If your Facebook feed was also filled with Razor Ramon's obituaries, memories and photos on Tuesday, wrestling with the character of a Cuban immigrant who is also the man behind it, Scott Hall, will admit to stealing from Mal Pacino and his Tony Montana in "Scar Face" - you are probably not alone.
It is probable that the people around you who broke up with Hull also parted ways with a piece of their childhood, of which, in the nineties, it was one of its symbols.
No less than Dylan McKay or Maxel Rose.
Say - Israel has a complex relationship with the 1990s, and it clings to them to this day, staring at them longingly as it listens to Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" on most radio stations - and that would be true.
The decade of the 1990s, which brought with it cable television services, connected Israel to the world in real time for the first time.
Therefore, the nineties were deeply burned into the cultural consciousness of a country that had hitherto lived at a different pace, and in significant delays.
The WWF broadcasts (then called the League, even though it is a clearly non-competitive industry - at least not in the classic sense), which arrived in Israel at the time, have become part of Israeli DNA to this day, at least nostalgically.
But that does not explain why even in the rest of the world the network was filled with sad separations, from those who erupted at a time when popularity and interest in the wrestling industry were at the bottom of the slump.
Places like the US and UK, which experienced better times of wrestling with names like the Van Eric brothers, Hulk Hogan, Macho from Randy Savage or Rudy Piper, also had a hard time saying goodbye to Razor Ramon - certainly not the first wrestler to die prematurely. How can it be explained that his death was actually perceived as tragic, after so many who went before him?
This story ends in the early evening hours of last Monday, at Walster Canston Hospital in Georgia, where Hall's heart is silent.
It happened after a weekend in which the man, who most of the world knew as Razor Ramon, lay unconscious and connected to the CPR machine after three heart attacks, the result of a hip replacement surgery that caused a blood clot.
His good friend Kevin Nash - the wrestler Diesel, to the WWF fans among you - told Instagram that Hall's family was waiting to gather around him and say goodbye for the last time, before deciding to disconnect him from the machine.
Dave Meltzer, a veteran wrestling journalist, wrote that from now on - only a miracle will help.
About four hours later, Hall, on his two feet and 130 pounds, would finally surrender.
Thus came the end of 63 years, most of whom knew, alongside fame and professional success - mostly suffering.
Not just because he was a prototype of the broken wrestler cliché, the kind that Mickey Rourke played in Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," which moved and shocked many.
Hall did indeed bear all the ills that this fascinating industry, in which he was considered a well-known and esteemed figure even after retiring from, was known for.
From drugs and alcohol, through injuries, painkillers and muscle relaxants to broken relationships and encounters with the unpleasant side of the law.
Scott Hall marked V for every rubric on this list, but he was not the only one.
• • •
First of all, a little order in things.
The World Wrestling Federation, the world-famous wrestling organization (there are quite a few more like it, for example in America, the UK, Mexico or Japan), arrived in Israel in late 1992 and early 1993, as part of the company's expansion process into new markets.
For that matter, Israel was there alongside India.
Part of it has to do with the fact that there really was quite a bit of interest then around the country, the result of the peace agreements of those years and its becoming a stopping point in the tour of the biggest names in world culture, from Metallica to Michael Jackson and Madonna.
For Vince McMahon, the owner and man who inherited the WWF from his father and turned it into a huge corporation, it was also an attempt to survive less financially successful years - a result of product erosion after many years of popularity, alongside a trial over steroid distribution.
McMahon may have been eligible, but along the way he revealed some unpleasant truths about steroid use and the consequences of the phenomenon among these grown men, who for the average viewer had hitherto been toy dolls, as well as flesh-and-blood superheroes.
Action figurine of big characters from life, who also happen to be walking between us.
"Machismo".
Scott Hall in the arena as Razor Ramon,
Anyone who understands the faucets of the industry will tell you that the years 1993-1992, and perhaps also 1996-1994, were among the evils that the genre knew, which at the time experienced quite terrible viewing figures and a lack of great interest.
But in Israel, as befits the territory that first encountered the wrestling phenomenon (at least in the glittering version of the WWF, before it were the Van Eric brothers and what was then called "Catch" and aired on the Middle East channel, nicknamed "Lebanon"), instantly fell in love with these muscular and immense guys. , And in the variety of infantile figures at varying levels presented.
1992 was also the year that Scott Hall came to the company, which in a meeting with McMahon would become "Razor Ramon", the same knotted Cuban bastard whose whole essence amounted to his word - "Machismo".
A guy who walked around with a toothpick in his mouth, a beard, about three pounds of hair gel and self-confidence in unreasonable amounts.
The problem was that in reality, the man behind the character had a problem in exactly this area.
"I entered the world of wrestling to get girls," Hall-Ramon said in a documentary made about him years later.
"I wanted to live a fake life behind a character because I wasn't really enthusiastic about the person I was in reality," he explained, then revealed a detail in his biography that even his big fans only discovered later.
When he was 24 and working as a security guard at a strip club in Orlando, he accidentally killed a man who pulled out a gun in front of him.
It was a quarrel around a girl who was all testosterone, which allegedly ended in Hall's victory - who was tried and found eligible.
The relationship between him and that woman did not survive much later, and Scott, who only as the old man was able to explain his own story to himself, became a wrestler and dug deeper and deeper into his fictional character.
He went through several phases, for example as "Big Scott Hall" or "Diamond Stud", walked around with curly hair and a formidable porn mustache that drew comparisons between him and Tom Selk, an actor and hot man in the 80s, but only when he came to the WWF in the early nineties and became a razor Ramon - Experiencing first real success.
He may have become a huge star, but his personal life continued to crumble.
His best friends were wrestlers Diesel (Nash), Sean Michaels (with whom he shared the battle of the ladder from "WrestleMania 10", which many remember to this day) and Sean Waltman, who is also quite remembered to this day, mainly because of the stupid name God knows how he caused it Work: 123 Kid.
This group, like the other colleagues in the WWF's traveling circus, toured the United States and visited the country several times, until it lost interest here as well. The guys got the nickname "The Click", and often drank alcohol and mixed it with chrysoprodol (or by its trade name - Soma), a muscle sedative that is approved for use for no more than three weeks - a section that the Click members saw as a recommendation and no more, and the kind that should not be considered .
Want to understand the magnitude of the addiction?
Look on YouTube for clips of interviews with Kevin Nash in which he tells about his life, that of Hall and their friends in those years, including stories about jars of hundreds of balls and life on water and beer for weeks.
During these years Scott Hall became Scott Alco-Hall, but in 1996, when he was still considered a huge star, he decided to defect with Nash from the WWF to the rival company, WCW.
WCW, based in the southern United States, appealed to a not-quite-sophisticated and terribly well-run audience, but was fueled by the money of billionaire Ted Turner, the owner of CNN. Re-as part of a "hostile" organization called the NWO, which means "New World Order".
Indeed, this was a new world order in the industry.
For the first time wrestlers receive a fixed salary, and their livelihood does not depend on the amount of people who come to watch them or any other consideration in the field.
During one career, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash not only made wrestling a hot topic in American pop culture again, but also changed the business model of the field and made many people who worked with them get rich, or at the very least - live a more stable life.
But Hall's life was anything but stable.
He would reinforce a host of addictions, get into fights in bars and become, alongside being a valued wrestler, a burden on his friends and also on the company that paid him millions.
In 2002, a year after WCW finally collapsed (this is how it is when poor management utilizes resources it perceives as inexhaustible), Hall returned to the WWF, which has since become WWE and a Wall Street-traded company, but survived there no more than a few months ago. Fired.
• • •
In bars in the US it is customary to announce to customers a "last round" before they are required to leave the place, i.e. - one more drink. In those years, the phrase "Last call for Scott Hall" became common among wrestlers. The first decade of the 2000s Hall spent In smaller and less successful leagues, he gained weight, was arrested, released on bail, and with each passing year lost his desire and ability to lead a normal life.
The peak, or rather the low point, came in 2011.
Hall had a heart attack before an independent wrestling show in front of an insulting crowd of people, and was led in front of the audience by people who held him, seeking to witness their hero standing broken and dismantled in the arena.
To say that Scott Hall was seen in the horrific video documenting the incident and has since been circulated on YouTube as a pale shadow of Razor Ramon - would be a laundering of words.
Hall looked like Elvis there in his last days.
Not a pale shadow of a mythical figure, but hardly a pale shadow of a human being.
But this story almost had a happy ending.
Hall received help from a former wrestling friend and current yoga guru named Diamond Dallas Page, who ironically was also the one who offered him the look of the bristles, curl on his forehead, toothpick and other gimmicks that made him so recognizable in the field in which he worked.
He underwent a successful rehab process, for a change, and also psychological treatment that helped him deal for the first time in his life with that shooting incident from his past.
When he recovered, and even entered the WWE Hall of Fame in 2014, Hall looked better than ever.
Since then he has occasionally wound up on company broadcasts, not as an active wrestler, but as an act of nostalgia that is always fun to remember.
He has spent his last years quite pleasantly, communicating with fans and meeting them and interviewing a lot.
At one time, it seemed like the end of Hollywood - Ramon-Hall, nicknamed the "bad guy", survived the inferno, conquered the bad years and experienced a renaissance at a late age.
But the body does not forget so easily, and on March 14 this year Hall's body decided to repay him for everything he had done to himself for quite a few years.
It almost won a Hollywood ending.
At the inauguration of the WWE Hall of Fame in 2014, Photo: EP
Scott Hall's story is basically the story of a host of actors and actresses, rock stars or athletes, but it is also a story of an industry that for many years has eluded real supervision.
Yes, here and there she was watched, but most of the time she managed to evade giving honest answers about what was really going on in her - whether it was changing her definition from a sport to an "entertainment sport" (which exempted her from various government regulations), to a variety of ways to trick drugs and steroids.
Today, WWE is a company of a completely different nature.
Her wrestlers avoid a life of debauchery and self-destruction, invest in body care, prefer to play PlayStation instead of going to a bar at the end of a show, and manage successful social media accounts.
For them, more than being a childhood hero, Scott Hall is a warning sign.
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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