Rick Bognar, who played “Fake Razor Ramon”, spoke with ESPN for a new interview. Some of the highlights are below:
On how his time in ECW set up his ‘Razor Ramon’ run: “I’ve always kind of played around with characters and accents and goofed off with things like that. I was in ECW, and Paul E. Dangerously says to me, ‘Here’s what I want you to do in this 6-man tag match.’ I pulled a kind of Razor Ramon character from my back pocket, just for a joke. I said, ‘What the hell do you want me to do, mang?’ He freaked out and said, ‘Oh my god, oh my god. Can you do that out there?’”
On why his run as Razor did not work as planned: “I tried to fill those boots, fill those shoes, that Scott Hall had built such a huge reputation on. I thought it wasn’t going to fly that well, but it was my chance to get to work in the States after I’d been going to Japan for quite a while. I was frustrated and let down, but I know they had their plans and their bigger picture. For me, now, it’s one of those things I let go of.”
On his post-wrestling life as a transformational speaker: “The injuries, the letdowns, the times going between different territories in Japan and Germany — these were all really down times. I didn’t know how to have a relationship while I was on the road all the time. As I started to figure these things out and looked at, maybe not necessarily my mistakes, but my troubles and my challenges through all that, I thought, ‘Okay, what’s the opposite? How do I improve that?’ I didn’t want to feel the sadness, the emptiness, the melancholy of it all anymore. It was powerful on me, and it had a huge negative effect, especially when I was on the road. [Once I pulled myself out of that], I wanted to give that gift back to people. I wanted to pass that information on — find fulfillment by seeing them grow as a human being and better their lives. I want to help people turn it around and transform, so they can have the same kind of happiness I’ve found.”
