Gunner is calling it a career.
Sunday night marked the final match in Gunner/Jaxson Ryker’s career. The former TNA/WWE star competed against George South for AML Wrestling in Salisbury, North Carolina.
Gunner (real name Chad Lail) previously announced his plans to retire this year. He said he had multiple bookings lined up in the summer, with the final one taking place on August 27. Gunner said that pro wrestling was no longer his identity and he knew it was time to move on.
Lail spent several years performing as Gunner in TNA/IMPACT Wrestling before he signed with WWE in May 2017. He primarily spent his run as a member of the Forgotten Sons stable on NXT and SmackDown. The Forgotten Sons were pulled from television after Ryker expressed his support for President Donald Trump during the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd protests in June 2020. He later returned to WWE TV as a singles wrestler, but he was ultimately released on November 18, 2021, reportedly due to budget cuts.
Read More: Jaxson Ryker Says He’s ‘Not Bitter’ Following WWE Release
Quick To Turncoat
Gunner appeared on the ‘Wrestling With The Faith‘ podcast to discuss his WWE departure and how people turned on him.
“I’m not going to ask for anybody to defend me. What I would say was folks that I worked with that I thought were my friends or thought were my companions. were quick to turncoat. There were some tweets that went out from coworkers. Not gonna name any names, don’t think it’s important. But there was tweets that went out from co-workers that fueled the fire. I was like, ‘What in the world?’ Like the majority of you guys know who I am as a person and for you to you to do this to make this look like this tweet was some kind of racial hate speech bigot, whatever you want to call it.
“That’s really what started to bother me. So yeah, man. I mean, my address was tweeted out [and] people threatening my family. It was ridiculous. I mean, people calling my phone like I said, random numbers. So of course, you know, it’s 2022 and now it’s very easy to access all this stuff and I was just blown away. Like I was sitting here on my couch and my wife once she found out the tweet, even she was like, ‘there was nothing wrong with that tweet, like what is going on?’”
