Razor Ramon

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.

Called a “hugely influential superstar” by World Wrestling Entertainment, he was also a founding member of the villainous New World Order with Kevin Nash ...

“And it was a powerful thing to me, whether I was the hated villain or the beloved hero. “A guy pulled a gun on me, and I took it away from him and shot him,” he said in 2011, recalling what he said was a fight over a woman. Outside the ring, Mr. Hall struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and went to rehab at least a dozen times, according to a 2017 interview. Mr. Hall rejoined World Championship Wrestling in 1996 as a heel, or villain, under his given name. He was known for his slick black hair and the gold chains he wore around his neck, outside as well as inside the ring. Scott Hall was born into a military family on Oct. 20, 1958. Mr. Hall had suffered complications of hip replacement surgery this month, according to Pro Wrestling Torch, a site that has covered the wrestling world for more than 30 years. You know, you’re going to fall.’ He said, ‘Try to fall forward.’” I was a kid.” That was something that I’ve always treasured.” Mr. Hall was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame as Razor Ramon in 2014 and again in 2020 as a member of the New World Order. “My dad used to tell me: ‘You’re going to slip.