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| Moxley and Omega have gone hardcore before, just not this hardcore Photo Credit: Bob Mulrenin |
Deathmatch wrestling has evolved and grown in the 25-or-so years since it was truly innovated in Japan to the point where Onita's signature match might seem normalized nowadays except for the fact that it feels like its use is rare. Putting that match on an AEW pay-per-view feels like a statement, and one that might not seem all too good for the squeamish. I used to be like that as well. Deathmatch wrestling was never my bag until recently, but when you wise up to how wrestling really mangles its labor, it just turns into another, highly entertaining theater in which grapplers of all genders can compete. If you ask most wrestlers what the most dangerous thing they can do inside of ring, 99 out of 100 will tell you is "take a back bump." Wrestlers have been taking these bumps since time immemorial, and they have done more to add to the chronically painful dispositions of wrestlers than any light tube, fireball, or skewer to the head ever have. It's almost like wrestling is an inherently dangerous industry that absolutely no one should take part in, consume, or analyze. Yet, here we are.
Once you internalize this truism, deathmatch wrestling becomes a lot less gross and a lot more entertaining. What's more fun than explicit and lurid violence anyway? If that's not your bag, what are you doing watching wrestling anyway? You like watching guys wriggle around in their underwear, possibly covered in oil? Okay, point taken. Still, what's violence if it's a hastily-decided powerbomb segue into a chokeslam or a light tube across the top of the head? The main difference right now how the people who do either one look. Basically, the people who do regular and increasingly elaborate wrestling moves to each other work for WWE or New Japan, where physique and attractiveness are paramount. Deathmatch wrestlers... I'm not saying they're all ugly, but aesthetic isn't on the top of the priority list. You know damn well that if Kazuchika Okada and Kota Ibushi engaged in a thumbtacks, light tubes, and C4 match, public opinion would be a lot better than it is.
That being said, Moxley and Omega are high-profile, marketable, attractive men at the top of the second-biggest wrestling company in the country. Right now, if anyone is going to normalize deathmatch wrestling, it's going to be these two working in this company. The question then becomes "Should it be normalized?" and not from the safety nerds either. I'm not going to say that deathmatch wrestling occupies some niche where guys participate for the love of bleeding and doing as much feigned carnage as possible, but there is a twisted kind of purity in the places where this kind of wrestling generally takes place. Maybe purity isn't the right term; rather, places like Big Japan and Combat Zone Wrestling have a certain authenticity.
That authenticity gets lost when things like "sponsors" and "shareholders" and "ratings" come into play. Corporate wrestling, no matter how good it can be, has a way of sterilizing concepts and tropes that filter up from the backyards and the indies. AEW is less guilty of this than WWE, but the bar to clear to be "better than WWE" at remaining authentic is subterranean. As long as TNT Network has a say in things, and if you believe whispers about how they've influenced AEW decisions, their say is not insignificant, you run the risk of someone in those corporate ranks getting a bit gun-shy over having too much violence. Deathmatch wrestling isn't inherently safe because no wrestling is inherently safe, obviously. While deathmatches tend not to have greater frequency for major injury than non-deathmatches, one doesn't need to look further back than the infamous Nick Gage vs. David Arquette match when Arquette got glass from a light tube stuck in his jugular vein and started bleeding so profusely that he got mad and no-sold the finish to yell at Gage. If someone from the network caught wind of that, or any other isolated incident from the three decades of deathmatch wrestling, they might turn into the kind of the insufferable safety nerd that gets mad on Twitter when Nia Jax does a move that doesn't look as smooth as they think it should or when Kota Ibushi treats his neck as a superfluous body part as he's wont to do.
The one saving grace is the guy with the money in AEW is an inscrutable wrestling nerd. Tony Khan grew up a child of privilege who used that privilege to spend all day on wrestling message boards like the infamous Death Valley Driver, a collection of the nerdiest and most influential wrestling fans that was never seen before and has not been seen since. In fact, Khan started the most notorious thread in the history of those boards, the Sleaze Thread. If there ever were a perfect money mark, it would be Tony Khan. Having Omega and Moxley as the two wrestlers in the match is another reason to be optimistic, and one doesn't have to look any further back than Full Gear 2019, when they closed the show with a "lights out match" that took the action to the limits of corporate extreme wrestling.
There's not a whole lot in American wrestling that will get me excited anymore, but the combination of Moxley, Omega, and Onita's signature match are doing it for me. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to see at Revolution, because this is uncharted territory. I have my reservations, but the intrigue alone around how they're going to pull this match off makes it worth looking forward to.
