{"id":2813,"date":"2016-11-22T21:45:44","date_gmt":"2016-11-22T21:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattralston.net\/?p=2813"},"modified":"2016-11-28T21:17:46","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T21:17:46","slug":"drunk-razor-ramon-jumped-shark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/sports\/drunk-razor-ramon-jumped-shark\/","title":{"rendered":"Drunk Razor Ramon Jumped The Shark"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve had reality TV since the 1950’s, but the mid-nineties saw a shift towards celebrating the people you’d move away from at a party. The cast of MTV’s Real World\u00a0<\/em>got progressively less sober, sluttier, and more self-involved. People had always admired the status of people on television, but now they were jealous of people who appeared mentally troubled and didn’t seem capable of contributing to society. Most of them were proudly anti-intellectual. Soon we had the Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo and it was all over.<\/p>\n

This shift towards enlisting, some would say exploiting, some of the least mentally capable people in society for low brow entertainment purposes might best be incapsulated in a series of appearances made by World Championship\u00a0Wrestling’s\u00a0Razor Ramon in the late 90’s. His persona was that of a swarthy Cuban guy directly ripped off from the character of Tony Montana in Scarface<\/em>. In fact one of his trademark phrases was “Say hello to the bad guy,” which was a direct rip-off of Montana’s “Say hello to my little friend.” Ramon’s elbow pads, knee pads, and trunks were all stamped with very poor clip art images of razor blades, most likely a reference to how people use razor blades to chop up\u00a0cocaine.<\/p>\n

It became increasingly obvious that the guy who played Razor Ramon, real name the decidedly less cool Scott Hall, was developing a pretty serious alcohol and drug problem. In a series of nationally televised wrestling events airing over the course of a few weeks, Hall was seen noticeably stumbling around and unable to form basic sentences. Giving a guy with a history of drug abuse and a ton of demons to boot the persona of a notorious coke head and drug dealer may have been, in retrospect, a bad idea.<\/p>\n

It is unclear if the WCW\u00a0attempted to get Hall any treatment. What is clear is that at some point the higher ups decided to make Scott Hall’s substance abuse problem Razor Ramon’s problem by proxy. They literally wrote it into the show as a plot line. Soon, an authentically wasted Razor Ramon was stumbling around the set holding a red Solo cup and making a total ass of himself. At one point, he puked outside the ring during a match. At another point, as part of a loosely constructed storyline, he keyed a limo outside of a nightclub. As it turned out, he was taking a few liberties by doing this and he was arrested for vandalism in real life. People found all of this positively hilarious.\u00a0In my opinion, this was the beginning of the train wreck genre.<\/p>\n