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Jon Moxley Comments on Disappointing WrestleMania 32 Match with Brock Lesnar and SummerSlam 2018 Changes Due to Lesnar

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Jon Moxley, who is the former Dean Ambrose in WWE, didn’t talk that much to the media during his WWE career, but he has done a lot of talking since joining All Elite Wrestling nine days ago. Last week, I covered Moxley’s in-depth interview with Chris Jericho on his “Talk is Jericho” podcast. A few days ago, Wade Keller released part one of a two part interview with Moxley where Jon went more in-depth on his gripes with WWE including why he thinks Vince McMahon is the problem and I covered that here.

There was a second part of the Keller conversation with Moxley that focused on some other topics including the Brock Lesnar vs. Dean Ambrose match at WrestleMania 32 in 2016 and also a story of how Lesnar got plans changed at SummerSlam last year. The second part of the Moxley podcast with Keller is available here.

Here are some quotes from Moxley talking about the two Lesnar related subjects. Thanks to WrestlingInc for the transcript.

Moxley explained how his WrestleMania 32 was set up:

“When I was talking about it (on Talk is Jericho), I wasn’t blaming Brock as much as Vince and everyone surrounding that situation. There was no effort put in the angle. By the time we got into WrestleMania, the angle wasn’t hot anymore. I was supposed to work with [Chris] Jericho and Brock was supposed to work with Bray. Then me and Brock did the three-way match, some cool stuff, and there was like a vibe between us. I earned this match on my own merit. Me doing my thing my way made it to where people wanted to see this match. This is like my dream opponent. This is my life. The match happened because of what I’ve done. Now they’re booking it, it’s goofball city again.”

Moxley detailed how difficult it was to get Brock to talk to him to plan out the match:

“The weeks leading up, the angle was not good. Brock isn’t even there half the time. We don’t do anything interesting. The weeks before in Brooklyn, I carry a little red wagon to the ring and fill it with weapons. I go into Vince’s office. I’m mortified. I’m like, ‘This is so serious and you got me dragging a little red wagon. Make me understand.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, this is dead serious to you. You’re going to drag that wagon out there. You’re not even going look at him. Going to drag the wagon out, put your weapons in, and say, I’ll see you at WrestleMania.'”

“I couldn’t convince him otherwise. I tried to do it exactly as he saw it. It kind of got over to a degree. If anyone call pull a red wagon and make it look cool, it’s me. We had one scheduled WrestleMania rehearsal at like 11 p.m. Saturday night before the show at the stadium. He never came to the hotel. We ended up not even doing that. Day of the show, he gets there at like 3pm. He’s walking away, talking to other people, not really interested. He didn’t have the mentality to steal the show at all. We finally talked about the match while the second match was going on.”

“We did nothing. If it was a match on Raw, it would have been awesome. They didn’t realize why people wanted the match. I would rather have worked with Jericho.”

It was a frustrating match to watch and I’m sure it was tough for Jon to even be a part of it. The good thing is that a few months later, Ambrose/Moxley won Money in the Bank and cashed in to become the WWE Champion. He was arguably the top face in WWE for most of 2016, so he was able to do well after the loss.

Moxley revealed how SummerSlam 2018 plans changed because of Lesnar:

“SummerSlam (2018), the end of the show was supposed to be when The Shield returns. We were worried about it not being as impactful the next night. It still worked just as good. The end of SummerSlam was Roman vs. Brock, Braun comes out, looks like a doofus because he can’t figure out how to cash in.”

“How it ever went was Brock’s idea. At 6pm before the show, everything was supposed to happen, the Shield coming out, this awesome stuff that the writers have been working on tirelessly to have this perfect ending to SummerSlam that was good. Brock comes in at 6pm and changes everything. Vince is like, we are going to go with Brock’s idea. It made everyone else look stupid but Brock.

“And the writers are just sitting there watching it in the room and they’re like ‘Come on, we had it, we had this great ending.’ Everyone is suffering, again not my problem, anymore.”

These are things we read about all the time in WWE where something is planned and then there’s a change. Thanks to Moxley for giving another example of it.