I didn’t want to break up the Hawk & Croc anniversary celebration posts going on this month, but sometimes real things happen when you’re not expecting them.
Earlier tonight, we lost professional wrestler Scott Hall, who also wrestled as Razor Ramon between 1992 and 1996.
Razor Ramon was a villain when I first started watching wrestling in the spring of 1993, but he became a heroic character by the end of the summer, and while I wouldn’t necessarily say that he’s one of my favorites of all time, he was definitely one of the top good guy wrestlers at the time — Despite his nickname being “The Bad Guy” — and became one of my favorites for a while, sort of by default.
I enjoyed watching his matches for those first few years that I got into wrestling, and even got to see him wrestle live, in 1994. His ladder match against Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania X is still one of the most revolutionary matches in wrestling.
But it was in 1996 when Scott Hall, and his best friend Kevin Nash, went from working in the World Wrestleing Federation (WWF, now WWE) to World Championship Wrestling (WCW) that he cemented his spot as one of the most important wrestlers in history, and it had nothing to do with what he was doing on television.
In ’96, Hall’s WWF contract was up. He wanted to stay in the WWF, as he’d previously worked in WCW, but the executives at WCW were offering him insane amounts of money — I don’t know the exact number, but legend has it that it was over $750,000 per year, for 180 days of matches. Guaranteed. By comparison, he was getting paid significantly less money in the WWF, and worked over 300 matches a year. And if he wasn’t having matches, he wasn’t getting paid. And he worked in a “favored nations” deal into his WCW offer, so that if somebody came in and made more money than him, his deal would be bumped up to match the new hire. Hall, as Razor Ramon, was the first four-time WWF Intercontinental Champion — The WWF’s secondary singles championship — but his buddy Kevin Nash was a former WWF World Champion, and had held the belt for just a few days short of a year. Nash got a better deal, which bumped Hall’s pay.
So, okay. These two guys got paid a lot of money to do less work than they were doing — So what? Well, they basically forced the guaranteed contract to become standard in televised wrestling companies. Why would anybody continue to work for the WWF when WCW was handing out guaranteed contracts? In order to attract wrestlers to come work for them, the World Wrestling Federation was forced to start paying guaranteed money to their talent.
And that’s still in place today, 25 and a half years later.
For a quarter of a century, any wrestler that’s come to WWF/WWE, WCW, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (now Impact Wrestling), or All Elite Wrestling (AEW) has a contract with a downside guarantee, where they’ll still make some money even if they’re injured and can’t perform. This is incredibly important because 99.9% of wrestlers in the US and Canada are independent contractors, not employees (I’m not sure what other countries have as the standards in their deals, but I suspect it’s not very dissimilar). And as someone who’s done independent contractor work before, let me tell you, having a guarantee in that contract means either you’re getting money, or you’re going to win a court case to get that money.
And then he went on to be part of one of the most influential stories in wrestling, ever: His contractual status unknown to viewers at the time, Scott Hall just showed up on an episode of WCW Monday Nitro, declaring, “You people… you know who I am, but you don’t know why I’m here.” It seemed as if a WWF Superstar was invading WCW. He ended his speech by saying, “You want a war? You’re gonna get one!” And when Kevin Nash joined him the following week, and Hulk Hogan became a villain for the first time since he’d become a household name, the three began what was known as the New World Order of wrestling, or the “nWo.” The nWo storyline was the driving force behind WCW’s output over the next four years, with many of their events and products being licened as being from “WCW/nWo.”
If you were alive in the late 1990s, you definitely saw one of those black “nWo” shirts with the white (or sometimes red) logo, whether you were a wresting fan or not. They were EVERYWHERE.
And since WCW Monday Nitro was aired opposite WWF’s Monday Night Raw, the two companies entered a ratings war for the next five years. Which is insane, when you think about it. These were two companies airing live television shows at the same time, on the same night of the week, in a battle for viewership in an era before DVRs, before streaming, before you could just watch pirated wrestling on websites; If you weren’t there live, you missed it. 1996-2001 was a very special time in American television.
And it all REALLY kicked off because Hall wanted to provide the best life that he could, monetarily speaking, for his family.
Scott Hall wasn’t a perfect man. He struggled with drugs and alcohol for years, some of those problems even becoming evident while he was on television during his time in WCW. But he eventually got cleaned up with the help of fellow wrestler, Diamond Dallas Page. DDP probably saved Hall’s life and gave Scott an extra decade of sober living. Hall used this second chance to pass on what he knew about professional wrestling to the next generation of wrestlers.
Scott Hall was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2014 for his Razor Ramon gimmick, and again in 2020 for his time as part of the nWo. During that 2014 induction, his last two lines were incredibly poignant:
“Hard work pay offs, dreams come true.
Bad times don’t last, but Bad Guys do.”
Rest in Peace, Bad Guy. And thank you for the years of entertainment.
