Jon Moxley Reveals How He Got Introduced To Pro Wrestling
AEW star and GCW World Champion Jon Moxley joined Throwing Down w/ Renee and Miesha, hosted by MMA fighter Miesha Tate and Moxley's wife, Renee, Paquette, to promote his new autobiography, Mox. Although to hear Moxley tell it, it's not exactly an autobiography.
"It's about every single aspect of my life," Moxley said. "From my very first memories of life, which were mostly about wrestling, up until things that happened very recently. It covers everything. I don't even know if I'd call it an autobiography so much as a collection of stories and stuff and events. I wouldn't call it a linear story at all, but you definitely get the sense of what the insanity of my life has been like."
Moxley went into this project without any writing experience, nor any writing training. He overcame this by realizing that the storytelling aspect of wrestling follows the same guidelines of telling a story via writing.
"I've never written anything in my life before," Moxley said. "I have no formal writing training at all, I didn't even graduate high school the first time. So I was like 'I don't know about this man.' But I did a sampler. I just typed it on my phone and I was like 'if it's good, I'll write something.' And wrestling is storytelling. So actually, without realizing, when you go to write a book your telling stories.
"It's actually a lot of the same things, especially when you're cutting promos or doing interview, you're telling stories. You're taking people on a ride and engaging them in what you're feeling and thinking, and getting them into the story. So I actually had experience in this, I just never realized it. I just never did it with the written word. So I just did a little sampler on my phone and just sent it to them (the publisher), because they came to me abut it."
Moxley also detailed the story of his first experience with pro wrestling, which was attending a local indie show at a Cincinnati flea market. It was there he discovered an add for a wrestling school, and the rest was history.
"I saw a flyer on a telephone pole," Moxley said. "I found myself academically studying wrestling, to the point where I'd be so obsessed with it. And I was athlete in high school, wrestling, football and all of that. But back then I didn't have internet and all that. So I was like 'how do you get into wrestling?' It's such a mysterious world. A guy like Undertaker, my friends used to be like 'do you think he actually sleeps in a coffin? What does he do in real life?' It's not exposed like it is today. So I saw a flyer on a telephone pole for a local indie show, and I was like 'oh cool. I'm going to that.' It was a flea market called the Red Barn Flea Market in Cincinnati. And at the event they had the program with coupons for pizza, they listed the sponsors and the card. There was an ad in the back for Les Thatcher's Main Event Pro Wrestling Camp. That was the lightbulb moment where I was like 'oh!' It's like anything else. You want to be a doctor, you go to medical school. You want to be a wrestler, you go to wrestling school.
"To get back to what I was saying before, I wrote it in a way, a lot of wrestling books, 90% of the people who read it are wrestling fans. But they still write it for the non wrestling fans, so they overexplain what words mean and terms are who people are and what things are and what WWE is. You don't have to explain what WWE is. There's a lot of insider terms and stuff like that. The hardcore wrestling fans, the majority who read the book, they know that. So I wrote it with the idea of not playing down to them or not overexplaining everything. But I also thought that was a cooler way to make it accessible and fun for non wrestling fans."
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Throwing Down w/ Renee & Miesha and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription