Billy Gunn Says AEW “A Little On The Wild West Side”
Having experience with both WWE and AEW, Billy Gunn has compared the differences between the two promotions’ structures in terms of their structure.
There is an abundance of current AEW performers and personnel who’ve wrestled for WWE previously in their career; among them is Billy Gunn. ‘The Bad Ass’ was a stalwart of the Attitude Era’s tag team scene alongside New Age Outlaws partner Road Dogg, and later served in a handful of backstage roles.
In All Elite Wrestling, this remains the case. Gunn is aligned once more with The Acclaimed while working as a backstage coach. Speaking to Renee Paquette on her podcast The Sessions, Billy Gunn detailed the stark contrast between the two:
“Being in that WWE structure for so long, luckily I was there for fourteen years, then I took a break or got fired. I say break, it’s really fired. So I’m very used to that, I am a very structured person. In the wrestling business, the more structured you are, the better things are cause it’s not, ‘Hey, I tell you this, you tell me that, I tell this, they come back and tell me, I go over your head and get another answer and now everybody’s mad at me.’
So that’s very uneasy for me. Up [in WWE], there’s one thing and if you don’t like it, you ask that one person and they said, ‘No, you’ll do it’, so you do it that way. I’m not saying it’s not good at AEW, I’m just saying it’s a little bit on the Wild West side. Which, I guess if you’re used to that, then it’s okay. I am not used to that and that’s the hardest adjustment to get is to understand that kind of dynamic of [needing to be on the same page]. I feel that we still have a little bit of too many people being able to do a bunch of different things.”
Billy Gunn joined AEW in early 2019, being announced as one of the company’s first coaches. The former Gunn Club member shared recently that he holds two contracts with the company, one as an in-ring talent and the other to work behind the scenes.