Jon Moxley Loved Match With Jake Hager, Learned Empty Arena Brawling Doesn’t Work

Early in the pandemic era, Jon Moxley defended his AEW World Title against Jake Hager in a No Holds Barred match.

The bout was taped and aired on April 15. Tony Khan famously hyped the match by saying, “I believe this will be known as the best empty arena match ever.”

Many fans didn’t believe it lived up to the hype and with the empty arena era now being over, very few would say Hager vs. Moxley was the best empty arena match ever.

However, Tony Khan wasn’t the only person who loved the match.

“I did make a serious effort to be like, ‘How can we do this? What can be done?’ Legitimate wrestling, technical wrestling, can actually work in this environment. Everything has to be stiff, tight, and physical because you can’t rely on the crowd. Everything has to be like a real fight. I had a match with Jake Hager when it was first going down where we were like, let’s just build the whole world title program in three hours. Jake is a shooter, let’s just have a fight. We did some really cool shit. I love that fucking match. What fucked it up was later, when they played it, there were four fucking commercial breaks, which made it endless long, but we did cool tight wrestling shit. I learned later that brawling in an empty arena does not work. We taped that match a month ahead of time and by the time I learned that, we had already taped the match. Ah, kinda fucked up there. Brawling around the building in an empty arena does not come off well on TV,” Moxley said on Wrestling Observer Radio when reflecting on the match.

The majority of Moxley’s run took place during the pandemic era with Hager being his first title defense after winning the belt at AEW Revolution.

Elsewhere during the interview, Moxley discussed his hatred of ladder matches. You can find his full comments by clicking here.

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