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Usually, when my feelings on a match differ from the consensus, or because I am absolutely not special, probably when most people’s feelings differ from a common consensus, you can split it into one of two categories.
The first one is the easiest, and it’s simply not liking a match, or sometimes, even hating it. This is, frankly, the route I prefer, because it’s much easier and more mentally freeing to just hate something entirely. The second, which is a thousand times more frustrating, is not understanding why people like it this much. Usually, this is so frustrating because it’s very hard to balance the initial urge to lash out that’s fed by the immediate feeling of alienation (as there is virtually nothing as off-putting as not liking something enough) with the reminder that, hey wait, you actually did like this thing a lot. The backlash, or negative gut reaction is almost never to the thing itself in this scenario.
Jon Moxley vs. Wheeler YUTA is a textbook category two.
I like it.
It’s a great fucking match.
This is not a match without flaw though.
Most obviously, the booking is not perfect, and it has a way of hindering the match. The goal is admirable, pushing Wheeler up the card with this bloody gutsy showing against the company Ace, but it’s less something handled with force and more something bluntly hurled out there in all caps. The result is that by yelling about it and going to extremes like YUTA kicking out of both Paradigm Shift variations — feeling somewhat like a lack of confidence in the audience to not love it or buy in without a finisher kick out in a damning but probably accurate indictment — the soft touch that has helped concepts like this succeed throughout wrestling history is removed, and at least for me, it becomes hard not to notice the blinking sign above the soundstage. In short, Wheeler YUTA doesn’t quite feel as though he’s earned all of the extremes the match offers, the real problem with a lot of the Moxley run far more than all the bleeding, and so its central premise is one that I think it falls just a little bit short of.
It’s hard to genuinely feel something, at least for me, when it’s so obvious that I’m being yelled at to feel that thing.
Lead a man with a horse head mask to water, and that sort of a thing.
Another part is that, while good, Wheeler YUTA is also not exactly perfect here either. The bleeding is, genuinely, astonishing and does like 60% of the work for him, but I won’t act like that’s all there is. His energetic start and many of his comebacks are good, but for what the match asks of him — as well as the reaction it got after the fact — he come up a little short. I won’t say he feels phony exactly, but it feels as though there’s a level this match suggests he hits that he doesn’t get to. It’s the stage and script for a star making performance that never totally feels complete. Chalk it up to a lack of total believability against Moxley late in the match as a character (not helped in retrospect by Wheeler’s booking in the two years and counting since) but his offense is also not all that great, and in moments of what ought to be these big emotional classical babyface moments, it’s very very clear why the most natural Wheeler YUTA work has been as a scientific heel.
To put it short, it’s a match with a clear ceiling, and while they absolutely hurl themselves in it with enough force to put a surprising amount of pressure on and even some cracks in that ceiling, only so much is possible given the limitations.
Having said all of that, the match still rules so much.
For every problem with the match I have, and have had and just now really found a way to articulate to the best of my ability, I am not made of stone. I see a match with one of the best and easiest set ups in wrestling, one getting maybe 80% of it right minimum, and I can’t not get SOMETHING out of it. Further more, show me a match with as much blood spilled as this, and one that is as simple and clear-sighted about it as this match is,
The thing too is that all of those flaws also have great counterweights.
Yes, Wheeler looks out of his depth, but there’s a genuinely fair argument that in a match where the point is him fighting out of his body and above his abilities, that might work out for the best. Yes, absolutely, it is not subtle, but despite the intellectual overconfidence of many AEW fans, this has never been the place for that and on top of the decision makers, some of these people also need the raw blunt force shot to get something rather than the slower knife. It’s an excessive match, absolutely, but when given the option, I would almost always experience something — in any artistic medium — that goes for it compared with one that doesn’t.
It doesn’t mean that those flaws aren’t still there, bad acts don’t wash out the good nor do good the bad, but they’re decisions I mostly get and sympathize with. It means that while I still think the acclaim around this match largely stems from many people either not having seen something like this before or being so starved for it at the time, in the same way, I also mostly understand it.
Moxley eventually chokes the kid out to win.
It perhaps takes a little long, and it perhaps goes a little too far. It is, no perhaps about it, not even a little bit subtle. However, as many of you know either through reading it over and over or simply on a gut level, subtlety is for cowards, and absolutely nothing about this match is cowardly.
Very few matches better sum up AEW than this.
For all its flaws, it’s a gigantic swing that mostly works. Not quite a home run, but a hit leading to multiple runs, and given how rare both efforts like this and the success in them have become in AEW in the time since, it’s still something to relish, and one of the better examples (if not the best one from April 2022) of just how great this company was at its best, and maybe more importantly, not only how great it can be again, but just how great and easy pro wrestling can be sometimes.
***1/4
HANDWERK 