I’m old enough to remember when Jay White was wrestling for a world championship in a PPV main event, though to be fair, you only have to be like five months old to remember that. The former IWGP World Heavyweight Champion has officially been with AEW one year as of this coming Friday, and while he didn’t exactly rocket to the top of the card the way some believed he would, things changed in November, when he became embroiled in a feud with AEW World Champion MJF. At long last, “Switchblade” was a contender, and while his Full Gear match with MJF was hilariously overbooked and made White look like he literally couldn’t beat a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, he rebounded nicely via the Continental Classic, where he lost just one match and made the three-way final alongside Jon Moxley and Swerve Strickland. At that point, his record as a singles competitor in AEW (a company that ostensibly cares about such things) was 18-3; MJF, Moxley, and Strickland — two former world champions and one future world champion — were the only people who had beaten him.
Advertisement
As of Wednesday night, you can add 60-year-old Billy Gunn’s name to that list. And yes, Gunn technically won via disqualification, but if you watched the match, you know how completely one-sided it was. After ambushing White from behind during his entrance, Gunn whipped him from pillar to post in a segment that lasted more than 15 minutes and consisted primarily of Gunn and White walking slowly around the ring. Inevitably, Gunn would throw White into something, White would sell, Gunn would pose and talk to the fans, and the cycle would continue. White barely got any offense whatsoever, and none at all until well into the contest. Instead, he spent most of his time begging for Gunn to stop, cringing away from him in fear, fruitlessly hiding behind security guards, and just generally acting completely pathetic. At one point during the picture-in-picture commercial break, White reached out to Gunn with his fingers in scissor position, trying to make amends with Gunn only a few weeks after turning on him. He looked like he didn’t belong in a match for the 24/7 Championship, let alone a world title match.
Advertisement
Things only got worse at the end, when Gunn countered the Blade Runner and hit a pair of Famousers. He clearly could have pinned White at any time, but he went outside the ring for a chair instead. That’s when his sons came down to the ring to plead with their father to spare White’s life, basically. And then White hit Gunn with a blatant low blow right in front of the referee and got disqualified. But despite the fact that Austin and Colten had taken out The Acclaimed backstage, Bullet Club Gold didn’t even get the consolation prize of a post-match beatdown, as Max Caster and Anthony Bowens miraculously recovered in time to make the save, after which they and Gunn beat up White some more (he tried to run away from them, but he even screwed that up; they caught him and dragged him back into the ring). The only thing White and The Gunns succeeded in doing was preventing White from being suplexed through the announce table and then booking it before they could get embarrassed even more. Your ROH Six-Man Tag Team Champions, ladies and gentlemen (they haven’t defended those titles since winning them almost three months ago, by the way).
This honestly might be the worst “Dynamite” match in history. I have plenty of issues with AEW, but if there are two things you can usually rely on, they are (a) the in-ring action will be solid at the very least, and (b) big-name wrestlers they sign from other companies will be treated with more respect than they would in, say, WWE. This was 15 minutes of a guy who held a world title 18 months ago (in a promotion AEW is partnered) with losing the longest, slowest, most boring squash match ever to a guy twice his age who’s never gotten close to a world title at any point in his career. That sucks, this feud sucks, and Jay White should get the hell out of AEW as soon as possible if he values his remaining career.
Advertisement
Written by Miles Schneiderman

Posted in
Tags: 