Jon Moxley On How Coronavirus Changed His AEW World Title Reign, Similarities With Eddie Kingston

AEW recently celebrated its one year anniversary of Dynamite, which premiered in October 2019. It reignited the promotional wars that WWF and WCW had on Mondays, except these new wars take place on Wednesdays with Dynamite going head-to-head with NXT.

Jon Moxley has been AEW World Champion for most of the last year, and he talked about what Dynamite has been able to accomplish when he joined the Total Slam podcast.

"It's been ups and down. We came out of the gate red hot with great shows, but like the rest of the world, we had to adjust and finding new ways to produce Dynamite in the safe way because of COVID-19. We never missed a week of TV, and it's vital to the industry that AEW would be a success for anybody who works in the wrestling business," said Moxley. "It's vital that it would be a worldwide alternative. We could go to Israel or the UK and put on a PPV over there because we have a lot of fans around the world."

Moxley won the AEW World Title on the last day of February, and then the pandemic hit just a few weeks later, so he didn't get much time to connect with fans in arenas. He discussed his reign as champion and what role he serves as the current face of the company.

"Everything changed in March, and I had to find a new way to connect with the audience which is through the TV screen," Moxley said of the pandemic. "For me, it was about telling stories and giving people distraction and entertainment, and to do my best to give inspiration. You would be amazed how powerful pro wrestling can be. As the number one guy, I had to be myself, and keep my head high, and be an example to never quit. I had to create stability in an unstable time."

At Full Gear, Moxley will defend his AEW World Championship against Eddie Kingston in an "I Quit" match. The two are quite familiar with each other, as they wrestled each other on the indie scene over 10 years ago, and Moxley admits that Kingston is one of the few people that he put his trust in.

"We know each other from way back, but I didn't see Eddie for a long time. When he came to AEW, I found out about it a week earlier, and I knew he was going to make a big splash of this appearance. We are the same people – what you see is what's you get," stated Moxley. "I keep my circle pretty tight, but he is a guy I wanted to be around, a guy I can trust... until he attacked me from behind.

"All those years of grinding and all the stories he told, those are real, but I don't understand where this bitterness came from. Maybe he thinks he should have been here from the start, and what I am going to do is beat some sense into him when it will be just the two of us in the ring, where you don't have anyone to blame, no excuses. He will have to accept that he was not the better man that night, that I am the AEW world champion for a reason. He will have to verbalize to the entire world that he quits. It will not be just losing the match – it's much more than that. He will admit all his wrongs, and I hope he will go back to be the guy he used to be."