AEW star Billy Gunn: “Nowadays, nobody knows how to work – they’re lazy”
During an interview with All Real Wrestling Podcast, AEW star Billy Gunn said the following in regards to making a connection with the wrestling audience…
“Nowadays, nobody knows how to work. They don’t know how to work in general. Working is like—yes, we get it, back in the ’80s isn’t going to work now. Because they’ve taken it so far to the extreme that you have to have very good basic storytelling for me to follow along, for me to see somebody actually wrestle.
So for me to advertise a match—hey, me and you are going to wrestle. Nobody wants to see me and you wrestle because nobody understands wrestle, because there’s no conflict.
People just don’t want to see two people wrestle, except for people that wrestle and think they’re going to mark out for you because, one, they know the moves that you’re doing. The people do not. They know some of them, but they don’t know all the setup to everything.
So the really only conflict we need is, hey, how about this? We were walking down the street and you happened to slap my wife on the butt, as a light fake. So now there’s a little bit of tension there, right? So now I want to see Billy beat you up for touching his wife.
So there has to be—and again, these are all just my perceptions of what we need to do—there has to be a reason for me to fight. There has to be a reason for somebody to like me and hate you, right? Just because we’re gonna wrestle—how do you like, I don’t understand how you get into that. You just don’t.
Sure, there’s a handful of people that will get into that, but I don’t want you. I don’t want you. I want everybody on the planet to see me, right? Because that’s a star to me.”
Gunn later stated the following…
“In the Attitude Era, when I had so much energy, all I said was, ‘Hey, I got two words for you.’ That was it. But there was so much energy. It’s the same thing—they all know it’s coming, so they all get ready, right?
And then when I’m at the end and they all blow, it is so loud. To this day, it’s still loud, and it’s still not old, and people love to do it, right?
It can be done the same way with wrestling moves. Everybody just doesn’t know how to work, and they’re lazy.”