The WORST Wrestling Story Every Year (1989-2025)
1996 - Fake Diesel And Razor Ramon
What’s often lost, amid this notoriously pathetic development, is that Jim Ross was incredible in his role as the pissed-off, browbeaten punching bag out to avenge Vince McMahon. He was almost as good at the heel promo as he was condemning the heels throughout the Attitude Era.
In 1996, Scott ‘Razor Ramon’ Hall and Kevin ‘Diesel’ Nash used their rights as independent contractors to secure for themselves a better deal and lighter schedule with WCW - having bumped on one of wrestling’s hardest ever rings for the entire duration of their contracts with the WWF. They then participated in a fictional storyline dreamed up by their boss, Eric Bischoff, as WCW basically copied Vince’s own recruitment playbook of the 1980s.
An infuriated Vince, realising that he owned the intellectual property, inflicted an imposter Razor and Diesel on his audience, played, respectively, by Rick Bognar and Glenn Jacobs.
The WWF was very aware that it was a sham within the parameters of the story itself; Ross brought in patently phoney doppelgangers precisely to make Vince look like a fool. It was an early, necessary experiment in pushing creative boundaries. It was also a terrible experiment; Vince was gotten-to, and made a spectacular d*ck of himself trying to get one over on WCW. This absolutely did not work, and was the real thrust of the idea behind the meta posturing.
Also, after the Ross angle was dropped, the WWF realised they needed the depth on a tiny, raided roster, and so Fake Razor and Fake Diesel simply became cast members.
In the end, the WWF really did bring back the lamest version of two cool guys and pretended they were the real thing. What’s worse, Hall and Nash were cooler than even the real Razor and Diesel.