During a recent appearance on Cincinnati’s ESPN 1530, Jon Moxley reflected on his final conversation with Vince McMahon, his headlining match against Orange Cassidy at AEW All Out 2023, and more.
Moxley left WWE in early 2019 and made his AEW debut at the company’s inaugural event, Double or Nothing in May.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On Vince McMahon admitting WWE took him for granted: “I take a lot of pride in our work and our work ethic and the standard we set ourselves to, and the way we do the job. To be one of those guys that’s reliable, that’s always there, the downside is that it’s very easy to take you for granted. The last conversation I had with Vince McMahon, he straight up told me, we took you for granted. It is a tough job because I got a lot of experience, a lot of stuff is very familiar to me and I’m comfortable doing stuff that a lot of other people may be intimated by. Orange Cassidy pulled off an amazing performance. He lost, but he pulled off an amazing performance in his first ever pay-per-view main event. That was not planned weeks out, in fact, everything would have looked completely different. That’s kind of how it’s going to go. If you’re going to have any success in wrestling, it’s very rarely going to go according to plan, you’ve got to be ready to take the opportunity when it’s there and when things go array, [and] when the wave changes direction, you got to be able to surf on it and stay on your board and you’ve got to be able to go with the flow so to speak. Every big opportunity I’ve had, probably in my career, has come completely out of the blue. You got to be ready to get your shit together and strike when the iron is hot.”
On his AEW All Out match with Orange Cassidy: “I think Orange Cassidy did that, 100%. Being in a main event, it’s a big difference, especially on an AEW pay-per-view because they’re so stacked. Often, counting Zero Hour, you’re talking about five hours of wrestling and having to close that show. I don’t have any other control over anything else in the show prior. A show in itself it like a living working art, you have to book it with its highs and lows. [If you do] the thousand miles per hour, foot to the gas pedal matches ten matches in a row, you’re gonna burn the audience out, both watching at home and in the arena. If you’re in the main event, you don’t know where the people are going to be at by the time your match is up. You’ve got to almost instantly feel where they’re at, and they might be taking a breath right now after the last match or two. You might need to start a little slower and lull them into a sense of relaxation and then pick it back up. If me and Orange Cassidy were the first match, that match would have looked totally different. It would have been a different scenario. I don’t like to plan too much in a situation like that, I want to gauge where we’re at and see what we need to do.”
