The Importance of…10.17.08: The New Age Outlaws

Chinjury Report
Quick notes on the past week in wrestling

-My personal life has sucked hard enough of late that I decided to do something out of character this Sunday, ordering my first TNA pay per view. What can I say? A good night of wrestling is usually enough to lift my spirits for a bit.

Simply put, this was not a good night of wrestling. The show started out all right with an entertaining, if clusterf*cky Terror Dome match. The AJ Styles-Christian Cage-Booker T triple threat worked well enough for me, in that TNA allowed it to be a bit of a re-coming out party for AJ, while letting Booker maintain some cred when he picked up the win. Monster’s Ball was a decent brawl.

Beyond that, what the hell did I pay for? The mixed tag was utterly forgettable. The X-Division and Knockouts title matches were little better than elongated Impact matches. Jeff Jarrett-Kurt Angle—the match I was most looking forward to—wasn’t bad, but ended up hamstrung by Jarrett’s clear ring rust, and the paint-by-numbers, cliched booking that ended it. And then there was the Samoa Joe-Sting debacle. For one, I hate it when a non-hardcore match spills out of the ring for more than thirty seconds. The match-starting brawl through the stands made no sense occurring after the opening bell, and should have made for a double count-out. This is the same reason I maintain that Undertaker-Triple H at Wrestlemania X-7 is so overrated, but at least in that one, the ref was knocked out during the brawl. In this one, Earl Hebner was right there with the guys, and to make matters worse, was caught on camera clearly laughing with an audience member during the ‘intense’ fight. From there, Mike Tenay and Don West further confirmed their status as one of the most embarrassingly awful announce teams in wrestling history with their BS broadcasting at the finish. Kevin Nash comes out, and everyone watching smells a rat. From there, Tenay and West go on and on about how Nash is clearly there to help Joe—is there any clearer way to foreshadow a swerve? The swerve was no surprise, and it was made all the worse that this crap closed the main event of what is supposed to be TNA’s biggest show of the year. Rest assured, I won’t be ordering a TNA PPV again anytime soon—probably ever.

On to our regular column…

This is the story of two men, who emerged from unlikely circumstances to form one of the most over tag teams in the history of professional wrestling. They are the Road Dogg Jesse James, the Bad Ass Billy Gunn, The New Age Outlaws!

The Road Dogg was born into a wrestling family, a son of “Bullet” Bob Armstonrg. By the time he got in the ring, just about everyone wrestling under the Armstrong name was a lower-mid-card guy in WCW, or a player in the indies. The guy didn’t carve much of a niche for himself until he made his way to WWF, where, if not a major player, he at least developed an identity as country music singing Jeff Jarrett’s sidekick, The Roadie. Before long, it was revealed that he was more than a roadie, but was actually the true voice behind Jarrett’s music, which led to his modest push, as he played Virgil to Jarrett’s Ted Dibiase.

Enter Billy Gunn. He started his mainstream career teaming with his on-screen brother, Bart, in the cowboy tag team of The Smoking Gunns. The were a lower card team for a bit, before the tag ranks thinned out enough for them to be title contenders, and then the pre-eminent team of the promotion. The gimmick never went particularly far, though, and eventually led to a lukewarm heel turn for Billy, and an unremarkable singles run, for which he was managed by The Honky Tonk Man as Rockabilly.

By most conventional logic, The Road Dogg and Billy Gunn should not have been a good tag team. They didn’t look anything alike. They didn’t wrestle alike. They didn’t have a history. Basically, all that was tying them was that they were a pair of mid-carders with fairly random, musically-related gimmicks. And yet, it was this pairing that elevated both men to a level of unforeseen significance in the business.

Road Dogg could rile up a crowd on the mic like few others, and Billy could hold his own on the stick as well. With their efforts combined, they got over each and every night before they even hit the ring—their guitar riff and line of “Oh, you didn’t know…” becoming one of the great catchphrases of the time period. As for the wrestling, it wasn’t fantastic, but it wasn’t horrible either, allowing the two men to thrive off of each other’s different styles—Billy bringing his power and aerial game; Road Dogg straight up brawling, and combining to pop the crowd with their signature spots every time. The brash duo fit right in with the Attitude Era, and fit just as well with DX, rounding out a stable defined by attitude. They proceeded to have quite a run, highlighted by matches with The Legion of Doom, and a memorable, if odd program against Cactus Jack and Chainsaw Charlie that included a Wrestlemania dumpster match..

In time, The New Age Outlaws split, and neither man was quite the same. Billy got a push with a King of the Ring tournament win. Next up, though, was a program with the Rock, in which he was completely outclassed on the mic, and kayfabe taken apart in the ring. Despite the push, Gunn was not over, and no one bought him on The Rock’s level. Road Dogg, meanwhile, killed time on the hardcore scene and teaming with X-Pac. There was brief Outlaws reunion, but when Billy got injured, it was the deathknoll for the team. Billy hung around the mid-card for a few years. Road Dogg got rowdy with K-Kwik. Neither man was quite the same.

Both members of the Outlaws found their way to TNA, after they’d done all they could in the WWF. TNA didn’t hide the history, and tried for a bit of intrigue in having the guys be stablemates in the 2 or 3 or 4 Live Kru, in which no one but The Road Dogg trusted Billy. This culminated in a re-hash of Outlaw antics, as the two broke loose as The James Gang. This wasn’t a bad idea, in theory, as people tend to get behind nostalgia acts, and it’s not like the two had anything more interesting going on. And yet, through a combination of the talents involved, the booking around them, and the stellar tag scene in TNA for much of their run, The James Gang/Voodoo Kin Mafia never really seemed to hit their stride. For a while, TNA went so far as to remove them from the traditional tag scene, putting them in an unusual publicity stunt of a program against the WWE and the new version of DX, then putting them into a bizarre misogynistic program against Christy Hemme. Then, all at once, we got the split and lackluster feud—a lackluster feud that led to nothing for either man, who, to this day wallow in the lower card, jobbing to guys who actually have a direction.

And so, like many stars who overstay their time in the wrestling spotlight, The New Age Outlaw legacy seems a bit tarnished based upon their lackluster later years in TNA. Nonetheless, they demonstrated the ability of skilled mic men to get over, specifically when they were allowed to be their creative selves, free of lame musician gimmicks. In getting themselves over, despite the odds, I think of The Outlaws as a poor man’s Hollywood Blonds—brash, individualistic, and unpredictably capable of complementing each other to an absurd degree. The funny thing is that, despite being less talented than Austin and Pillman, The Outlaws are all the more historically significant because WWF bookers had the sense to let them run with the ball, rather than cut them off because they were getting more over than writers had intended. The Outlaws made their own success, and in doing so, have a place as one of the most important tag teams in wrestling history.

That’s all for this column. Next week, we conclude our series on DX alumni, with a look at the importance of Tori.