WWE Hall of Famer Mark Henry knows all about making the decision to hang up one’s boots following Billy Gunn’s retirement tease last week.
Following Gunn and The Acclaimed’s loss to the House of Black on last week’s AEW Collision, Gunn left his boots in the ring, a traditional sign of retiring.
Speaking on “Busted Open Radio,” Mark Henry, who last competed in 2018, weighed in on the situation. He said,
“Billy is 58 years old. He don’t look 58, but there comes a time when you just can’t do it no more — not at the level that you feel like you should be at. Or the emotions may have gotten to him. I mean, he did lose. Did they lose because of him? Was there something where he felt like, ‘Sh**, if I was better, if I was younger,’ and then the emotion overwhelms you and you just make a knee-jerk reaction, maybe that’s it.
“We’ll find out, but I’ve been there before. It wasn’t about the losing. It was about how I saw the way I looked on screen. I’m like, ‘Damn. I lost a step.’ And when I see it, I know the fans see it. So that was it for me. I didn’t ever want to look like that again, and maybe [Billy] just saw himself slip.”
Henry infamously faked a retirement speech in WWE in 2013 before attacking John Cena, setting up a match between the two for that year’s Money in the Bank event.
