Jon Moxley vs. Wheeler YUTA, AEW Rampage (4/8/2022)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Shaq. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

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

 

Orange Cassidy vs. Jon Moxley, AEW All Out 2023 (9/3/2023)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Stink Time. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

This was for Cassidy’s AEW International Title.

Having only ever seen this live, it’s different on video, in the usual ways. The blood works even better when you see it up close. Commentary here — at least Taz and Excalibur — is mostly to the match’s benefit. It loses the feeling of live big match major event wrestling somewhat, but it retains those feelings in the major moments. It’s still s impressive to me, because it very easily could not have been.

I didn’t think this would work like it did.

Not just as the main event, in the wake of a thing that I have too many thoughts on to even start to go into it on a piece that isn’t expressly about it (you all have the ability to pay for AEW CM Punk match pieces if you want that), but like, in general.

Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy do not — or did not — feel like wrestlers who I thought would work especially well together.

In saying that, I also have sort of a confession to make, or at least some sort of admission (confession implies a guilt, which is not so much the case as much as it is weird feeling), which is that the Orange Cassidy AEW International Title reign has not been something I really liked a whole lot, in a larger sense, or at least not in the way that a lot of other people have.

Like so many AEW ideas, it’s great on paper, and really great as an overall concept, seen from farther away. A long-term champion who you would not expect to be such a long term champion gaining prestige for himself and a new title. Injuries mounting up on top of each other, only for the champion to find new ways to adjust to it and beating increasingly better wrestlers and bigger names. Run it in TEW, as a fantasy booking bit on a message board, whatever, and it’s really interesting. But in the hands of Orange Cassidy, I didn’t love it. It always felt like a reach. I’m a fan and all — I’d wager I loved the act and more importantly the wrestler before a whole lot of people, he’s a DECADE IN LISTS guy whenever that finally gets done — but something about it always felt a little off. Off in a way that given the strength of the ideas, and how much I tend to like OC (please don’t call him that), and especially something like a chronic hand injury, I always felt like I should have liked more and felt weird about. A collection of good ideas that almost never resulted in a great match and only on a handful of occasions — AR Fox, Swerve Strickland, Yuta, Daniel Garcia — resulted in a match that I thought was actually good.

Great stuff conceptually, but that never came together more than a few times in a long reign, and that I didn’t think Jon Moxley — being one of the realest wrestlers alive, to the extent that I only buy a handful of wrestlers in the company (BCC, Kingston, maybe a Starks or Darby) being able to believably beat him — would be a great fit for it.

That turned out not to be the case.

Sometimes, things happen through force of talent or force of effort, and I would say that’s what happened here. Two great wrestlers, in a rougher spot for the promotion, simply deciding that they are going to have a great match.

Above everything else, the strength of this match is what Jon Moxley does with the idea of Orange Cassidy.

For years, it’s felt like people who wrestle Orange Cassidy want to be in Orange Cassidy matches, rather than figuring out how to channel him like the force of nature that he is, but this match succeeds in large part because Jon Moxley puts him into a Jon Moxley match.

So often during this reign, other wrestlers have been a little too nice and accommodating about the things he does poorly at this point — so many bad strikes — that it can undercut some of his strengths as a pure underdog. Moxley, however, never does that. He treats him like a joke until he proves he isn’t. He takes early offense, but also never sells the weak elbows, mocks him, and in how he treats Orange as an opponent, never quite feels like he’s doing anything all that phony with him or playing along with the act. So often, more serious wrestlers feel like they’re jumping down or going down a level when they do what they do against Orange, but this time, it feels like Moxley brings him up nearer to his level by never once playing the game.

What Mox does also allows Orange Cassidy to hit in a way he really hasn’t since the first PAC match and then some. The act works best against people who do not believe in or respect it, no matter what they say, and while Mox isn’t exactly [REDACTED] in terms of how great it feels to see Orange fucking get his ass in the back half, it works in a lot of the same ways. Covered in blood, so much of the other parts of this schtick beaten and torn away, Orange Cassidy simply has to fight, and it becomes real real easy to remember that before all of this, Orange Cassidy was once one of the best babyfaces in the world, and it works twice as well now that you can see his face, look him in the eyes, and see it all covered in blood.

The match isn’t quite short enough to hit that WCW Main Event Feeling, where every move feels important and like they are always trying to win, but in the last half or so of this match, it comes very very close. Goldberg vs. DDP still smokes this, but there’s something of a similar feeling to a lot of matches like that, that the underdog comes closer than you think, but is fighting something and someone so much bigger, and feels that much more heroic for meeting it with their head up and looking it in the eyes.

Orange Cassidy does that here, and I think it’s the best he’s worked in AEW — mechanically and conceptually — since right before the pandemic.

He has his openings when he turns Mox’s bloodlust against him, hitting the Beach Break on the exposed concrete when Jon overreaches, and in the match’s most triumphant moment when his classic light kicks turn into actual real kicks of genuine anger and passion, it all comes together perfectly.

Mox still trucks him, of course.

Some things are inevitable.

But when Cassidy kicks out of the Death Rider and rises up to meet the final one not only looking at him, removed from whatever detached cool there is of the act, but giving up the double bird, it’s perfect, and he gains probably more out of this than Mox does when the second one wins the title.

I don‘t know if I was wrong to think all of that stuff I thought before the match.

The match didn‘t make me suddenly love all off those matches that I simply kind of liked. On paper, Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy still aren‘t the greatest matches for each other. Every reason I was tentative here is still there, and I am not exactly clamoring to see a rematch any time soon. Lightning rarely strikes in the same place or in the same way twice. 

The beauty of pro wrestling though is that, again, this does not happen on paper, and so in the moment, I was incredibly wrong, and it whipped ass to be this wrong.

On September 3rd, 2023, Jon Moxley and Orange Cassidy had a great fucking match that left both either a little or a lot better off than they found them. Everything else comes after that.

(Even if it’s Mox’s second best ALL OUT title match main event.)

***1/4

 

Jon Moxley vs. Neil Diamond Cutter, IWA-MS Prince of the Deathmatches (4/23/2010)

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This was a first round match in the Prince of the Deathmatches tournament, and was a Drunken Taipei Deathmatch, in which both parties have to take a shot every few moments, popularized by the Necro Butcher vs. Corporal Robinson match in 2002.

Before anything else, the real highlight of the match comes before the bell rings, as Jon Moxley makes one of the great independent wrestling entrances ever.

More of a spectacle than some great match, but given that you can look elsewhere to find 2010 Mox in a serious bloodbath against another weird little guy, and given that this is such a great great spectacle, none of that matters.

As the match stipulations might suggest — stopping periodically to take shots of whiskey — we were never going to be talking about a great match in a more traditional sense, or anything that belongs on some star rating list or spreadsheet or whatever. I don’t believe there is some great drunken deathmatch out there, even if Necro/Corp is better than this (I prefer a more drawn out process rather than this match already beginning with Mox being aggressively hammered), as even if you had something that worked on a mechanical level beyond what this tries to do (Neil takes a few cool bumps into a pile of glass) or had all the cool stuff in the world, by the nature of the thing, such a thing is not really the point.

Or, in other more famous words, it’s not supposed to be good, damnit.

Thankfully, a wrestling match does not have to be good in order to be great.

Of everything that happens here, the real joy is in Jon Moxley turning in one of the drunkest performances ever put on film.

From the moment he steps through the curtain, Moxley is on the bender of a lifetime, as if his dad just died and/or he got dumped at a Halloween party the night before. The entrance itself is not something a sober person would do, but from the start, Moxley is constantly shouting about how he’s the greatest wrestler alive, the emperor of the world, all of these things. The match also throws in these funny little spots where he falls off the buckle or obviously misses a move, getting in on the bit for just long enough to make you wonder if this is actually just the greatest selling work ever caught on film, before Mox turns around and does something only a drunk person would do, like putting a chair up on the floor and running at it, but just jumping off the seat onto his feet and celebrating it.

The genius of this match is not simply that Moxley is clearly out of it, but that in addition to this, this is a match that feels like what an accurate portrayal of a drunk man trying to wrestle would be if this was a genuine competition, rather than a drunk man simply trying to perform a wrestling match, as is much more often the case throughout wrestling history. In its own incredibly bizarre way, this is one of the more realistic feeling wrestling matches I’ve seen in recent memory.

It’s the finish that really seals the deal in that aspect, as drunk ass Jon Moxley does the sort of thing a drunk ass man would do, and tries to airplane spin this poor little weirdo, only to start lightly vomiting in mid-rotation, before falling down and getting pinned.

Moxley then leaves the match as he came in, babbling incoherently, before lastly turning a commentary on the name Smart Mark Video into a half diatribe about how he didn’t need to go to college.

A tour de force.

Jon Moxley vs. Jimmy Jacobs, Wrestling Revolver Tales From The Ring (10/31/2021)

(photo credit to @photosbymanning on Twitter)

This was an Iowa Street Fight.

Wrestling in 2021 offered up a lot of things that were very special to many of us. Getting the greatest wrestler of all time out of the WWE. A childhood hero returning, people getting their due after a long time, much-needed changed of scenery, multiple returns to form in so many different ways. A lot of these felt like things large swaths of people wanted, but every so often, wrestling in 2021 offered some very specific presents to very specific people.

This match, very specifically, felt like something specifically for me, and I can’t think of a better one.

It’s another one of those matches in 2021, on top of that personal appeal.

Their 2010 feud is one of my favorite of the decade, speaking to me on a real human level in the way that many Jimmy Jacobs storylines (non-kidnapping ones, anyways) tend to, and the blowoff “I Quit” match they had in DGUSA was one of my favorite matches of the year and of the decade.

Obviously, this is not that.

Not just because they’re more grown up and banged up now, but because of all the matches where the wrestlers have changed for the last eleven years, this is the one with the largest change in between the wrestlers and in what the match up can be. I don’t think this is a better match than Danielson/Kingston II or the latest KO/Zayn match, but it is the match of the three like it with, I think, the largest hill to climb, and it’s one that I find so impressive. While Jacobs has gone into something approaching semi-retirement, it’s Moxley who’s become this gigantic star. In most of their 2010 matches, it was Moxley as the the upstart bully against this undersized weirdo, and that just is not a story that they can tell again.

Moxley is who he is and Jacobs is who he is, and like those other great rematches, this is a match that lives with and works around those new realities.

That is to say, Jimmy works as more of an antagonist now against the big hero, and it’s a lot of fun.

Jimmy Jacobs, beautifully, doesn’t play it as pure evil. It’s not 2008 AOTF cult leader Jimmy. It’s something mostly new, this little psycho who seems to know from the moment the match begins that he’s probably going to lose this fight, but that it’s still one worth having. Focused on procuring his pound of flesh first and foremost, making this on hard on his old opponent as possible, on every level. At times, it seems the goal is simply to drag Moxley back into the muck with him (this being Jon Moxley’s final match before going to rehab is something else), not into the WWE or AEW sort of prop hardcore wrestling or even the light tube deathmatch that Moxley recently had with Gage, but into something bloodier and more guttural.

The result is a more classic kind of independent wrestling brawl, something closer to Midwest in origin and feeling then the east coast. It’s more about punching and stabbing and bleeding than about big flashy spots. There’s an acquiescence to that at the very end with one (1) barbed wire board spot, but even that’s done in a more impactful way and built up to better throughout the match. That comes both on accident, with the wire catching and tearing the ring skirt some and on purpose, with the usual avoidance of it, and also Jimmy shaking his hands out after touching the wire to set it up, in a cool little trick. For the most part though, it maintains that rawer kind of a feeling. Deathmatches can feel like real struggles and competitions, but this is a match that feels like a fight, and I’m always going to appreciate that more.

Like the other matches in this vein in 2021, they’re also really great at adding in new bits while playing an old song. They strike several familiar old chords with Jimmy’s spike and Moxley using a fork as his own stabbing weapon, with Jimmy dual wielding at a point and the classic Frye/Takayama-with-stabbing-weapons hockey fight, both spots that never fail to be gross and awesome. However, what’s new is the spike in the mouth from Jimmy, and what’s both new and really cool is updating the spike-in-the-turnbuckle bit to now be used by Jimmy to swing up into Moxley’s face to break a sleeper, instead of being a big comeback spot.

It’s a perfect little shorthand for this match, what was once jaw-dropping and groundbreaking losing that novelty, but having it replaced by a kind of airtight function and utility. What no longer amazes still works, the match stripped down to all but the most basic and primal elements of the thing. Just the beating heart of the matter.

Through a combination of evasive tactics, a mastery of edged weapons, and just a little luck and willingness to die for a match like this, for a moment, Jimmy Jacobs has a shot. Not a big one, but a window being able to crack open just a little feels like the biggest victory in the world when it seemed painted shut only a moment earlier. Unfortunately, like the other matches of its ilk, there are realities to deal with here. Jimmy isn’t what he once was, and Moxley is so much more than he once was. While lacking the ability in 2010 to fight Jacobs off when he lost his mind entirely and went on a late-match rampage, Moxley now has the size and power to not only fight him off, but to do real damage in the process.

Moxley throws Jacobs not only off of the front guillotine, but flips him off with the release suplex and through the barbed wire board. He follows right up with the Paradigm Shift (with wire still stuck in some part of Jimmy Jacobs, taking the strands of barbed wire and half the board with him for the move in a beautiful visual), getting out as quickly as he can, and that’s that.

Jimmy takes the loss he was always going to, but along the way, gleefully extracts the pound of flesh in the way that few others are ever able to.

I don’t know if this is going to hit quite the same for anyone else. I kind of doubt it, but ultimately with a match this fun, this bloody, and this satisfying, I also don’t especially care either.

***1/4

Jon Moxley vs. Nick Gage, GCW Fight Club (10/9/2021)

This was for Moxley’s GCW Heavyweight Title.

It’s not the greatest thing in the world. There’s nothing more seasoned deathmatch fans haven’t seen before and sometimes even from this match up eleven years prior. Watch enough of them and you can spot little seams and call what’s coming next a few times here.

None of that matters.

Not that much anyways.

It’s a deathmatch in front of a white hot crowd, all packed in real tight in a great building, in a match between the two biggest stars who could or would have a match like this. There’s a sense of occasion and importance here that elevates just about everything that they do, it’s a big time deathmatch in the US that feels like it genuinely actually Matters for the first time since probably the Gage/Tremont trilogy four years prior. It doesn’t matter so much more than what they do, a match like this cannot succeed on feeling alone, but when they can work in concert like this, it’s such a beautiful thing. To that point, while nothing they do is reinventing the wheel or offering some new story up, they don’t exactly shy away from anything. All the glass and the wire stuff looks great, and is performed with such a lovable aplomb. Everything around the match itself on a mechanical level has a way of elevating the material beyond what it might be otherwise.

The counterweight to the Moxley/Omega matches.

Dudes rock.

***

Jon Moxley vs. Josh Barnett, GCW Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport 6 (4/8/2021)

An odd match.

Certainly a great one.

In spite of issues with it, it’s two maniacs hitting the mat hard and then tenderizing the faces of each other with a thousand gross elbow variations, knees, and any sort of other bludgeoning attacks you can dream up. It’s the sort of match that I find impossible to deny a place in my heart towards. You ask what I want to see in a wrestling match, this has most of it. There’s not exactly a compelling narrative (although there is one), but mechanically, it’s all there. Great work on the ground, with tight holds that themselves are interesting and never static, always moving around and moved away from with both a grace and a roughness that I find so appealing. When they move away from that and the match becomes a far more hostile thing, they’re just swinging full force face-melters, cracking each other open, and it’s a delight.

Truly, one of the easiest sorts of matches to like that there is. A stylistic purity of thought, one often on display on all of these Bloodsport shows, but rarely taken to the levels of violence or frenzy of the later moments of this match.

The professional wrestling can be very fine sometimes.

It may be just a little bit too weird to be anything more than that though.

There’s a weird sort of babyfacing of Barnett here, as if he isn’t a total psycho, and so much of the match seems to take on this sort of a “DEFEND THIS RING” kind of approach against an interloper like Moxley, as if Josh Barnett is the hero of this all and not simply a name on the marquee to give the concept some legitimacy. Styles make fights and this would be way less interesting if Moxley was anyone else, but it’s exactly an odd enough approach to throw the thing off. Why would someone be happy Barnett won? Why would anyone care about that? Why should Barnett win? The result of a match never makes it inherently good or bad, but it is a headscratcher to be sure, saved only because hey, yeah, Barnett has way more experience in a match like this. Even if it sucks and even if Barnett himself is nowhere near as likeable, talented, or interesting as Moxley, you can see some kind of a logic behind it all.

Once more, a match from WrestleMania weekend with some real flaws, but a little too awesome on the whole to entirely deny. The sort of match you watch a Bloodsport show in the hopes of seeing, even if the decision making is sometimes baffling.

***

Jon Moxley vs. Mr. Brodie Lee, AEW Double or Nothing (5/23/2020)

This was for Moxley’s AEW World Title.

The best match in the history of the AEW World Title. The only great match in the history of the AEW World Title.

It’s the natural evolution of their matches in EVOLVE and CZW a decade ago, in a way that their WWE matches were never able to be. I liked those matches well enough for what they were, talent always finds a way and all that, but almost every WWE “brawl” feels like a put on in a way that this didn’t and lacked a sense of proper chaos like this had. It isn’t WILD in the truest sense, it’s just a brawl that gets out of control and never falls back into it, but it’s so much fun. They get to use the surroundings too, but it never feels like they need the props to make the match good, so much as that they are going to fight everywhere and these wooden casino props are heavy, so they may as well use them to try and hurt each other too. It’s an extension of the match, rather than something tacked on to try and elevate it. The match itself is delightfully uncomplicated. They want to hurt each other, they hurt each other, and Moxley is slowly overwhelmed by the size and ferocity of his old foe’s attack, before being forced to do something extraordinary that changes the match.

The most refreshing thing about it is how Brodie Lee gets to feel important again for the first time in eight years. The character sucks, his Dark Order get up is absolute trash, but underneath it all, he’s still Brodie Lee. He’s the best big man of a generation and once again walks that tightrope perfectly between being a bully and doing a lot of really cool things on offense. Moxley is a presence and certainly carries his own weight, but it felt really really good to see Brodie unleashed for the first time in such a long time.

Following the big Paradigm Shift through the small Big Ramp, Brodie is about taken out, but they make a pair of decisions that help this a lot, and make a wonderful contrast to the mistakes of Cody vs. Archer earlier in the night. Similarly here, Moxley has to unload multiple version of his finish. Brodie kicks out at one following a Paradigm Shift in the ring, leading to Moxley now attacking the cut that’s opened up. A second lifting one leads to a two count. Instead of going two in a row, it’s now two different big kickouts that maybe people didn’t expect from Brodie, given how he’s been treated elsewhere for years. Is it a little excessive? Hey, yeah. Maybe. But it’s Brodie Lee, I’m not going to get mad an attempt to elevate Brodie Lee a little bit.

Instead of simply repeating himself until it’s boring, Moxley makes another far more interesting decision that both helps the match and helps out Brodie a little more, and he chokes him out for the win. Brodie gains a little something, and Mox loses nothing, because his defining feature has always been the sort of grit that makes something like this match and this finish work so well.

Not just a great goddamned fight, but a great goddamned fight where everybody comes out looking better.

***1/4

 

Jimmy Jacobs vs. Jon Moxley, DGUSA Bushido Code of the Warrior 2010 (10/29/2010)

This was an “I Quit” match.

I’ve been watching a lot of DGUSA on and off over the last few months. A lot of that is wanting to cover every possible base for a series of 2010s lists and pieces that I’m planning on releasing over the next few years. A lot of it is also revisiting stuff I loved and/or liked and/or hated at the time but never reviewed and put on record how I felt about it. I hadn’t planned on reviewing any of it, and I’ve been able to stick to that, for the most part. Of what I focused on and might have written about beyond just “this was bad, meaningless limbwork that meant nothing”, things either didn’t do it for me like they once did (Shingo vs. Davey), were disappointing but still good (Bryan vs. Shingo, Bryan vs. Moxley), or were a blast but in ways that left me nothing to write about (the big four way spotfests and tag bombfests). This put my ass on the floor, and while I’m still in awe of it and watching something else, I might as well write about it. I don’t think this is MOTD level stuff, but as people do more decade type work, I think this is something people should look at again.

This is the end of a long feud. As Jimmy Jacobs has come to EVOLVE and DGUSA in 2010, trying to make good and be a positive influence, following a series of wonderful promos talking about his drug and attitude problems over the last few years, Jon Moxley has very much not been like that. He is where Jimmy was. Jon Moxley has been a mirror. He’s repeatedly antagonized Jacobs about losing his edge, and at one point, Moxley brought Lacey back from retirement as a mind game in a match against Jacobs before then attacking her. Jimmy’s talked about how Moxley behaves like he used to, and Moxley’s taunted Jacobs about how he no longer has it in him to go as far as Moxley does. Their previous matches have all proven this correct. Moxley’s cheated and benefited from interference, and while Jimmy’s tried to turn back the clock, even bringing back the white and blood stained MAN UP gear last time, but cosmetic change isn’t real change. In response, Moxley has embarrassed and hurt him for approaching him with half measures like that. That last match ended with Moxley beating Jimmy down into the mat with chain whips and chair shots, leading to Jacobs collapsing backstage and vomiting, completing as absolute a loss as he possibly suffer.

As any good blow off does, the things said in a pre match summary video matter, and the themes of the last ten months matter. They start hot, as Jacobs dives off the small balcony overhead onto Moxley before whipping him with a belt, again hoping a cheap and unexpected trick might work. It doesn’t. He can’t hold onto the advantage for more than thirty seconds before he loses it. Moxley plays up to the themes more overtly by being the one to produce railroad spikes this time. Before long, Jimmy is bleeding, and he is bleeding BAD. The full and complete Crimson Mask. Jimmy has his bursts, but Moxley is a younger, crazier, and more physically gifted version of the man he was at his best, and it’s just so hard.

Moxley has never seemed to me like a particularly dangerous person so much as he has a crafty survivor type, but the mirror element to the match casts him in a more dangerous element than usual. When Jimmy was like this two or three or four years ago, it always felt a little sad. A lot of that, and a lot what’s always connected me to the Jimmy Jacobs character, is a personal thing. It’s a little bit of growing up with this character, it’s a little bit of just having the same roots (what’s up Grand Rapids?), and it’s a lot of these ways that I’ve been able to look at this character and its turning points and being able to see something there that reflected what I was going through at the time. Certainly not entirely, cut out the stabbings and the ex-girlfriend kidnapping angle that was never TOTALLY explained, but the root causes? The motivations? The promos about kicking a drug habit around the time I was trying to do the same? It’s not a one to one mirror, but it was a mirror. Pro wrestling rarely ever gives me so accurate a mirror. As a result of all of that, there’s been very few times where I didn’t at least get a sense of weight behind Jimmy Jacobs doing horrible things. Something had gone wrong with this kid somewhere, and it always felt like I was watching someone who had descended into this from a mugh higher starting point, like a cautionary tale. In comparison, Jon Moxley felt like he had always been like this. He didn’t feel like he changed to become like this, there wasn’t a descent into this, it’s just how he is. He himself is not dangerous, but I felt a sense of danger for my guy specifically when he was against somebody like this.

Of course, experience matters. While Moxley is making a show of using all these old tricks that Jimmy used to, Jimmy starts to use the tricks that people used against him. There’s specifically the transition where he pulls a spike out of the top turnbuckle pad and turns to jab Moxley with it, a direct echo back to the Windy City Deathmatch against Colt Cabana three and a half years prior. Moxley’s opened up, as happens when you get stabbed in the face, but he’s not really slowed at all. Jimmy’s again turned the clock back in some way, and once again, it does not matter. At all. Moxley continues to beat the shit out of him, it’s just that now he’s also bleeding. Moxley ties Jimmy’s arms behind his back with the belt introduced earlier, and unlike how that’s spot gone with chains before, it’s actually tight. Moxley begins to really go to work, including one tremendous moment that I’d put up there with the best work of his entire career.

Moxley focuses more on torture than victory though, and never once (maybe once only?) does he actually ask Jimmy if he quits. So, he doesn’t. You can’t win unless you try to win. Jimmy is able to sneak in a low blow, and for once his size helps him out. He can scoot his arms underneath his legs and back in front, and bite his way out of the belt. They manage to trade spikes to the head, and Jacobs repeatedly lands the chair shots in revenge. Moxley keeps getting up in a way Jimmy hadn’t been doing when the roles were reversed. Moxley won’t give up when Jimmy jabs the spike in his face, so Jimmy goes and does what Moxley either didn’t think of, didn’t think of YET, or (least likely) would not do. He digs the spike into Moxley’s groin, and unlike the famous 2008 “I Quit” match against BJ Whitmer, it’s not this manic stabbing motion. That felt like an act of hate, with desperation behind it. This feels like an act of panic, still with desperation behind it. Jimmy holds onto the spike and keeps pushing at it desperately, and Moxley gives up.

Beyond just hitting an emotional chord with me because of who and what this was based around, this does so many things that I absolutely love. It’s a bloodbath, it’s incredibly efficient at under fifteen minutes, there’s stabbing, and it’s a story both about an underdog and about a veteran turning back the clock. It’s also specifically just so smart about everything it does. Moxley always comes off tougher and stronger, even at the end. Jimmy found a way and pressed his openings in very specific ways, but they did everything correctly to make this feel like a situation where everything broke perfectly to result in this outcome. Everyone looks better coming out of this, and most importantly, it allowed for perfect fanwank continuity, as Jimmy embracing the evil at the end is enough to pretend it’s a direct bridge to the SCUM stuff when he resurfaces in ROH again within the next year.

One of the best blowoffs and best matches of this type of the decade, and I absolutely accept being on an island there.

****

Kenny Omega vs. Jon Moxley, AEW Full Gear (11/9/2019)

This was an unsanctioned match.

Hated this, honestly. Didn’t loathe it on a bone deep level, but a gigantic waste of time overall.

Kenny is one of the most frustrating wrestlers of all time and this felt like a reversion to Dean Ambrose for Moxley. The worst meeting in the middle that they could possibly have had, and I’m 90% sure this only was the match it was, and the main event, to draw attention away from Cody losing a match. It’s 38 minutes long and has barbed wire and broken glass and a board of mouse traps (for some reason????) and a little blood, but felt incredibly toothless. There was even a big prop Caribbean Spider Web spot that felt very sanitized, which is one of the most embarrassing things I can possibly write. This is the sort of match where, if I started to write about it, I would end up writing like 1200 words and go into a big thing. Simply put, this is like Cody/Jericho in that the ideas are there, but it can’t shake off the WWE But Different feeling to actually ever feel dangerous past a surface level. They use cool weapons and do exposed board spots and even if it was half as long, I still probably wouldn’t love it because it’s all so meandering. Stunningly average for a match with this much put into it, as they somehow got outdone by Cody Rhodes and Chris Jericho.

Depressingly standard long ass Kenny Omega match in spirit and layout, but with these concessions made to the spots Jon Moxley’s been watching other people do for the last eight years and wanting to give a whirl. I really feel for him, because he deserved a better opponent for his first chance to go THIS nuts. Instead, this was a match seemingly devoted to Kenny Omega trying to steal deathmatch valor.

**1/2