THE NEW AGE OUTLAWS
Road Dogg & Billy Gunn
1997 - 2015 (on and off)
WWE Tag Team Championship (six times)
WWE Hall of Fame
Written by ZAH
When you think back to the Attitude Era, one of the biggest tag teams that truly defined the attitude of the time was The New Age Outlaws. Most fans don’t remember, though, that this was a team that kind of came out of nowhere to “grab the brass ring” and have an incredibly successful run.
“The Road Dogg” Jesse James and “Rockabilly” were actually feuding in late 1997 before, via storyline, they simply stopped and decided to team up together. Rockabilly became “Bad Ass” Billy Gunn and Jesse James simply became The Road Dogg. Showing an all-new attitude, the team would attack other tag teams, pull wins out of nowhere by cheating, and rely on Road Dogg’s mic skills to get them over prior to their matches (as opposed to a theme song, which would come later).
The team defeated The Legion of Doom for the WWE World Tag Team Championships only a month after they began teaming together. Once picking up their “New Age Outlaws” nickname after that match was over, it wasn’t long before their hard work paid off and were brought into the D-Generation X stable by Triple H the day after WrestleMania XIV.
The team eventually moved on from WWE and joined TNA, becoming The James Gang (with Road Dogg becoming B.G. James and Billy Gunn becoming Kip James) in 2006. Of course, they quickly became the Voodoo Kin Mafia (a take-off of Vincent Kennedy McMahon’s initials…ugh) and declared “war” on WWE in an effort to get over.
The Outlaws were back in WWE in 2014 and even became WWE World Tag Team Champions by defeating Goldust and Cody Rhodes at the Royal Rumble.
While only holding the titles for a couple of months, it was still extremely impressive to have won championships 14 years after the last time around and went to prove just how talented these two individuals were.
While they each had singles careers and have done numerous behind-the-scenes duties over the years, you cannot deny the incredible success of six WWE World Tag Team Championships between 1997 and 2014.
These two are definitely one of my all-time favourite teams.