Hardcore Ambivalence: Kenny Omega vs. Jon Moxley (Repost)
All Elite Wrestling Full Gear 2019
Baltimore, Maryland—Royal Farms Arena
November 9, 2019
I’m gonna date myself here, but I was a tape trader in the 90s and early 2000s. And no, that first line was not some set-up for a glib quip about pining for the days of physical media. Because if anything, having that physical media, all those copies of copies of copies, signified how addicted you were to the guilty pleasure of professional wrestling.
Like most tape traders, I genuinely can’t recall how many tapes I had amassed at my peak. I had a big ass bookshelf in the back corner of my bedroom that was filled with nearly a hundred right there, then piles and stacks flanking that bookshelf, and then in my basement I had storage bins for the tapes and compilations I lost interest in. My routine would be renting tapes from all the video stores in a five mile radius of my hometown. I would disconnect the VCR from the living room and attach it to the TV/VCR in my bedroom to make my own tape. All on EP mode, so I could also squeeze in a recording of three Raws to fill the 9 hour cassette.
I had, for the most part, all the WWE and WCW PPVs worth collecting, but I was sorely lacking in ECW, which were harder to come by. Finding great ECW content made you almost entirely reliant on tape trading to be exposed to it. With it being over 20 years ago, I can’t recall which ECW tapes I first received by mail, but the one that stood out, was Hardcore Heaven 1995.
It was not memorable for The Public Enemy vs. The Gangstas main event, but for the tape itself being intercepted by my very-disappointed-in-me dad. With the misleading title of “Hardcore Heaven,” I’m assuming he had different expectations of how this video would meet his viewing pleasure. My dad was disgusted by how violent the tape was. It was like he’d rather it had been porn that I’d smuggled. The match in particular he singled out was the Axl Rotten vs. Ian Rotten Taipei Death Match. For those of you that don’t remember it, a Taipei Death Match consisted of the wrestlers heavily taping their hands, then applying an adhesive so their fists could be covered in broken glass (a homage to Kickboxer, that Jean-Claude Van Damme flick, but at the time I honest-to-God thought Paul E. was referencing the Chuck Sheen derpy parody movie, Hot shots! Part Deux). The match itself was shitty. No way to call it anything but that. Just two fat guys that couldn’t do anything besides punch, kick and cut themselves. Also unimpressed with their in-ring workrate was my dad. “How do you like this? It’s sick,” he scolded.
I didn’t have an answer for him. I didn’t know if I liked hardcore wrestling or not. I liked blood, and the choreographed intensity of hardcore had its allure, but I was equally as turned off by the excessive violence when it felt like weapons were used for no reason psychologically or if I saw a performer sloppily blade on-camera. I never had a non-fan call me out for why I liked this sub-genre before. What would a well-adjusted, regular person think of hardcore wrestling?
And even harder to answer, at what point does the violence become gratuitous?
Take my take on blood, for example. I like blood in wrestling. Blood from the forehead is okay. Blood from the back of the head is worrisome. If a wrestler bleeds hardway it shows grit, stoicism, makes the business look real. But purposeful potatoes to the brow is barbaric, signifies the wrestlers can’t work.
Even my own inner-barometer for the threshold of violence I’m willing to tolerate is sorta full of shit.
I can really only stomach watching hardcore wrestling live. If I watch it live, as a viewer I can be swept-up in emotion, and I still have a chance of holding onto the suspension of disbelief. If I’m watching hardcore delayed or on repeat, I can’t help but get caught-up in the backstage gossip of how the violence did or did not maim the wrestlers. Every spot set-up with weapons feels much more contrived and cooperative. And I get seriously fixated not on the storyline of the match, but if the wrestler is going to suffer long-term physical or emotional harm (example: the chair shots in Mankind vs. The Rock from Royal Rumble 1999 with Mick’s family watching traumatized).
So in summation, you like what you like when it’s done right. But when is it done right? When is violence in wrestling artistic versus gratuitous? Who the fuck knows. To each their own as to what you’re subjectively willing to tolerate.
All Elite Wrestling’s Full Gear 2019 had a main event that was the demarcation for me as to what was too far. The perfect example of my hardcore ambivalence.
I was dying to see Kenny Omega wrestle Jon Moxley. Kenny had been my wrestler of the year on a consecutive basis going into this match. Jon Moxley was a new wrestler to me, as you may assume I never caught him in CZW, only knowing him as Dean Ambrose, who by the end of his run came off less like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and more like Popeye. After Moxley’s shocking debut with the paradigm shift on the Double or Nothing 2019 entrance set’s stack of oversize casino chips, I couldn’t have been more excited for their eventual main event. But during their program, when Moxley did the paradigm shift again on Omega, but this time through a serendipitously placed backstage glass table, I knew they would skip the regular match and go right into a hardcore one, potentially turning me off to what was once an instant buy. Which…of course I bought anyways. Nevertheless, I was freaked out for both the promotion and the wrestlers. I didn’t want the draw of the company to be hardcore wrestling, thinking hardcore didn’t have mainstream marketability (not that I wanted AEW to be some antiseptic, homogenized product for children) that would be cause for sponsors to cut bait. Moxley already had a staph infection months into his arrival into AEW, and I didn’t want two of my favorite guys to get injured and sidelined for months right when they started, stifling momentum and altering long-term storyline plans.
The story of this match was Kenny Omega wanting to prove he was still the best performer in the world after losing to Chris Jericho and Pac at the two previous PPVs. If Omega was fighting Jon Moxley, he needed to beat him at his type of match: Lights Out.
The match began with fisticuffs and rope-running, as Moxley gained the early advantage with a boss man slam. This gave Moxley the time to go under the ring for a trashcan, the first weapon introduced in the match. Omega reversed a paradigm shift on the trashcan to send Moxley outside. In an athletic feat, Kenny hurdled the guard rail to execute a dangerous and beautiful looking running dropkick. Moxley regained momentum by pushing Omega off the guard rail, blocking a moonsault attempt.
Moxley began the 2nd act of the match by going under the ring to find his trusty barbed wire baseball bat. Omega gave Moxley his back and took four or five shots with it, the camera zooming-in on Omega’s open wounds to let the audience know the barbed wire bat was not worked. In a creative sequence, Moxley held onto the barbed wire bat as he was about to be suplexed, only to logically use it to scrap Kenny’s arm like a cheese grater.
Then began the cooperation spots. The first saw Omega dropping the barbed wire bat to go outside to set up a table and find his own barbed wire household item, in Kenny’s case, a broom. If you had access to a barbed wire bat why would you drop it? I get that Kenny was jonesing to use his own weaponry, but a barbed wire baseball bat would legitimately kill a fucking bear, why would you casually discard it? The broom gave way to breaking two of my inner-barometer violence thresholds in-one: hardway color from the back of the head. Omega dropped his broom for Moxley’s bat to grind that in Jon’s face, but why would he do that if he initially wanted his broom more? After hitting a near fall, Kenny went outside to look under the ring to get a trashcan. If a trashcan hadn’t worked earlier on a piledriver before, why get another one? To just hit a spot for the you-can’t-escape moonsault? Omega went outside to grab another weapon, a plywood board with mousetraps on them. Kenny ate that. But if Kenny already went for a pin, meaning he’s willing to end the match, why not reach under the ring for the mousetrap board before the trashcan? Moxley went under the ring to grab a length of steel chain, something that resembled Hercules meets the University of Miami’s turnover chain.
We moved next to the always jolly attempted murder spots. First, Moxley needed more weapons, and in a moment that took the match to an irredeemable portion, went outside to grab a screwdriver to stab(?) Kenny with. It got stuck in the turnbuckle. But why did Moxley never go back to it? Then Kenny created a makeshift noose with the chain and dangled Moxley over the top rope with it. Bummer alert, the reason why we don’t see strangulation and hanging spots anymore is because of Chris Benoit. Memories of a double-murder suicide tend to take me out of a match. The next weapon retrieved underneath the ring was a bag of broken glass (presumedly gathered from that broken table in the lead-up to this bout) that both men took spots on top of. As Moxley escaped the ring and crawled up the entrance ramp, Omega found Moxley’s screwdriver and stabbed his forehead with it, before discarding it for an actual bed—a bed—of barbed wire.
It was a staggering visual, but cheapened for me by the Elite dutifully carrying it out to the side of the ramp. Clearly, that would be something that would draw attention to itself in the previous three and a half hours of the show, but there was no organic purpose for it. Excalibur tried to cover the logic-holes and earn some of this by calling the Elite an accessory to the crime that was about to be committed, but why did the Bucks shake their heads and guffaw into their hands like it was too far? I get that they wanted to heighten the drama and show that it was a line they personally would not be willing to cross, but then why the fuck did they build this in Kenny’s garage or, perhaps, the EVP conference room? Moxley suplexed Kenny onto the non-diegetic bed of barbed wire, sending himself on there too. But why that particular suplex? Especially when he already did a standing suplex with no float-over to Kenny earlier in the match onto a board of mousetraps? I know, I know, I know, but even with explaining it with cheats such as Moxley’s too fatigued or he’s willing to put himself through hell to defeat Omega it’s just too stupid.
The finish saw Moxley disassemble the ring itself, stripping away the canvas and mat to its exposed floor of 2x4s. The wrestlers reversed finisher attempts before Kenny hit the paradigm shift on the pine. Kenny went up to the top rope to hit a phoenix splash but Moxley moved and Kenny bit it. Excalibur referenced Kenny’s Golden Lover partner, Kota Ibushi (all the more difficult to watch as I am now in November of 2021, knowing what missing that move did to Ibushi’s shoulder in a ring with a mat during the G1). Moxley won with an elevated paradigm shift with good ol’ extra mustard on it.
Midway through the match, Excalibur offered a prophetic plea, “The fans here (are) having a hard time trying to discern who to root for, what to root for. They obviously love both of these competitors. They don’t want to see their careers end any sooner before they should. This is hard to watch.”
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve watched it three times; once live, and twice for this review, and I’ll never be able to stomach viewing it again. An innovative (at times) twist on a hardcore match, both performers trying their admiringly absolute best to make this an epic classic, but it’s just too gratuitous for me.
★★★
