Billy Gunn calls Triple H’s AEW comments a ‘d*ck move

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In April of 2019, Billy Gunn was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame as a member of D-Generation X. Gunn had just taken a job with Tony Khan’s All Elite Wrestling, which launched as a WWE “challenger brand” a few months earlier. Billy was given permission to take part in the ceremony, during which D-X star and WWE executive Shawn Michaels made a joke about the ROH/independent show ALL IN that served as proof of concept for AEW, and fellow D-Generate and higher-ranking exec Paul “Triple H” Levesque called it a “pissant company”. Gunn looked back on that moment in an interview he did last month with Inside The Ropes: “I knew it was coming. I kind of knew they were going to do something AEW because it was hot at the time and I was there and they were all wondering how I got to go there, and that’s because Tony Khan was super cool. I went, asked, and he said ‘100%. Of course you can. I would never hold you back from that.’ “I didn’t know what they were gonna do, but I knew they were going to do something. I also knew that if they were, Hunter was going to have something to say. Once I set myself up for that, I just let it go. The only one that got hurt out of that whole deal was him. I don’t want to say it, but it was a dick move. It was kind of trying to save face, and you didn’t need to because it’s going to happen. “It’s the wrestling business. It’s what we do. They like to stir up shit. When you have somebody in another company, which was me, they can’t believe it, and then you see me, they have to do it. It’s like an unwritten thing in a book. ‘If another guy is in another company, we have to say or do something.’ They started chanting it [the crowd had done the Young Bucks ”too sweet, whoop, whoop” chant], and you get a response from the guy leading the company.” The chant could have been answered with something about The Bucks specifically, but I also don’t think anyone was too surprised that AEW took fire — probably not even Tony Khan. In the end, it actually served as good publicity for a while, until Punk’s run with TK’s fed ultimately made things very tribal in the pro wrestling world. Did it seem outrageous to you at the time? How about in retrospect? Weigh in below.