On last night’s episode of AEW Dynamite, Jon Moxley made his return from a stint in rehab and cut one of, if not the best, promo of his career. If you haven’t seen it yet, put a star next to it on your to-do list to make sure you watch it as soon as possible. It was that good.
Before Mox could get his opportunity to speak, however, a member of the audience (let’s not call them a “fan”) shouted something along the lines of “get this drunk trash out of the ring.” Without missing a beat Mox dropped an F-bomb live on TBS telling the heckler to “go f**k himself” and asked for security to remove him from the premises.
The reason that I mention this moment in particular because its just as important as the actual promo Mox was about to cut. Unfortunately in our world, some people prefer to kick you when you’re down; or in Mox’s case, up. That’s just part of the real world we all have accepted. If Moxley had seemed out of it after this inciden,t I don’t think a single fan would have complained as someone shining a light on the hardest time of your life before you even get a chance to explain. Personally, I can tell you from experience that you don’t always get this chance. Jon Moxley is human. We might all forget that at times with some of the insanity he portrays on AEW TV, but he is and last night we got a look into the inner workings of how he beat his addiction and returned.
Jon’s honesty came across in a way that was so raw that it captured the entire arena’s attention once the heckler had been removed. You could have heard a pin drop in the arena as he spoke. The one thing from this promo I really wanted to talk about today was how it’s helped shape my mindset. I’ve been dealing with a litany of demons my entire life and the dark cloud that Mox mentioned hanging above his head, I feel that every day myself, it doesn’t want you to be happy. I think a lot of people missed the point of the dark cloud representing depression hanging firmly over Mox’s head. While alcohol is what led to him entering rehab, depression is what truly ensnares everyone who struggles with their own demons. Depression isn’t something that magically disappears. You have to work on yourself, better yourself and fight through hell to make it back to some form of normalcy back in your life and for a long time I’d given up on that fact until I listened to Mox’s promo. It was almost a shock to the nervous system when my favorite wrestler of all time being so…human? It added a lot to the promo that it felt like the first half was Jonathan Good the man and the second part was Jon Moxley the character. I’ve struggled with mental health my entire life and as Mox says, we all carry our own internal scars. The best characters on television are the characters that are the most relatable. These are the characters that you can root for. That, in essence, is Jon Moxley.
If there is any message to take away from Jon Moxley’s return promo it’s this: Never stop fighting to be happy. Fight your demons tooth and nail and come back stronger for it.
