Impetus: former wrestling legend Scott Hall passes away after complications from hip surgery, resulting in a blood clot getting loose, triggering numerous heart attacks, being and being put on life support before being let go by his family
I’m not going to pretend like Scott Hall was ever one of my favorite wrestlers. I’ve been a wrestling fan way too long, watched, read and listened to all sorts of shoot interviews, backstage stories and insider knowledge throughout the years to have a picture of Scott Hall in my own head, that is pretty jumbled up, but definitely not as quickly clear that he was among my favorite wrestlers.
As a performer, Scott Hall really was in a class of few; technically proficient, rock solid on the mic, and had charisma oozed machismo all over the place. I still remember most of the original Razor Ramon vignettes back in the day and then eventually seeing him debut on an episode of Superstars. He did moves like back suplexes off of the second turnbuckle, chokeslams, and seeing the Razor’s Edge for the very first time blew my mind.
He was as good a performer from my early memories of Razor, to when I picked wrestling back up in 1998 and watched now Scott Hall in WCW as a founding member of the nWo. He definitely wrestled a lot less, but was still often on television and still entertaining, leaning more on being more of a mouthpiece and agitator, and making it more special when he actually did wrestle.
But then by the end of this period, the personal demons that Hall became synonymous with the phrase were too much, and he was more or less unceremoniously removed from television before WCW eventually went under. In years following, Scott Hall kind of became a shell of himself, occasionally being mentioned on the internet, usually for something related to his rampant alcoholism.
Eventually, Hall cleaned himself up, and he and Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan were brought back to the WWE to reform the nWo for story purposes, and he had a fairly mediocre feud with Stone Cold Steve Austin leading up to that year’s Wrestlemania. Afterward, he would relapse and succumb to the personal demons again.