Moxley talks ring name, getting the WWE call, indies, more

Moxley opens up about his AEW debut and other topics while appearing on the debut edition of AEW’s official podcast Unrestricted

here are the highlights courtesy of Reddit user dogryan100:

Asked on what it was that made Jon discover pro wrestling, he doesn’t remember a time before it. There was a couple kids that lived in the apartment beneath him who had wrestling figures and old WWF tapes, he remembers watching them at their house, those were his oldest memories.

Jon was huge into wrestling video tapes when he was younger.

Mox says back in the day before everyone had cellphones and stuff, there was so much more magic involved in watching. You didn’t know things like everyones real names. He had discussions with friends about if they thought The Undertaker was really like that all day every day and if he sleeps in a casket.

On how he came up with the name Jon Moxley, right before his first match he was asked what he wanted his name to be and he had no clue, he was wearing a football jersey at the time and someone else said that he looks like the guy from Varsity Blues, Johnathon Moxley (although that characters name was Johnathon Moxon. The other guy screwed it up when he said it). He was too nervous to say yes or no but the others thought it was cool so they went with it.

As a side job on the independents, he was working nightshifts in a factory, Thursday->Sunday, 11PM to 7AM. The way he would do it was sleep all day, wrestle in the evening, and then make it just in time to work.

For a long period in around 2008-2009 he had pretty much accepted that he was just someone that hadn’t made it in wrestling.

It was a program with Drake Younger (who now referees in NXT) that he started to lean into the more hardcore style of wrestling and what started getting him noticed, and not long after got the call from WWE.

He initially thought the call from WWE was a prank call. He took the call at the time as a bit of a joke and said that and later on got a call from Joey Mercury, who he had worked with before and he recognized his voice.

When he first signed he didn’t even have a bank account, so to get his first money out he had to go with a buddys girlfriend to the bank, get her to co-sign things, and he literally had to carry the cash out with him

His first “house” he found in Tampa was one single room rented out of a house in Tampa that he found on Craigslist that he was near certain was a crackden. There was once a knife fight out the front involving one of the other housemates. He was there for the first year.

Jon feels that he was a bit lucky getting the good starting point by being in The Shield. Back then a lot of guys would find it very hard to break in, especially from the early NXT when it was purely developmental and not like it is today.

He says that his time as a whole in WWE was very good and the whole relationship was great and mutually beneficial, and it simply ran its course and they went their separate ways.

About 8 months before he left WWE he knew that he already wanted to leave. He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do, but he definitely wanted to go to Japan, maybe wrestle under a mask or something.

He didn’t want to be someone who did all the indies and was advertised as “Former WWE Superstar Dean Ambrose”

The main idea of what he wanted to do after WWE was really disappear for a while, and then after a while come back with some different shtick.

When Cody first told Jon about AEW, he thought it was cool but he didn’t believe it until he saw it.

Before the Double or Nothing debut, he had no idea if people were going to cheer, boo, or be silent.

When he dressed as a bear (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lFelQQBriQ) he felt at that point he had hit rock bottom.

One of the reasons he thought he was going to get boos was so many of the AEW type fans were people who were so anti-WWE that someone like him coming in who had a “Silly” character might be seen as a negative.

Going into his first non-WWE match with Juice Robinson, there was no real plan going into the match, but a few minutes in it suddenly “clicked” and he realized that he can wrestle like he used to.

At some point last year he was struggling with a pinched nerve which was caused by an issue in his C5/C6 vertabrae

Jon was very surprised that his debut was kept as a proper surprise and wasn’t leaked out. Aubrey says that nobody in the back knew about it at the time when he first showed up in the middle of Jericho’s promo.

Aubrey Edwards herself thought that the whole Dean leaving WWE was a work and he would show back up at SummerSlam or something, because WWE had never given a kind of send-off that they gave Dean.

Talking about Renee Young, Jon jokes that they are a true power couple, because their household has revenue streams coming from FOX, WWE, AEW, NJPW, some other projects.

Jon hopes that Renee gets a job with The Today Show so he can move to New York and just check out and get fat, do an indieshow once a year, “look like Arn Anderson.”