Kevin Nash broke the tragic news on March 14 that former WWE Intercontinental Champion Scott Hall will be taken off of life support when his “family is in place.”
Hall, 63, suffered multiple heart attacks a few days previously and was reported to be on life support.
Hall had been hospitalized earlier in March after breaking his hip in a fall. The heart attacks were related to a dislodged blood clot.
In his Instagram post, Nash spoke about how in 1996, he and Hall, then two of the biggest stars for Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment, then known as the World Wrestling Federation, made the controversial move to rival company World Championship Wrestling. Hall’s Razor Ramon was so popular that WWE attempted to have a different wrestler portray the character after Hall moved to WCW.
Nash wrote in part, “When we jumped to WCW we didn’t care who liked or hated us. We had each other and with the smooth Barry Bloom we changed wrestling both in content and pay for those……a lot that disliked us.”
Barry Bloom is regarded as a ‘super agent’ in the world of professional wrestling
During his career, Barry Bloom has managed stars such as Brock Lesnar, Bill Goldberg, Chris Jericho, and Triple H, according to a 2002 news article.
Bloom’s first client in professional wrestling was future Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, a superstar in wrestling during the 1980s.
Pro wrestling scribe Dave Metzler wrote in 2020 that Bloom was representing WWE star Drew Guliak. Metzler said, “WWE generally doesn’t like it when talent hires agents. The funny thing is that Bloom used to represent Paul Levesque and was the most well known agent for wrestlers dating back to the 80s when he represented Jesse Ventura, and his clients include some of the biggest names in the industry today.”
In 2018, Barry Bloom was said to be working with Chris Jericho and Jim Ross to establish AEW
In October 2018, SEScoops reported that Barry Bloom was working with WWE legends Jim Ross and Chris Jericho to establish a new wrestling company. The story said that Bloom was taking meetings in Japan related to the project. That project would eventually become All Elite Wrestling, which launched in January 2019.
It’s not clear what role, if any, Bloom has in AEW. As of January 2019, Bloom represents wrestler Kenny Omega, a vice president within AEW. SEScoops reported in September 2019 that Bloom represented most of the top talent AEW.
Former WCW President Eric Bischoff wouldn’t ‘p**s on Bloom if he was on fire’
According to one of Barry Bloom’s former clients, Sean Waltman, aka X-Pac, one person who will not work with Bloom is former WCW President Eric Bischoff. At one point, Bloom did represent Bischoff too. Waltman said in an interview, “Eric told me he wouldn’t p**s on him if he saw him on fire now. Yeah, no, he does not like Barry now.”
Waltman went on to say that Bischoff’s issue came from the fact that Bloom promised the WCW president that he wouldn’t play his clients against the various companies vying for their services. As Waltman put it, “He had no choice. Like, he has a fiduciary responsibility to his clients, not WCW. He can’t possibly live up to that promise and honor his fiduciary responsibility.”
Barry Bloom credits wrestling’s renewed success with the industry becoming open about the fact that it’s all a show
In 1999, as professional wrestling went through a major boom period, Barry Bloom was quoted by The Hollywood Reporter as saying that the reason for the success was that wrestlers were open about the fact that it was all a show.
Bloom said, “Instead of spending energy trying to figure out if it’s real or fake, people accepted it as a legitimate form of entertainment and became more interested in execution.” Bloom continued, “They were finally able to get deeply involved in the characters and storylines and found themselves enmeshed in a sort of athletic soap opera.”