Jon Moxley is wrestling again following a rehab-prompted hiatus from AEW. The former AEW World Champion checked himself into a facility late last year, returning in January.
Moxley detailed his struggles with the process during a sitdown with his wife Renee Paquette on her podcast, The Sessions With Renee Paquette, and revealed he was even urged to retire by one of his therapists.
The Hardest Part
The ex-WWE man explained quitting alcohol wasn’t the hard part as he’d wanted to do it for a while, and he can’t imagine having a drink again, noting the changes to his body were the toughest to deal with.
“Night sweats, crazy nightmares, my chemicals are all unbalanced, wacky mood swings. Let’s say it hasn’t been easy,” he said (H/T WrestlingNews.co). “The not drinking part is easy. It’s not like I have some desire to drink. I have no desire to drink. I can’t even imagine drinking right now. Not drinking was easy. I wanted to stop drinking for a long time. I was trying to quit drinking for a long time.
“Just dealing with all the after-effects and what happens to you physically when your body goes through this metamorphosis, trying to re-calibrate itself has not been easy. I’m on national television while I’m going through these problems and being in front of everybody. A lot of people in my position would have stayed in rehab a lot longer. I would have stayed in hiding a lot longer than I was. The one therapist I had straight up told me to retire. She said, ‘Start a wrestling school. Train some kids. You know what the problem is? You gotta get out of there.’ I was like, ‘I don’t think it’s that.’”
A Difficult Return
Moxley claimed his first match back was not as he expected as he felt much slower but also didn’t feel any nerves.
“So my first match back, you think it’s gonna be like, ‘Okay, well, now you’re sober so you’re just going to feel like a million dollars.’ It doesn’t really work like that. It was weird. It was like my legs were in quicksand. I didn’t have any adrenaline, not that I didn’t have any adrenaline, so much is like, I wasn’t nervous. It’s hard to put into words, but it used to be like this big, long, giant process to get ready to go out and do a match or wrestle, like this transformation to be ready to go to the ring.”
Moxley will hope to regain the AEW World Championship when he faces Hiroshi Tanahashi at Forbidden Door this weekend. CM Punk was originally set to defend his title against Tanahashi but his injury forced AEW to book otherwise.
TheSportster Podcast has returned! Check out the latest episodes of the show where Jim Parsons and Norman Quarrinton cover the latest news and events happening in the worlds of WWE, AEW and more!
Listen to TheSportster Show here