Billy Gunn on AEW’s “Brawl Out” incident: “If you’re a young little buckaroo and you want to poke the bear, get ready to get bit”
WWE Hall of Famer Billy Gunn spoke with Kenny McIntosh in an interview published to the Inside The Ropes YouTube channel. Here is an excerpt…
McIntosh: “[CM] Punk debuted in 2021, and then there were these nights in wrestling that people talk about, like Montreal and All Out 2022, where Punk did the press conference and then there was an incident backstage. You were in AEW at that point. Were you seeing this stuff going on? Were you thinking, ‘What are we going to do?’ How were you looking at it as someone in AEW?”
Gunn: “So, I wasn’t around for that, and I don’t watch any of that media stuff. It’s got nothing to do with me. It’s just whatever. It’s for them to talk or whatever.
I knew about the incident that happened back then, which was what it was. They just have to realize that sometimes there are certain veterans who just aren’t going to put up with that sh*t, no matter what. If you’re a young little buckaroo and you want to poke the bear, get ready to get bit.
So, I think that’s what happened. I don’t know all the details. That’s between them. And, of course, the media stuff—I don’t watch that because it’s got nothing to do with me either.”
McIntosh: “Back in the day, if something happened for real backstage, it would be like, ‘Let’s make an angle out of it.’ You’d work together and do something.”
Gunn: “They do, but nothing like that. Vince [McMahon] had things under control really well.
There’s this couple of things: I don’t have to like you to wrestle with you or work with you. I don’t have to like you. I don’t have to do anything. I just have to do business.
And mostly, 99.9% of the guys always did that.
There’d be that every speck now and then where you’d pull someone into a room. You pull them into a room, shut the door. You don’t do it out in public, and I don’t do it in front of the boys.
If I have something bad to say about coaching and I’m about to lose my sh*t, I don’t do it in front of people. I take them somewhere where nobody else can hear it because it’s nobody else’s business.
You pull them into a room, shut the door, and go, ‘All right, here we go. What are we doing? If you’ve got a problem, we need to fix it now.’ We’ll fix it now so when we walk out the door, we don’t have a problem anymore.”
And that’s how grown-ass people deal with sh*t.”