8 WWE Tag Team Stars Who Couldn't Cut It As Singles
Sometimes you just can’t make it on your own.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a career tag team wrestler. Hell, some guys have gotten their place in various professional wrestling Hall of Fames based on their work in doubles competition. Wrestling needs tag teams and some guys were just made to work in pairs.
Few get into the business hoping to become a tag team lifer, however. While some may want to emulate the success of their heroes (how many guys getting into the business name the likes of the Road Warriors and the British Bulldogs as inspiration?), they must also harbour a desire to go it alone and make a name for themselves, by themselves.
Regrettably for those performers, a great tag team wrestler does not a great singles wrestler make. Oftentimes, a tag teamer will split from his partner only to fail to cut it in the singles ranks, bombing badly. Sometimes, this will happen over and over again to the same wrestler, cementing their status as a tag team guy for life.
Whether it was because of politics, bad timing or the fact that the audience just wouldn't accept them on their own, these eight guys were all pretty damn good tag team wrestlers who couldn't move past that and attain singles glory.
8. Billy Gunn
Ah, Billy Gunn. No matter how many times WWE tried to position him as a major singles star, it just never quite seemed to work. He was destined to remain in the tag team scene, were he enjoyed considerable success with numerous partners.
Billy boy's first tag team stint was with 'brother' Bart, as a member of the mid-90s friendly Smokin' Gunns. The Gunns were a solid midcard act and captured the WWE Tag Team Titles three times in their three-and-a-half years together. The inevitable split occurred and Billy moved on to a doomed 'Rockabilly' gimmick, with Honky Tonk Man as his manager.
'The Real Double J' Jesse James realised that both of their careers were going nowhere and so the two formed an alliance. Really, this was WWE management just throwing two guys together because they had nothing else for them to do, but they made the best of it and completely turned their careers around.
The New Age Outlaws, as they became to be known, were one of the most over acts of the Attitude Era, so over that they found themselves becoming members of the ultra-popular D-Generation X group. Billy had some great times as a member of DX, but WWE brass always viewed him as a future singles star.
He was taken away from the group, dubbed 'Mr. A**', won the 1999 King of the Ring and entered into a feud with The Rock. Regrettably, Gunn was outclassed in that feud and it did nothing for his reputation. It was, in fact, a setback and he soon found himself teaming up with The Road Dogg again.
By the time Gunn returned from a shoulder injury in the fall of 2000, WWE had decided to try their luck with him once more. Now known as 'The One', Gunn was given an Intercontinental Title reign and placed in main event scenarios and, while he was over, it didn't last (which he later claimed was due to the backstage politics of Triple H).
It was a familiar story from them on, with Gunn finding himself teaming with Big Show, Chuck Palumbo and then Hardcore Holly in between half-hearted singles pushes, before he was released in November 2004. A brief singles run in TNA as The Outlaw didn't set the world on fire, either.