AEW Held Off On Dynamite Announcements Out Of Respect For Jon Moxley

Tony Khan was faced with a bit of a moral dilemma after announcing that Jon Moxley was going to take some time off to go to an inpatient alcohol treatment facility. Moxley was scheduled to face Orange Cassidy in a semi-final of the AEW World Title Eliminator tournament on tonight’s Dynamite.

Khan struggled with how to be respectful to Jon Moxley and his family while still delivering on his obligation to hold a televised wrestling show. The reality is, there’s still a show tonight and Jon Moxley won’t be there. It needed to be addressed at some point. He talked about the delicate dance on today’s Wrestling Observer Live.

“There are a lot of announcements about tonight’s show that I had been holding off on making, because I really wanted to show respect to Jon and I felt that announcing matches didn’t make sense when we had such an important announcement to make eariler in the week. So, I’ve held back.”

Khan didn’t make any announcements about tonight’s Dynamite between the time he made the Twitter post announcing Mox’s leave of absence and early this afternoon. The AEW boss wanted to give fans some breathing room and to allow the news to sink in and process. An immediate announcement would’ve seemed disrespectful to Moxley.

It seems that AEW is taking the high road and has been nothing but class in dealing with Moxley’s alcohol issue. In the wild, pretend world of professional wrestling, it’s easy to lose perspective and try to make everything a work like WCW did with Scott Hall.

While we don’t know exactly who will fill in for Jon Moxley, we do know that Orange Cassidy will have a tournament match tonight. CM Punk recently hinted that he might be the one. It’s hard to see that happening, as either Bryan Danielson or Punk would have to take a loss since the tournament needs to have a winner.

What do you think of this story? Let us know in the comments?

Please credit Ringside News if you use any of the transcriptions in this article.