After the mass exodus of talent from the WWF in the early to mid 90’s, Titan was left with a rather gaping hole in their lineup. Bobby Heenan, Hulk Hogan, Lex Luger, Randy Savage, and a host of others had all left the Federation for the greener (as in dollars) pastures of WCW.
The two most devastating departures, however, came in the guise of Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. They had been two of Vince’s most popular stars under the names of “Big Daddy Cool” Diesel and Razor Ramon.
After the two went to WCW and formed the nWo, rumors began circulating that Razor and Diesel were returning to the WWF. After a short period of these rumors, a source no less credible than Jim Ross himself said that Diesel and Razor WERE coming home.
The problem is, they weren’t going to be played by Hall and Nash.
“Diesel” was played by Glen Jacobs, who is now known the world over as Kane (but who also suffered the indignity of being Jerry Lawler’s evil dentist, Isaac Yankem, DDS). He was a couple of inches shorter than Nash, but may have actually been a bit more muscular.
“Razor” was a guy by the name of Rick Bognar, who had achieved a measure of fame in Japan as, ironically enough, Big Titan. He was a quite a bit shorter than Hall, and had a something of a gut to him, which made the gimmick (to those of us here, at least) somewhat humorous.
Fans quickly booed them out of the building, but not before Jim Ross did a worked-shoot interview on Vince McMahon that sent smarts all over the net into a tizzy.
After this bombed, a rumor was quickly started that the WWF put these men out there in an attempt to prove that the characters “Razor Ramon” and “Diesel” were no longer of value to the company, and that WCW was, in fact, having Hall and Nash continue to portray these characters, just without using their names. Ummmm…right.
The most ironic part of the whole deal? Just two years earlier, the company ran a series of ads with a fake Razor that was captioned, “WWF – Accept no Substitutes!”