41 Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics In Wrestling History RANKED

36. 1996 - Fake Diesel And Razor Ramon

This was a bad angle, a wretched angle in fact, but nothing more.

It was sad and desperate, too. Via Jim Ross, WWE conned viewers into thinking that Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, on fire in the New World Order, were returning to the promotion. The promise of an earth-shattering event, of course, was not delivered upon. It would have been legally impossible at a minimum. Instead, using their own intellectual property, WWE recast Rick Bognar as Razor and Glenn ‘Kane’ Jacobs as Diesel. Vince McMahon did this because he was spiteful and very gotten-to. He could not cope with WCW’s huge increase in popularity, lashed out, and made his fans suffer through his own bad mood.

He made a fool of himself in the process of telling the world that he, not Ted Turner, owned the rights to two gimmicks. Those two gimmicks, incidentally, were not as over as Hall and Nash essentially playing themselves. It was a pathetic self-own that wrestling fans should have seen the humour in. Instead, they were disgusted.

What’s telling about the 1996 winner is that Hall himself indulged in cultural appropriation to launch the Razor Ramon character four years prior. The character, while memorable and well-performed in spite of it, was a fairly direct lift from the Cuban-American drug lord portrayed by Al Pacino in ‘Scarface’.

Wrestling’s wider, uglier history of appropriation and grotesque ethnic stereotypes is barely reflected in the awards - but a bad wrestler impersonating a good one?

That’s too far!