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As AEW inches closer and closer to Full Gear, current World Champion Jon Moxley sat down with The Enquirer in his hometown of Cincinnati about non-alcoholic beer, his wife, and most importantly, sobriety and how it has helped him both inside and outside of the ring.
“Over a year ago, I was afraid of dying of a seizure in the ring,” Moxley recalls. “I had that on my mind every day. It was all (messed) up, and going through an absolute personal hell for a long time that nobody else even knew about. When you’re scared for your actual life, to make the decision to go to rehab and (stuff) was basically – I had to basically assume I’m giving everything away. I was like, OK, I’m either going to live a long, happy life and raise my kid and be a person, or I can wrestle. But I can’t have both.”
Using alcohol to numb the pain of being one of the hardest-working performers in the ring, Moxley was afraid that losing the booze would in turn cost him his edge in the ring. Fortunately, when he left the facility, Mox was met with a very welcomed surprise.
“But when I got out, it turned out that nobody was mad at me at all,” he said. “Everybody was very happy. I was welcomed back by AEW and by the fans, and it was just like, go and get back to it. And when you’ve already lost everything, all you fear for is your life, literally and figuratively.”
“If I had taken another step in the wrong direction, I could have been on the verge of losing my family if I had gone that way. If I had kept going in another direction, I could have died on live television. I could have literally lost everything. So to make that choice, I had to completely give away everything. I’ll never wrestle in this arena again, I’ll never get to wrestle in front of these fans again, I’ll never get to be on TV again, I’ll never win a championship again, I’ll never make any money again, I’ll go back and get my old job at the arena – I don’t know. I had to give it all away.
“Now there’s kind of nothing to lose. What, am I gonna lose a match? Will I screw up a move? Like, what could possibly go wrong? Almost nothing. Big f’n deal. Am I alive? OK, I think it was a fine day, then.”
In the end, Moxley appears happy to have found a way to work in AEW that works for him, especially since he landed that Athletic Brewing beer sponsorship he was vying for at Forbidden Door. Expect more Athletic Bews after Full Gear, folks.
We had to send some brews to the champ. @JonMoxley 💪 pic.twitter.com/1KyE80oaRY
— Athletic Brewing (@AthleticBrewing) July 20, 2022
The AEW World Champion opens up about why rehab was the right move for him.
Later in this interview with The Enquirer, Moxley explained why, for him, rehab was the right decision.
The simple short way to put is that you get to a certain point you’ve got a problem you can’t fix yourself. If your plumbing is backed up, you call a plumber. If your transmission is shot, you call a mechanic. At a certain point, when things are beyond your own control, you’ve got to call a professional and do a job that’s much more expedient, efficient and thorough than you can do yourself.
It’s definitely the best decision I’ve ever made. I’m the kind of guy that wants to fix everything myself, and isn’t going to ask for help, necessarily, and obviously that’s a kind of embarrassing thing, y’know. That’s the main reason probably that a lot of people hesitate to do a thing like that because it’s a sign of weakness or it’s embarrassing. It’s whatever. It’s a lot quicker. It saves you a whole hell of a lot of trouble to deal with it head-on. But you’ve got to kind of get to that point, though, because you can try everything on your own first. The cliche is you’ve got to hit rock bottom or whatever.
Maybe instead of going through a year of hell, maybe I’ll bite this in the bud right now, and that would be cool.
Fortunately, since returning from rehab, Mox has had some of the best success of his career, winning the AEW Championship on two separate occasions while running a very successful open challenge eliminator series that has gotten over in a major way. Is that all because of being alcohol-free? Whose to say, but it certainly seems to be working for him, which is really all that matters.
