The Moxicity of Our City

I think the smallness of DGUSA works against this match.

In theory, I love a grungy venue, cameras that haven't been white-balanced, and blood spilled with no promise of lasting fame or further reward, but when we cut from Jon Moxley's promo, during which a couple of fans chant "can't hear shit," to the ring, I had to temper my expectations for this a little. For one, look at how little space Mox and Jimmy Jacobs have to play with.

One of the cool things about wrestling is that it can be done anywhere, so long as two wrestlers and a referee have enough space to make something happen, but the Police Athletic League Hall in Fall River, Massachusetts is tiny — Cagematch says that 752 people attended this show, and if that's true, DGUSA made space for them by shoving the guardrails as close to the ring as they possibly could. In theory, there's nothing wrong with that: dorks like me who've tried convincing their professors that wrestling is a legitimate art are fond of reaching towards the notion of wrestling being a descendent of the theater in the round, but one of wrestling's many miracles is how wrestlers manage to expand that space simply by leaving it. The space outside the ring, between the ring and the guardrail? That's part of the stage. The space between the guardrail and the wall of the arena? That's part of the stage. The space beyond that, in the parking lots and streets and environs too numerous to mention? Well, supposing the wrestlers are brave enough and there are cameras capable of following them into the wilderness just past what we can see on the camera and assume based on our knowledge of shitty little buildings that seem fated to moulder around the action they can barely contain, that, too, is part of the stage.

But this is the year 2010. This is the still-new world of internet pay-per-view. There aren't that many cameras (maybe three?), and leaving the ring means risking the feed, so we are bound to the ring, which, with its red-dominant ring mat, is the wrong fucking color for the bloodbath this match eventually becomes. It's also an I Quit match without a microphone, which isn't really a problem — not everyone who has an I Quit match is Terry Funk or Ric Flair or Mick Foley, and the lack of a mic means that Moxley and Jacobs have to trim down a lot of the excesses of this kind of thing. But at the same time, if anybody on the indies at this time could tap into the gravitas of the true masters of the I Quit match, it'd be these two, and the lack of that tool (likely because microphones are expensive and you don't want someone bleeding into one if you're not wealthy) leaves them without a vital means of ratcheting up the drama. The idea here is that neither one of these men wants to give the other the satisfaction of their saying "I quit" into a microphone in public — that's kind of tough to do without a microphone!

I'm jumping ahead of myself a bit, so let me go back to the idea of how wrestlers expand their stages. Jimmy Jacobs does this immediately by starting things with a balcony dive, hitting Moxley with a diving cross body. It doesn't look that much higher than the top turnbuckle from the perspective of the cameraman who catches it, but it does exactly what you want, giving the hero a big moment over his rival and getting the crowd into things right away. You forgive Jacobs stopping for a moment after that to soak in the cheers because, rather quickly, he's got a leather strap in his hands and is wearing Moxley out with it. There's a lot of Jon Moxley fan fiction on the internet, and if its authors or readers ever discover stuff like this, we're all in trouble.

Mox, for his part, has a bunch of railroad spikes hidden in his boots, but for the first several minutes of this match they're a tease. He gets one stuck in a turnbuckle pad like it's an AEW screwdriver before his second finds its mark. Before that, though, you get the wrestling portion of the I Quit match, where Mox beats Jacobs down and maintains his control with a number of submissions. It's fine, if a bit of a comedown from Jacobs' opening dive. Their cutoffs — Mox with an elbow to a diving Jacobs, Jacobs with a spear countering a corner piledriver — feel like the product of the limitations they're faced with. As Lenny Leonard noted a front row fan's resemblance to Blues Traveller frontman John Popper, I found myself writing "Is this violent enough?" in my notes.

Thankfully, Jon Moxley answered my question; first with a powerbomb into the guardrail, then by producing a second spike. His body language before stabbing Jacobs with it is strange to revisit 16 years later — he's such a master of milking the moments just before he strikes now, but here he's kind of figuring it out, half-Terry Funk, half-some kind of Joker. But when Jacobs emerges from the spike attack with one of the gnarliest crimson masks you'll ever see, all of that just fades into the blood red mist.

It's so gross, y'all. The screencap above is from the early seconds of Jacobs bleeding out — the blood on his chest is there because his forehead is spurting. I've said before and will say it plenty more in the future, but blood doesn't automatically make matches better for me. It's all about what happens after it starts to flow, how the babyface uses it to engender sympathy and how the heel becomes an even bigger bastard in its wake. Jacobs, for his part, immediately waves off the notion that this will get him to quit. Mox, for his, starts laying in measured punches, choking Jacobs against the ropes, attempting to get him to quit by applying submission holds. He can see the life draining from Jacobs and wants to be sure of it. It's a second gear the match really needed, at just the right time.

Still, it's not perfect. When Mox gets Jacobs in a Fujiwara armbar, you really feel the smallness of DGUSA. This is the first real I Quit match bit of drama, with Mox insisting that Jacobs wants to quit and the ref asking if he wants to "say the words," but without a microphone it's just a modern submission spot operating under a pre-1997 understanding of submission holds. Jacobs doesn't vocalize his desire to keep the match going, he just fires up on Mox, grabbing the spike that'd been lodged in the turnbuckle earlier to jab it into Moxley's forehead in kind.

From here, it feels like both men came into this match with big ideas and a fuzzy idea of how to execute them. I'm not into Jacobs' strikes, particularly his use of the spear, and while his working a guillotine choke on Moxley despite having his hands bound by the strap is novel, it doesn't really work. The lack of a mic rears its head again when Moxley finally goes feral, stabbing Jacobs over and over and over again with the spike until the referee finally pulls him off. Is he calling the match, like Ken Shamrock at WrestleMania 13 or a UFC referee? Nah, he just wants to ask Jacobs if he quits. Jacobs sits up and screams "NO," blood dripping down his face.

It's a cool visual, but how they get to it makes no sense and undermines the drama of Moxley's attack. Why does the referee get to decide, in a no disqualification I Quit match, that Mox is done stabbing Jimmy Jacobs? Why does Mox allow this? Was there really no better way to get to the end of this match than by having the referee fuck on the heel and having the heel just accept it? If the immediate follow up were more brutal I'd probably be okay with it, but the Jimmy Jacobs chairshots that connect his escape from the strap to his stabbing Moxley in the dick and balls for the win don't have as much oomph to them as Mox's early match lariats, and, if I'm really gonna nitpick, it's wild that Mox goes ten seconds with the spike between his nuts before he gives up (again, not into a mic, so if you're one of the 752 people present you just have to kinda take the referee's word for it), but given that he's up and out of the ring within seconds of the bell ringing, maybe it wasn't that bad. The less said about them giving Jimmy Jacobs a microphone to bleed into (for a good promo about his desire to win a championship) the better.

Rating: *** & 1/2