, Jared Saint-Laurent (MSL in MLW).

“I lived down the road from him,” said Saint-Laurent. “We got in the habit for a few years of hanging out every day. He was living alone in that big mansion and wasn’t really seeing his family. So we ended up in a routine of going to the gym together every day, getting lunch and just kind of bullshitting unless I had an indy booking to go to. Scott was a very complicated guy I think. I met him at a point in his life where he just didn’t care about himself anymore, but he still loved the business so much and really just loved helping others succeed.”

Zbyszko didn’t want to say much saying it was too personal, but said he thought Hall was a great guy and a great talent. Those close to them said Zbyszko always seemed more motivated and happier when Hall was around. Hall was the bigger star but when they were together, Hall would always put Zbyszko over as a big star and he liked to rib Zbyszko over his love of Bruno Sammartino.

Hall trained for pro wrestling under Matsuda in Tampa. He and Danny Spivey started their careers together in 1984 as The American Starship. Hall was known as Starship Coyote and Spivey as Starship Eagle. Their first matches were at the October 2, 1984, television tapings in Spartanburg, SC, debuting with a win over Jeff Sword & Paul Kelly.

As everyone would be in that era, they were super green and really not ready, but you learned on the job back then. This was the period where Hulk Hogan and the Road Warriors were the kings, and everyone was looking for big, muscular guys with the idea they could be the next guys to be taken out of the gym and be superstars because of what the public was buying.

But they simply weren’t ready to perform at the level fans in the Carolinas expected. They worked some prelims and the Crockett family gave them a second working on the grounds crew at Crockett Park in Charlotte, the home of the Charlotte Orioles minor league baseball team that the family owned and that Frances Crockett, Jim’s sister, ran. They were sent to the Central States to get more experience.

He used the name Scott “Coyote” Hall, and then came to the AWA in 1985. It was at this period when he was first talked about as being a future superstar of the business.

He wasn’t ready at the time, but Verne Gagne saw him as the guy who would carry the promotion in the future. Other promoters saw him as a diamond in the rough. He was big, but still clumsy at times in the ring. But the line I remember being told by one of the leading promoters of that era was that he was just as tall as Hogan, had a better body, was more athletic than Hogan, and he was better looking than Hogan. Of course, that was immaterial because at the time he didn’t come close to having Hogan’s charisma.

Gagne had him named “Magnum Scott Hall,” not after the condoms but because Terry Allen was already a star as Magnum T.A., with that name being taken from Tom Sellick’s role in the television show Magnum P.I.

Gagne quickly tried to hide his in-ring weakness by teaming him with Curt Hennig, the most talented younger wrestler in his promotion. The idea was that Hennig would carry the matches, do the selling, and Hall would get the comebacks and glory spots. The idea is to do the team until Hall was ready to go on his own, and become world champion.

Hall & Hennig won the AWA world tag team titles from Jimmy Garvin & Steve Regal (not William Regal but the original Steve Regal from Indiana) on January 18, 1986, in Albuquerque, NM. They lost the titles to Buddy Rose & Doug Somers on May 17, 1986, due to interference from Col. DeBeers (Ed Wiskoski).

As it turned out, the tag team got Hennig over more than Hall, and he ended up as the guy who would win the AWA title. The AWA was dying and Hall left in January 1987. Hall took a WWF tryout in August, but they decided against signing him. He went to the USWA, where he actually fit in great.

The USWA used mostly shorter wrestlers. And it always had a high percentage of women fans. The top babyfaces, seemingly forever, were Jerry Lawler, who was maybe 5-foot-10 and 37, and Bill Dundee, who was closer to 5-foot-5, and 44. Hall was bigger than the guys in the AWA, but in the USWA he was a giant, with a great body, and 28 years old. He was hardly a great worker, but he was good enough and had credibility as a star since the AWA was on ESPN and he was pushed as the company’s top babyface. But he was an outsider. Jerry Jarrett always made sure that the guys who lived there and weren’t leaving would be pushed and outsiders could get short pushes but if they were babyfaces, they weren’t allowed to get over more than Lawler. This was the first place where he was actually over more than his push.

He hooked up with New Japan Pro Wrestling in 1987-88, which gave him the chance to work with a much higher level of talent, and make a lot more money than he could in the AWA, which was floundering.

Even with his AWA stardom and size, he was booked as a mid-level foreigner. He’d beat the undercard guys and lost to the top stars. When he wrestled Antonio Inoki, he was booked to lose in 1:26.

In the 1987 IWGP tournament, the forerunner to the G-1 tournament, he placed seventh behind Inoki, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Konga the Barbarian, Masa Saito, Kengo Kimura and Hacksaw Higgins.

In that year’s tag team tournament, Hall & Seiji Sakaguchi placed fourth behind Inoki & Dick Murdoch, Tatsumi Fujinami & Kengo Kimura and Masa Saito & Fujiwara.

In 1988, when the annual tag tournament was changed to trios, Hall & Murdoch & Bob Orton lost in the semifinals to eventual winners Inoki & Riki Choshu & Kantaro Hoshino. In particular, he loved working and being with Murdoch.

His work improved during this period. Jim Ross, who was a big proponent of his before most in wrestling were, brought him to WCW with the idea that he would be the good-looking big babyface to draw women.

He became Scott “Gator” Hall, doing vignettes similar to how Jerry Jarrett marketed the Fabulous Ones, swimming, hanging out on the beach, and playing volleyball. But even with the push, at the house shows, he just didn’t click and was used more as a babyface with credibility who would lose to the top heels clean. Less than six months after he debuted, he was gone again.

He began touring internationally, working again for New Japan Pro Wrestling. He also wrestled for the CWA during this period, using the name Texas Scott as a cowboy. At the 1990 Catch Cup, he lost in the finals to The Soul Taker (Charles “Godfather” Wright). He would tell friends he loved the CWA caravan lifestyle and became good friends with Wright and Owen Hart at the time. He won his first singles title in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, beating Miguel Perez Jr. On March 3,1991, to become the Caribbean champion. But it was short-lived, as WCW wanted him back, so he lost to Super Medico III (Jose Estrada Jr.)_ on April 20, 1991, in Aguadilla.

He returned to WCW a week later as The Diamond Studd. Some of his Razor Ramon character, such as the slicked hair and the toothpick, and his finisher, the Diamond Death Drop which later became the Razor’s Edge, Outsiders Edge and in recent years, the Bad Luck Fall (from Bad Luck Fale), came from this period. The Diamond name came because he was managed by Diamond Dallas Page. The idea was also to copy Rick Rude’s mannerisms from WWF as being a guy who women fawned over.

He was basically a midcard heel, who started off with a push but then started losing most of the time. As Diamond Studd, he was there to look big and be a stud, with Page doing all the talking.

His first wrestling connection with Kevin Nash was here. Page managed a group called The Diamond Mine, consisting of Scotty Flamingo, who later became Raven, Diamond Studd and Vinnie Vegas (Nash).

He left for WWF, where he did a character based on Tony Montana from “Scarface.” “Say hello to the bad guy,” came from the movie line “Say goodnight to the bad guy.”

The idea was Hall’s, but he later said when he pitched it to Pat Patterson and Vince McMahon, he was only joking. He did lines from the movie that neither McMahon nor Patterson had seen, or had ever heard of. He talked with a Cuban accent. He came up with vignettes based on scenes from the movie like driving around South Florida in a convertible. Since neither knew or had seen or had any knowledge of any of this, and he was coming up with all these ideas, they believed he was a creative genius. They came up with the name Razor, but wanted a last name. Hall asked Tito Santana for a Latino sounding name that started with an R, and Santana came up with Ramon.

He started out feuding with Savage. Savage was WWE champion and defending on September 1, 1992, against Ric Flair. Ramon attacked Savage which led to Flair winning the title, to build up a Survivor Series main event of Savage & Ultimate Warrior vs. Flair & Ramon. It was a huge position to be put in, as Hogan had left the company because he had become a magnet for bad publicity regarding the steroid scandal going on. Warrior was brought back to be the top star, but he was fired before the match when McMahon found that he was using Growth Hormone to get around steroid testing. An angle was created to split up Flair and Mr. Perfect (Hennig), so Perfect & Savage beat Flair & Ramon via DQ.

Ramon was in the WWF title match at the 1993 Royal Rumble, losing to Hart’s sharpshooter.

He started a babyface turn after losing to Waltman on the May 17, 1993, episode of Raw. After losing, he started to gain respect for the 1-2-3 Kid, and Ted DiBiase, who was leaving for All Japan, started making fun of how Ramon had lost to Kid. Ramon went babyface beat DiBiase at SummerSlam.

Hall and Waltman became good friends after doing the angle. Hall had seen Waltman in the Global Wrestling Federation and liked his work, and was totally on board to do the angle. After the angle, Hall liked him even more as a worker and took him on like a protégé to teach him aspects of the business Waltman didn’t know about.

The feud with Michaels came when Michaels was IC champion, and then suspended over a drug test. A Battle Royal was held on Raw to come down to two men, Ramon and Rick Martel, who wrestled the next week for the vacant title, which Ramon won and became champion.

Michaels returned and claimed he was the rightful champion. They wrestled for months at house shows. During that period they had nine ladder matches at different shows. The matches were not the spectacles that the WrestleMania match was, but they were much better than matches at WWF house shows were at the time.

The March 20, 1994, WrestleMania ladder match became one of the most legendary matches of the modern era. While many today would say the Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart match on the show was better, since it was a high-class technical match while the ladder match was an incredible stunt show performance by Michaels, at the time that was not the prevailing view. Still, they were arguably the two best WrestleMania matches up to that point in time, both on the same show. Michaels vs. Ramon was voted match of the Year for 1994 by Observer readers. In time, because wrestlers later elevated the ladder match to more of an art form and had bigger stunts, it’s now seen as a gimmick match that has been topped.

It was notable because of the competition in what ended up a four-match race, with a Mitsuharu Misawa vs. Toshiaki Kawada match at Budokan Hall, which many people to this day swear is the greatest match of all-time, Great Sasuke vs. Chris Benoit in the finals of the legendary first Super J Cup, and the AAA When Worlds Collide main event of Love Machine & Eddy Guerrero vs. El Hijo del Santo & Octagon at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. That was listed in a nationally televised television special in Mexico years later listed as one of the ten greatest matches in Lucha Libre history. The Hart Brothers MSG match also cracked the top 20, at No. 18.

Ramon lost the title to Diesel (Nash) a month after WrestleMania, to set up a rematch at SummerSlam, where Ramon regained the title with Walter Payton in his corner when Michaels accidentally superkicked Nash. He traded the title in 1995 with Jeff Jarrett, winning it for a third time in a ladder match. Jarrett regained it, lost it to Michaels, and then Michaels beat Ramon in another ladder match at that year’s SummerSlam on August 27 in Pittsburgh. While not as well remembered as the first one, that ladder match was also incredible, placing second in 1995 Match of the Year voting behind a 60:00 draw between Manami Toyota and Kyoko Inoue.

Ramon’s final IC title win came after Michaels vacated the title after being beaten up outside of a club in Syracuse, NY. While WWF claimed it was nine people who did it, the police report stated it was one person. But Michaels was badly injured. Ramon beat Dean Douglas (Shane Douglas) for his final title win, before losing it the next year to Goldust, after the 1-2-3 Kid turned heel on him.

The two were scheduled for a Miami Street Fight at the 1996 WrestleMania in Anaheim, CA, but after a drug test failure, Hall was suspended, missing the show.

This suspension happened, coincidentally, or perhaps not, when Hall went to McMahon to give notice that he was leaving when his contract expired to WCW.

In 1995, Hall earned about $400,000. The period from mid-1992 through 1995 was the weakest in WWF’s national history. The entire wrestling business was from a popularity standpoint, and money drawing standpoint, at its lowest level since the late 1940s. WWF was built around Hulk Hogan, and when he left after the 1992 WrestleMania, business collapsed.

The business was also built around steroids, and due to negative publicity, McMahon began vigilant drug testing. While there were very much loopholes, as documentation in the Ultimate Warrior lawsuit clearly showed, the talent did get smaller and physically less impressive and fans weren’t buying the new stars and less impressive bodies at anywhere near the level they had during the first steroid era.

So with that, pay was down. Hall went to McMahon and told him he had a $750,000 per year offer from WCW, which also had a 180 date maximum.

McMahon said he couldn’t match that guaranteed offer. Nash told him the same thing shortly after. McMahon told Nash the same thing. At the time, McMahon didn’t guarantee money in talent contracts, except in the case of Hogan. You worked as many dates as you were booked, and got paid based on a percentage of the house figure that was never explained, plus a small percentage of merchandise sales. Years later, McMahon later said that if he knew what was going to happen he’d have matched the outside offer.

Hall & Nash have claimed that they were the ones who changed the business regarding guaranteed contracts. WCW started doing guaranteed contracts in 1988 and Jim Crockett started doing them earlier than that to keep his top talent from leaving for WWF. Bill Watts had also started doing guaranteed money contracts to keep talent from leaving by 1986,. The Japanese promotions started many years earlier. Hulk Hogan had a guaranteed contract starting in 1984 to get him away from the AWA (and later New Japan), and a few others got them over the years, but they were the exceptions. Marc Mero got a significant guaranteed deal from WWF, beating his WCW contract, in 1996, slightly before Hall & Nash left. Brian Pillman got a guaranteed contract shortly after, and Bret Hart got a $1.5 million downside from WWF a few months later before almost everyone got them. It was going to happen either way due to the competition, but it’s hard to say if Hall & Nash’s leaving led to McMahon offering guaranteed money for Mero and Pillman. Without question, Hall & Nash’s leaving played a significant part in McMahon and the company going to a number level they’d have never touched, because after losing Hall & Nash McMahon at first felt that there was no way he could also lose Hart.

Hall said it wasn’t the money as much as easing up on the schedule that caused him to leave. But in 1995, he worked 178 dates, or less than the 180 dates on the WCW deal, although with WWF there was no maximum and he did work 208 dates the year before.

Hall & Nash both left. Both men’s final night was May 17, 1996, in Madison Square Garden. The show drew 17,000 fans, with 14,824 paid and $299,596. It was the largest gate in the history of the arena aside from the two WrestleMania shows. While it was not common knowledge, insider fans knew Hall and Nash were leaving.

Heel HHH beat babyface Hall in the semi and babyface Michaels beat heel Nash in the WWF title match on top, in a cage. After the match, HHH and Hall came out and got in the ring, where Nash and Michaels were. Nash and Michaels dropped character. They hugged and celebrated with each other, breaking kayfabe. While far more was made of it years later, as at the time it was only known about by the fans in MSG and in newsletters, so only a tiny percentage of fans were even aware of this, it was breaking of kayfabe and a number of executives in the company were furious that guys who were feuding on television and just had grudge matches against each other were acting like friends not only in public, but in front of the fans on stage in the company’s best drawing arena.

And in actuality, while some fans in the arena were amused by it, it wasn’t all that big a deal, and in the newsletter world, it was hardly covered as something big, at all. It was briefly mentioned that it happened and was unusual, and there were those in the WWF office and older wrestlers in the company who were furious. But it’s impact on the fans or being a big deal at the time was so grossly overstated in history that it was comical. Everyone knew it was a show, and it wasn’t all that much of a secret that the four were friends, worked together to push their agendas and that the kliq era was ending.

While Nash’s first full year in WCW was $752,576 in salary, and he made a lot more than that in future years, basically what he told McMahon, Hall’s first full year, 1997, well after the formation of the NWO, was $664,948 in salary and $669,480 including merchandise oney, working 138 dates. Hall’s original contract was changed on January 1, 1997, when he signed a five year deal, with a no cut clause, that would peak at $1,450,000 in 2000 and $1,625,000 in 2001. But he was suspended so often he never made close to that, and the company folded early in 2001.

His best year in WCW was 1998, where he earned $1,373,737 in salary and $1,423,194 with merchandise money on 192 dates. His 1999 earnings were $771,758 salary and $848,127 in total with merch money and in 2000 he earned $815,334 in salary and $858,244 in total even though he never was used by the company after February.

The NWO era began on May 27, 1996. The Monday Night Wars had started the prior September and in the first nine months, Raw and Nitro battled evenly.

The first big move WCW made was expanding Nitro to two hours, giving them a one-hour head-start on Raw, which was still one hour. That was the show where, in the middle of a match, Hall showed up and said he and his friend (Nash, who came two weeks later since his contract expired after Hall’s) were here and taking over. WCW attempted to run with a storyline that WWF had sent these guys over, but were immediately hit with legal threats. At first, the announcers never mentioned who the guys were, although everyone knew them from WWF. It wasn’t for several weeks before, on the air, to quell legal threats (which didn’t quell them since the lawsuit continued for years before being settled), Hall & Nash said on the air they were not representing WWF and were given their real names, as opposed to the idea that it was Diesel and Razor, which was the original insinuation.

With two hours, and the NWO angle, along with a faster paced and more modern show, along with bigger name talent and better talent, WCW won every Monday night rating battle until April 1998. Because some weeks there were preemptions and time changes due to sports, the streak lasted the infamous 83 shows.

Hogan joined the group at Bash at the Beach, and called them the New World Order of Wrestling. This was later shortened to NWO, the heel invading group within a group, and the famous NWO music and commercials for merchandise “paid for by the NWO.”

NWO T-shirts became the in-ring. Even though there were a handful of NWO members and maybe 200 wrestlers under contract to WCW, somehow the NWO won every numbers battle and every war. Eric Bischoff then turned heel joining the NWO, which was the forerunner to the Vince McMahon role as the heel authority figure. The irony of course is that it was WWF copying WCW in getting more risque, with DX in a sense being the NWO, and McMahon copying Bischoff’s heel authority figure, and WWF paying $3.5 million for Mike Tyson which WCW wouldn’t match, after WCW had spent big money to outbid WWF for Dennis Rodman, that turned the tables of the war back to WWF less than two years later.

Hall became a far bigger star under his own name then as Razor Ramon, although WWF history may say otherwise. His television appearances were complete with his catch phrases such as “Hey Yo,” and his survey at every show, “How many people came her to see WCW? How many people came to see the NWO. Survey says, one more for the bad guys.”

WCW grew exponentially, but in time, the audience burned out on the repetitiveness. The company built around cool villains led to almost all the babyfaces, with the exception of Sting through the end of 1997 because he was always protected, and then Bill Goldberg in much of 1998, floundering. The wrestling fans watching WWF were told WCW and Ted Turner were the bad guys stealing talent Vince McMahon made, which was ironic given wrestling history. Fans watching WCW were told the ex-WWF talent was superior to their home-grown talent that some fans supported. The newer fans who came in from 1996-98 were just taught WCW was uncool, run by stodgy out of touch businessmen like J.J. Dillon, and babyfaces who couldn’t get the job done. WCW was loaded with young talent, but wouldn’t push them. WWF had its young talent, and did push them. WCW was headed for an iceberg.

Hall was responsible for the Sting “crow” character that led to the hottest period of Sting’s career. Hall would tell the story that he saw Sting with the long hair and thought of the idea from seeing the movie “The Crow.”

The story at the time was slightly different. One of his buddies was dating one of the women wrestlers in WCW, and to spice up their sex lives, she would dress up as the crow. The story was that they were coming up with ideas for Sting and Hall suggested Sting dress up like the woman wrestler, and Hall had no idea of the movie or anything past he thought it was cool look for Sting what the woman wrestler would dress up as.

Hall went to rehab in early 1998 when he showed up loaded during a live Nitro. Hall turned on Nash when he returned. Hall played a role in the famous Hogan vs. Goldberg match, as the TV storyline was that Goldberg first had to beat Hall and keep his U.S. title on the July 6, 1998, Nitro before 41,412 fans at the Georgia Dome to get his shot at WWF champion Hogan. Goldberg beat both men and was on fire. Hogan blamed Hall for losing and called him the weak link. Hall and Nash feuded with each other and with Hogan, and then they all got back together. There were multiple NWO factions that were both aligned and not aligned depending on the week.

Hall, disguised as a security guard, used a taser on Goldberg at the 1998 Starrcade, to lead to Nash pinning Goldberg with a power bomb to win the WCW title and end the Goldberg streak. While business stayed strong for a few more months, it was the beginning of the end for the company. Popularity declined throughout 1999, and in 2000, the company lost $62.3 million and was put for sale by Turner Broadcasting and sold in a fire sale.

During his WCW run, he held the TV title once, beating Rick Steiner on November 21, 1999, in Toronto at the Mayhem PPV under Vince Russo, and then throwing the title in the garbage can the next week. The title was revived a few months later when Jim Duggan, in the role playing that he was a janitor, found it in the garbage can and started defending it as champion.

He held the U.S. twice. He first won it from Roddy Piper on February 21, 1999, at SuperBrawl in Oakland, and was stripped of it during one of his many absences. He beat Bret Hart for it a second time on November 8, 1999, on an Indianapolis Nitro. He lost it to Chris Benoit on December 19, 1999, at Starrcade in Washington, DC, very shortly before Benoit left the company for WWF.

He held the WCW tag team title seven times, six with Nash, as The Outsiders, and once with The Giant (Paul Wight).

The Outsiders first won the titles from Harlem Heat on October 27, 1996, at Halloween Havoc in Las Vegas. They were pretty much perennial champions through May 17, 1998, which coincides with the period the promotion was on top in the ratings war, with title trades twice with Rick & Scott Steiner and once with The Giant & Lex Luger. On December 13, 1999, they had a two-week run as champions beating Bret Hart & Bill Goldberg, but vacated the titles two weeks later due to an injury.

He also held the USWA title as Razor Ramon when WWF and USWA were having a working agreement and WWF stars would go to Memphis and work usually with Lawler on Monday nights. He won the title on April 3, 1995, from Dundee, before losing to Lawler in May. He also held the WWC Universal title long after the high point of the promotion, as Razor Ramon on July 14, 2007, winning it in a three-way over Carlito and Apolo on that year’s Aniversario event. He came in three times as champion, with two matches with Eddie (Primo) Colon and one with Orlando (Epico) Colon. He never lost the title as it was stripped when he didn’t appear for two shows in mid-December as his drinking issues had gotten bad at the time.

Hall worked a few ECW dates, and then blew off following up. He wrestled for New Japan in 2001, including losing to Keiji Muto for All Japan’s Triple Crown when Muto was defending the title in both companies. It was during that period he put over Tanahashi, who was two years into his career.

Hall came and went in TNA numerous times from 2002 to 2010. At times he was aligned with Waltman, and regularly with Nash, including a 2010 run as “The Band.” On May 4, 2010, at the TV tapings in Orlando, Hall & Nash, as The Band, won their seventh and final tag team championship beating Matt Morgan, who at the time was doing a gimmick where he was tag team champion by himself. Eric Young was then added to The Band and they used the Freebird rule to where all three were champions.

Ten days after winning the titles, Hall was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest when police were called to a bar in Chuluota, FL, where the police report said Hall had been drinking heavily and when they arrived he was yelling and cursing at the bar staff and some local independent wrestlers. In his police statement, he claimed he was an unemployed pro wrestler, even though he held the TNA tag team titles at the time. A month later, the promotion released him for the final time.

He did some wrestling through 2016. When Jeff Jarrett started Global Force Wrestling in 2015, he announced Hall as one of his top stars, but then five days later Hall was released. What was believed to be his last match was on June 17, 2016, beating Chuck Taylor for the DDT Ironman Heavymetalweight title in Des Moines, IA for First Wrestling.

He was divorced three times, twice from Dana Lee Burgio. The two had a very public split-up. He had two children with Burgio, Cody, now 30, and Cassidy, 26.

He had several arrests over the years as well as countless stories of issues, in almost every case, related to drinking.

In 1998 he was arrested for groping a 56-year-old woman outside a hotel in Baton Rouge, LA. In 2012 he was arrested, again in Chuluota, FL, for a domestic disturbance involving his girlfriend at the time, who claimed Hall choked her while he was drunk, which he denied. The charges were later dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Another arrest made national headlines because of the weird nature of it. Hall was part of a 2008 roast of the Iron Sheik. A comedian, Jimmy Graham, made a joke saying, “After The Sheik and Hacksaw Jim Duggan got caught snorting coke in the parking lot (actually they were pulled over by the highway patrol in a car), his career fell faster than Owen Hart.”

Hall, who was friends with Owen Hart, went after Graham, knocking down a podium to try and get at him, and grabbed the mic saying that joke was disrespectful.

In both WCW and TNA they did angles based on his drinking issues, and in WCW on television he was given the nickname “Last Call Scott Hall.”

At times he was called the greatest wrestler never to win the world title, which means ignoring the USWA and WWC versions. The phrase came from Lee Marshall billing him as that in WCW, and it was one of those things said so often that people took it as true. Certainly, in today’s “everyone gets their turn” WWE, a star of his caliber would have gotten the title, and likely multiple times.

Most likely in the pre-1984 pro wrestling world, a star of his level would have had little shot at winning one of the major world titles because so few ever got the chance. It’s possible he could have won the WWA title when it was one of the big three or the AWA title in its early years, but the NWA and WWF titles were only held by a few people for years at a time. If he didn’t have his issues, there is certainly the chance he would have won it in WCW, but for an NWO heel, he was always behind Hogan and Nash in the pecking order, largely because Hogan was Hogan and Nash was more vigilant than Hall in those situations. In 90s WWF, it wouldn’t have been a major stretch for him to have a run, nor was it any surprise that he didn’t. As far as greatest to never hold the world title, it’s all a subjective argument based on what you consider a world title. The only modern era name that comes to mind that was at his peak definitely a bigger star who never held a major world title was Roddy Piper. If you only consider “big three” style world titles someone like Argentina Rocca (Quebec), Johnny Valentine (NWF) and Wahoo McDaniel (IWA Japan), would also come to mind. During the 70s, Valentine had that similar reputation as the greatest never to be world champion.

He was also inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame twice, in 2014 as Razor Ramon and in 2020, along with Hogan, Nash and Waltman as the NWO group.