10 Lies About Famous Wrestling Matches That You Probably Believe
3. "Jon Moxley And Kenny Omega Took It Too Far"
It feels quaint now, particularly since Chris Jericho has since crashed Nick Gage through shoot glass on television and Sammy Guevara just the other week almost broke his neck or worse with a spectacularly ill-advised 630 senton off a ladder, but the Kenny Omega Vs. Jon Moxley Lights Out match at Full Gear 2019 incited something of a moral panic.
An understandably distressed Renee Paquette wondered aloud just what the f*ck her husband was doing, where Dave Meltzer ripped the violence and strategy to shreds on Observer radio (though he did put over the storytelling). He claimed that the match was a dumb idea unlikely to grow AEW's audience because of the sheer level of violence involved - which he even compared to the most indulgent, gory excesses of Big Japan Pro Wrestling. A low-level grifter even successfully convinced the Maryland Athletic Commission to issue AEW with a fine. Was that person's needle d*ck smaller than the wired barbs?
On the subject of which: the weaponry was deployed in a genius way, in that it effectively worked everybody.
Actual harmful plunder was utilised early, in order to establish a tone and indeed a precedent; if the first wave of weapons were real, and the audience had been cast into a spell of suspended disbelief, the worked stuff - the broken shards of sugar glass, the "barbed wire" bed - had to be real.