Jon Moxley vs Darby Allin, AEW Dynamite Grand Slam, 9/25/24
I just realized in this match graphic that Darby copied Punk's knuckle tats
Now this is wrestling that feels like it’s pushing the envelope.
I lauded Adam Page and Swerve Strickland for bringing the kind of violence that had long been unthinkable in major promotions into a PPV main event with their Lights Out Steel Cage Match at All Out, but I also criticized it for feeling like a parade of too-loosely-connected plunder spots escalating for shock value. No such complaints here. Rather than reaching for shock, this is a legitimately uncomfortable watch in places, in a way that even AEW’s biggest deathmatch stipulation matches rarely ever quite achieve. I’ll readily grant that this doesn’t have the portentous, industry-shifting implications that something like the All Out match or the Texas Death Matches AEW put on PPV in 2023 did, but for my taste, it succeeded more in communicating unconfined violence and creating memorably what-the-fuck, this-shouldn’t-be-happening vibes than either, and was also far more cohesively laid-out.
Within seconds of the opening bell, Moxley goes after Darby, and Allin starts bleeding from his mouth. And I don’t mean Mox caught him a little too snug with an elbow or he threw himself at a turnbuckle and he opened up something at his gum line that maybe smeared a bit on his lip or chin. I mean he’s bleeding. From his mouth. It drips down onto the canvas, viscous and dark, within the first few minutes. It’s immediately quite startling. It just gives the impression that something is off, something’s wrong, and intended or not, it really sets the stage for what’s to come.
What’s to come is Jon Moxley spending the opening minutes of the match just smothering Darby Allin. Darby is a prodigious bumper, modern wrestling’s greatest eater of shit, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to getting mauled by a bear. He takes some memorably wicked bumps into the buckles— and one not quite into the buckles, we’ll get to that— but with every strike available to him, and getting creative in using the ring as a weapon, Mox gives him no quarter, and not an inch of room to recover. I used the word creativity, and a beat mere minutes in where Moxley lines Darby’s bloody mouth up with the bottom rope and then kicks the rope to work the cut in his mouth is just transcendent. That’s so much more twisted to me than a gimmicked chair or a cinder block or even a syringe. Not more painful, maybe, but a different level of fucked up. That is just the product of a singularly sadistic wrestling mind. Ad-libbing a way to work a bleeding mouth? I know I’m laboring on this, but it’s just remarkable spur-of-the-moment thinking, I haven’t stopped thinking about it all week. Now a mouth already full of blood becomes the gusher I described before. And the slams immediately following are gnarly too, with Mox executing them so close to the ropes that Darby’s legs catch on the high-tension cable of the ring ropes. These two have put so much thought into this beating. Moxley is perhaps contemporary wrestling’s greatest methodical, cold-blooded killer, and he has met the avatar for his perfect victim in Allin.
The loudest pop, I think, of all of Grand Slam 2024, comes when Mox whips Darby into the turnbuckle, not for the first time, and Darby careens off, and through, the top and middle buckles, spinning out of the ring entirely to the floor, his legs and hip colliding with the ring steps on the way down. It’s one of the most uncontrolled-looking bumps in recent memory, adding to the feeling that something has gone wrong, there is something spiraling out of control here in a way nobody can quite account for.
All the while, Darby has been trying to throw shots to get some control back in the fight, but once things move to the floor and Moxley finally decides to circle his prey rather than smother it, Darby finally has room to throw some desperate overhand shots to the back, a back rake, even get off a dropkick and a sleeper, but Mox cuts him off matter-of-factly before, and this is odd, turning his back to his opponent after rolling back into the ring to break the ref’s count. He’s been so overwhelming, so locked in, but he’s seemingly also so confident in his ability to finish the job that he’s willing to give Darby a window. There’s no cockiness about him, no smarm, this is not that kind of heel performance. I’d almost liken what Mox is doing here— and the thrust of his new character direction— to Kagetsu’s run at the top of STARDOM. Do I think Jon Moxley is better than Kagetsu? No disrespect to Kagetsu, who I love, but the answer is pretty clearly yes. But what I mean is, he is frustrated with the way things are in AEW, so few of the prospects AEW brought in during its infancy have seen their stock rise a meaningful amount, even someone as demonstrably, reliably great, time and time again, as Darby Allin has been. So he has anointed himself the mountain to climb, AEW’s necessary evil. Private Party will have to surmount the rest of the BCC, Darby will have to weather the storm of Moxley himself, a reprise of the best thing the Blackpool Combat Club ever did as a faction, the induction of Wheeler Yuta, giving that same rub to young talent who really should have ascended the card by now but have never really been given the baton. This is largely speculation, Mox’s drawling promos offer little clarity— by design— but this idea is supported by his picking apart of Darby in this match and then promptly demonstrating disrespect and letting his attention slip.
So he takes his focus off Allin for just a second, and Darby, freak that he is, takes this opportunity to capture his arm, take the cap off the ring post, jam Mox’s forearm in the ring post, and go after it with his elbow. Shafir at ringside helps Mox extricate his arm from the post, buying Darby precious seconds, in which he apparently decides that to get back in this thing he needs to start throwing fucking bombs, but even a Coffin Drop and his always-reckless-looking suicida are only enough to stagger Mox for a moment, during which Marina Shafir steps in again, at which point I wonder what her role in this faction is ever really going to turn out to be. The weaponizing of the ring continues for Moxley, working on Darby’s shoulder in the ring post as we head into, sigh, a commercial. Picture-in-picture for the live audience, not so for me, using the TBS site to rewatch. I really should DVR big shows like this.
Anyway, Moxley seems to pick up where he left off when the red light comes back on, unloading mercilessly on Darby with every strike he’s got. The blood around Darby’s mouth has started to dry into a Joker-esque smile on the unpainted side, which I’ve decided to read as an homage to his mentor even if it literally couldn’t be anything other than a happy accident. Darby mounts another comeback attempt, even attempting a pinfall, Steamboat Rule-ing it, both in the spacing and the increasingly sustained nature of his comebacks. His twist on this though is, and has always been, that he’s going to come back by being a violent fucking psychopath, dishing it out in one stroke as bad as he’s been beaten over the course of several minutes. It’s pretty guaranteed to get a pop if it lands, and there are ample opportunities for cutoffs just by taking a big risk and coming up empty. It’s never seen to fail, and outside of maybe the No Holds Barred match with Samoa Joe from the beginning of 2023, this is probably the best example of how to implement the patented Darby Allin match layout to date.
Mox hits a dropkick?? I don’t know if I’d ever seen a Moxley dropkick before this match, it’s an uncanny, unfamiliar sight, but it lands flush. Love to see a veteran trying something unfamiliar, like how Danielson in the build to All In started doing a Springboard Somersault Plancha that I can only think of a single-digit number of instances of him doing, and none in the last fifteen years. Darby keeps taking his big shots, they keep connecting, but Moxley is like the Terminator, he doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear, and he absolutely will not stop until Darby Allin is dead. Darby wrenches in a Fujiwara Armbar, screaming, but it doesn’t matter. He transitions into a Guillotine. It doesn’t matter. Dodges a charging nothing and sends Moxley into the stairs. It doesn’t matter. At this point, rolling into ring after the aforementioned stair spot feels like self-preservation, like fleeing to safety for Darby.
And then he gives it up. After a whole section ringside has been torn up by the previous excursion outside, mat and all, Allin hurls himself at Moxley for one of those middle-rope suicidas I mentioned, where he turns himself into a fucking bullet… And Moxley sidesteps. Darby wipes out on the concrete. And then Moxley lifts him up like a sack of potatoes and drops the very same back that just collided at high speed with the floor of Arthur Ashe Stadium, into the sharp edges of the ring steps.
There’s match left, but is there? Darby is done for. I would not have objected to Remsburg’s count in this one reaching ten without Allin stirring, but as Excalibur reminds us, this is a guy that was walking around days after being hit by a bus just six months ago. What’s a little bit of concrete and steel? Jon Moxley sits in the far corner of the ring, taking a moment to recover and admire his vicious handiwork. He doesn’t get immediately back on the attack like he usually might when Darby just beats the count, either, he just marvels at his tenacity and shakes his head in frustration. What else is there to do?
And that’s when the audience really starts to contribute. After a whole night of being infuriatingly cold, giving very little to to the incredibly smart and insanely improbably match Danielson and McGuinness put on in the opener, they finally start to pull their weight, taking the match across the finish line as Darby drags himself toward Moxley, with the best wrestling chant I’ve heard since “You’re a wrestler!” for Danny Garcia a couple summers ago.
“You can’t kill him!”
Come on. So good.
Moxley can’t even hide how much he loves it. It’s exactly the impression that this match, which he put together, and this program, which he has the pen for, are meant to leave, and the crowd is already participating vociferously in it.
If Jon Moxley is a Terminator, Darby Allin is a zombie. But really, what is a zombie going to do to put down a Terminator?
A Coffin Drop attempt is countered by a supine Moxley, who clocks it and catches Allin in a Sleeper, paired with Body Scissors that put pressure on the spine and ribs that Darby has been landing on every manner of unforgiving surface on since the match started. The Sleeper becomes Moxley’s signature Bulldog Choke, hips in the air for extra torque like Mox likes to do, and the blood still filling Darby’s mouth mixes with sweat and saliva as he fades, giving the distinct impression that his mouth is foaming blood, the frothy stuff dripping on the canvas as he desperately reaches for and reaches the bottom rope.
What fight is left in Darby after that rises to the surface as he claws vainly at Mox’s face, paintbrushes him, bites his head, tries for a Superplex, but there’s just not enough left in his stores of strength or awareness to realize what’s happening as Moxley hits an Avalanche Death Rider to put Darby down for the count and clear Mox’s path to Bryan Danielson and the AEW World Championship.
This was as much synopsis as it was review, usually not my way of doing things, but a literal recounting of the match’s contents really speaks for itself. Wrestlers are described as having gone to war with one another so often by commentators (read: Excalibur) trying to be poetic about matches that are rarely all that, but this was as warlike as AEW has gotten in recent memory. Moxley’s sensibilities and grit, and Darby’s ragdoll form and comparable ability to absorb massive amounts of physical trauma, make this one of the most straightforwardly, often uncomfortably, brutal matches of the year, without featuring a single weapon spot, without a single guy even running the razor. The blood from the mouth really serves this match better than a crimson mask would’ve anyway, somehow. There’s more verisimilitude ( ˌverəsəˈmiləˌto͞od , the appearance of being true or real) with the bloody mouth, and that’s what this match brings to the table more than something like the All Out main event, which felt distinctly less human, had distinctly less of a shape to it, and for all its weapons and pouring blood, ended up over-the-top without the grit that can serve to make heightened violence all the more effective. This match, as many Darby Allin matches, and especially many Jon Moxley matches, underscores that building from a more grounded place gives you more space to grow into, and this match filled the massive space of Arthur Ashe, hopefully growing into something lasting in the process.