As WWE transitioned out of the Attitude Era and Ruthless Aggression began to take shape, new stars arose and a number of talents from years before shifted into new gimmicks and creative directions. One such shift saw Billy Gunn strike up an unlikely tag team with WCW alum Chuck Palumbo.
They were athletic big men with chiseled physiques, all of which made sense. However, no one would have guessed at the direction the Billy and Chuck pairing would take with their matching bleach blond hair, headbands, and heavy suggestions there might be a romantic undercurrent to the partnership between the two.
The Male Equivalent To Trish Stratus And Stacy Keibler
Billy Gunn is currently pulling double duty as both an on-air talent and behind-the-scenes coach for AEW. He made a recent visit to Renee Paquette’s podcast, The Sessions (h/t 411mania) where he spoke about a variety of dimensions of his career. That included his polarizing tag team with Chuck Palumbo. While the duo did win tag team gold together in WWE, their every in-ring accomplishment wound up overshadowed by the controversial suggestion they might be a romantic couple and particularly their commitment ceremony on an episode of WWE SmackDown.
Gunn told Paquette that, more so than courting controversy, the original premise of the team was actually to emulate more of what the women--some of them icons, some of them now forgotten pieces of the Ruthless Aggression Era--were doing in WWE at the time. “We had all the Trishs and the Stacys and all the super hot girls that just had everything. They had makeup people,” Gunn explained. “And it was, ‘Hey, we have this idea that you guys are like divas. Like we’ll give you the hairdressers, the blow dryers and all that.’”
Gunn went on to note, “I wanted something to challenge me and to try to pull that off and make the WWE Universe think that I was gay was good.” The man had been a WWE mainstay dating back to his run with kayfabe brother Bart as The Smoking Gunns in the New Generation era, so it both stood to reason he’d want to do something new, and remained the case that he could pull off a diverse range of characters.
Billy Gunn Had Fun Going Outside The Box With Chuck Palumbo
The results of Billy and Chuck were largely successful, as the tag team is still talked about to this day. Gunn recalled, “We had a conversation, ‘Hey, if we do this, we have to go all in. It’s not going to be anything disgusting or raunchy, so we don’t have to worry about that. But I’m sure that we’re going to do some crazy things just to plant it in people’s minds.’” While some parties were offended with Billy and Chuck—either out of homophobic motivations, or because they thought their portrayal of potentially gay characters was disrespectful—the general reception was largely positive for the team.
Gunn credits their success to their commitment to the gimmick. “We both had to be invested and we both had to do it 100 percent,” he said, “whether we fall flat on our faces or not.”
Billy And Chuck Was One Chapter In One Of The Greatest Tag Team Wrestling Careers Of All Time
Billy Gunn was one of the greatest tag team wrestlers in WWE history, particularly in terms of not only wins and losses, but pulling them off with a diverse array of partners. That includes winning two tag team titles with Bart Gunn, five with The Road Dogg, and his last two with Chuck Palumbo to add up to an impressive total of ten. That’s a mark second only to Edge, who enjoyed a total of twelve reigns over his career. Gunn also had degrees of success teaming with other partners, including The Big Show and Bob Holly in WWE, Monty Brown in TNA, and more recently his sons in AEW.
Additionally, Gunn won the Pro Wrestling Illustrated Tag Team of the Year Award with both Road Dogg and Chuck. While not everyone considers these fan-voted, largely kayfabe awards that prestigious, it’s nonetheless a testament to Gunn’s enduring success in this dimension of wrestling that he garnered the honor with different partners—a rare feat.
In his conversation with Renee Paquette, Billy Gunn went into the good, bad, and awkward of his partnership with Chuck Palumbo. From finding real tag team chemistry bell to bell, to keeping a straight face while they posed for photo shoots on the beach, the team was truly one of a kind. While fans saw many versions of Gunn in particular across decades, he achieved some of his biggest success with Palumbo, rooted in an outside the box premise.