AEW World Champion Jon Moxley and the Blackpool Combat Club have been running roughshod over the company in recent weeks. It appears that Moxley is about to begin another chapter in his feud with Orange Cassidy, and the two will likely cross paths in some fashion on this week’s Dynamite in Cleveland, Ohio.
Ahead of the show, Moxley chatted with Web Is Jericho writer and Youngstown Studio’s B.J. Lisko about a variety of topics including the current state of the company which is in its fifth year. When asked how far the company has come, Moxley said: “It’s been a pretty wild ride, as we knew it was gonna be. That was the really fun part about it. Man, do I want to jump on this raft and it’s going down the river and it’s gonna be going for a while. There’s still water in view. But very soon we’re gonna go around the corner. And there’s some dark looming trees in the future, and literally anything could be down this river. We have no idea. There could be a waterfall, there could be crocodiles. There could be jaguars. There could be rapids and rocks and whirlpools. There could be sea monsters, we have no idea what’s coming down the river.”
Moxley talked about speaking with Chris Jericho at the onset of the company. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Moxley said. “I remember talking to Jericho at the very beginning and saying ‘This is so much fun, cause it’s like Lewis and Clark going west, because we have absolutely no idea what’s coming. It might be wild. It might be great. It might be terrible. It might be something in-between. It’ll probably be a lot of both, we just have no idea.’”
Moxley likened the still relatively new company to his 3-year-old daughter. “When you look at it now, it’s still a super young company,” he said. “Wrestling five years can see like a really long time, but as far as an organization or a successful company, it’s extremely young. It’s still a baby. My daughter is 3-years old. 3 years can seem like a long time if you look at it through one lens. If you look at it through a different lens, she’s a 3-year-old, and she’s barely existed yet. AEW is still basically a toddler. It’s wide open to mold it into whatever we want. There are no rules.”
Moxley continued: “Much like my 3-year-old daughter, she has got a whole person to grow into. And AEW is wide open. It’s still a piece of clay. There’s been a couple dents in it. There’s a couple finger prints in it. It’s taken on a certain shape, but it’s still just a lump of clay, which is a very exciting thing. We can turn it into whatever we want.”
Moxley concluded that he’s not so focused on where AEW is at now, but where it’s headed. “Not really concerned about what it is right now. I’m concerned what it could be 5 years from now or 10 years from now or 20 years from now. Pro wrestling, the great thing about it, is it’s always changing, always growing and always evolving. If you don’t keep up with it, and you’re not constantly learning, then you get left behind. Some of the smartest people in the business at one time, who thought they knew everything, stopped learning. And 10 years later, 20 years later, they’re so far behind, they’ll never catch up.”
Watch Moxley’s full interview below.
