Editor’s note: this piece contains images and descriptions of violent wrestling matches and moments featuring blood, simulated strangling/asphyxiation, and more. These images have not been put behind censor walls as a matter of editorial choice.
On July 12, 2025, Hangman Adam Page beat Jon Moxley for the AEW World Heavyweight Championship. Like his first title victory in 2021, it was the culmination of years of storytelling, in and out of the ring, a redemption arc for Page, whose anxious millennial cowboy had crawled out of the bottle to win in 2021 and reemerged from the black pit his heart had become in 2025 to do it again, creating two of the biggest moments in All Elite Wrestling’s tumultuous existence.
This win, though, transcends scale. The longer AEW exists, the more important it will seem, and there is no reason at present to suspect that AEW will not be around for a while — ten years, fifteen, beyond Jon Moxley’s career or Adam Page’s or any of the company’s founding core — a defining moment for the company and the sport of professional wrestling as a whole, a crystal-clear statement of what this company and these wrestlers mean not only now, but forever.
Its roots really are that deep. Scan any social media platform and you’ll find a wrestling fan positing theories as to how this match came together and what it all means. On paper, it looks simple: 273 days after Jon Moxley beat Bryan Danielson for the AEW World Heavyweight Championship and held it hostage in a briefcase in an effort to remake the company in his image, he lost it to the company’s biggest day one star on its largest stage. Despite the seeming straight-line simplicity of professional wrestling, in which the babyface endures hardship and triumphs over the heel, there is nothing simple about Adam Page’s second championship victory.
On screen, it was a months-long tangling and untangling of thread after thread after thread, breaking Page down completely only to build him back up while, parallel to that, Jon Moxley broke AEW down and forced it to do the same. On the booking sheet, one can only imagine how this played out. Where does Page’s journey start? At this, the mind reels: the date one assigns to the beginning of his quest reveals as much about the viewer as it does the storyline. Was this a story about personal redemption? Was it about rebooting AEW, rallying around the flag after it endured an incredibly difficult year? When the bell rang for the end of his reign, what kind of demon was Jon Moxley, and what does his slaying represent?
To me, the answer is more cosmic than the battle for Page’s soul or AEW’s — the war he and Jon Moxley waged at All In Texas was for the very heart of professional wrestling, for which the date of redress is December 28, 1997: WCW’s 15th edition of Starrcade. Again, it looks simple on paper: Sting defeats “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship 539 days after Hogan won the title, defaced it, and held it hostage in an effort to remake World Championship Wrestling in his image: the new World order. Sting was the company’s biggest homegrown star, its stalwart, the one man who never left it for greener pastures. Starrcade was its biggest stage. Redemptive arc, years of threads tangling and untangling, the whole of the wrestling world aching for an earned moment of bliss.
Sting left Washington D.C. with the title, but other than that, everything that could have gone wrong did. For Starrcade 1997 and nearly two years of build to pay off properly, Sting needed to beat Hulk Hogan cleanly. For whatever reason, and dozens have been offered over the past 27 years, he did not. I don’t think it would have mattered if the planned finish had gone as intended, had referee Nick Patrick counted an actual fast three count that made Bret Hart’s rescue of Sting and the title necessary: the point of that match, of every petite tragedy and triumph between Hogan’s turn at Bash of the Beach 1996 and Starrcade 1997, every word said and unsaid by Sting, every color shed from his facepaint kit, every goon dropped by the Scorpion Death Drop and every time Hogan escaped by the skin of his teeth, was that Sting’s victory, our victory, was the final one in the battle for World Championship Wrestling. Someone made a demand. Someone blinked. Someone counted slow. Fragile egos. Fragile bodies. Weak minds. Weak spirits. In the end, the guy set up to save the day handed the title back on Nitro. In the end, WCW died.
So too did a certain kind of narrative framework in mainstream American wrestling, a long-form, detail-oriented system of set-up and reward, a rich simulacrum of competition and TV drama teeming with delight above and below the surface, a wrestling language that could meet both casual and diehard fans where they were. This happened before WCW officially folded, when they panicked and tried to keep the nWo gravy train going. which was also one of the few moments in Vince McMahon’s too-long creative career where he made a decision that wasn’t itself some kind of half-measure: Steve Austin’s victory over Shawn Michaels for the WWF Championship at WrestleMania XIV.
McMahon couldn’t have drawn up a better “fuck you” to the competition: Unlike WCW, he got to promote the fact that an outside referee, no less a media sensation than Mike Tyson, would be involved in the finish of the match for months. The Michaels/Austin feud mattered, but the real money was in Austin’s seeming beef with Tyson, the tease being that Tyson would end up screwing him out of the title. Instead, he counted a clean, emphatic pin on Michaels after a Stone Cold Stunner, raised Austin’s hand, let him celebrate over a downed Michaels, and then laid HBK out for the benefit of SportsCenter.
There aren’t many moments orchestrated by Vince McMahon like it. As a booker, he lacked patience, most likely because the goal of his eventual monopoly was not to promote professional wrestling, but for him to ease the shame of being a wrestling promoter by pretending to be something else. During the peak of Hulkamania, he tried his hand at hosting a talk show. Steve Austin’s success enabled him to chase the zeitgeist of Must See TV Comedy — on the call for a WWF Title Match between The Rock and Mankind that aired as competition to the Super Bowl halftime show he didn’t describe the WWF to the curious as wrestling, but a hybrid of Roadrunner cartoons and daytime soaps. With WCW dead and long in his rearview mirror, he tried to turn Raw into Saturday Night Live. Every time a crumb was given to wrestling fans who endured his fascination with fart jokes and fat jokes and F-list celebrities and his own virility, it was quickly snatched away. Title reigns and eras went long, but more out of a sense of entropy than purpose: the half of the WWE crowd that booed John Cena’s run as the company’s ace wasn’t in on a joke, and Triple H’s “Reign of Terror” does not refer to the ruthlessness with which he pursued his championship matches.
AEW changed that. It didn’t look at wrestling as a closed loop wherein the only things of consequence within its history occurred in its ring — it reached outward, encompassing wrestlers and acknowledging ideas beyond its boundaries, both because it had to and because its principal creative voice, Tony Khan, believes that wrestling is richer for it. More potential points of departure for All In Texas spin out from this notion: For Hangman Page, maybe it’s the loss to Chris Jericho in the first AEW World Heavyweight Championship match on August 31, 2019, or the day after when he woke up to the news that Jericho had lost the belt at a Longhorn Steakhouse. For Jon Moxley, maybe it’s his debut on May 25 of that same year, disturbing the notion that AEW could be called “All Friends Wrestling.” Maybe it’s Page’s loss to CM Punk that did it, or Jon Moxley’s, or Moxley saying he was through with complacency, or the day Triple H warned him that he didn’t want to end up like Terry Funk, or any number of pebbles cast into the endless sea that is the great sport of professional wrestling.
It is all of these things and more, crashing into each other en route to obliterating a firewall that has stood for over a quarter of a century, between a wrestling world shaded in dour tones of grey and the one that stands before us now, one that is thrillingly, vibrantly unknown. The trick pulled here, the beautiful twist in this tale, is that while Hangman Adam Page is Sting in this narrative, Jon Moxley is not Hulk Hogan: he’s the closest thing we have to Terry Funk. One looks at Terry Funk in retrospect as a selfless genius, a philosopher and a seer and an outlaw, but the first time he was called “middle aged and crazy” it was in 1989 when he was suffocating Ric Flair with a plastic bag and piledriving him through a table.
The world remembers the poetry of that work but much of that was done while he played the role of the bitter old bastard stuck on his legacy and the right way of doing things. Jon Moxley and the Death Riders may have signaled “new World order” to American fans, there’s no way Moxley, a wrestler who once came to the ring to Atsushi Onita’s theme song, wasn’t thinking about Terry Funk becoming the main villain of FMW following Onita’s retirement, forming a group called the Funk Masters of Wrestling to prove that his philosophy was superior to that followed by new top babyfaces Hayabusa and Masato Tanaka. The question the Funk Masters of Wrestling and the Death Riders angles asked is a big one: What good is a wrestling promotion if its top stars can simply inherit the world when their forebearers age out of the game?
This mutation of it will go down as one of the most divisive angles in modern wrestling history, and not entirely because wrestling fans lack patience. The angle started strong, bravely even, with the crushing betrayal and eventual defeat of Bryan Danielson. Remember how mad people were that he didn’t get some cheeseball moment to celebrate himself at WrestleDream 2024? For a while, that anger seemed justifiable: Moxley positioned himself as a warrior philosopher, but he and his crew weren’t doing anything new, their rhythm became predictable, their aims were vague. There were valid arguments to entirely jettison or partially reboot the angle with every new challenger Moxley snuffed out, if only because the angle seemed to be spinning its wheels and the tactic worked when fans were tired of Hulk Hogan in 1997 and 1998. As for Page, he was so far down the list of likely kingslayers 273 days before he did it that Will Ospreay and Darby Allin were still on the board for a lot of pundits, probably right up until they inserted themselves into the match.
But the Death Riders angle got good again as they started showing cracks, and Hangman started to build momentum, inching back towards the light. All In Texas was not going to topple All In London in terms of attendance, but it was arguably more important as a symbol: AEW’s first American card in a venue of this size. Tickets went on sale when the company was cold and there was no clear path to this (or any) AEW World Championship match as a drawing card. Other promoters with surer bets than this match blinked when they shouldn’t have: Cody Rhodes wakes up next to a rubber chicken at WrestleMania 39, CM Punk gets stuck with a Jackknife Powerbomb at SummerSlam 2011, Kevin Nash takes the Fingerpoke of Doom from Hulk Hogan while Goldberg is stuck in traffic, and the surest bet of them all, Starrcade 1997.
On one side of each of those equations, you have something new. On the other, you have entropy. In wrestling, entropy is often seen as the safe bet, though every single time a promoter takes it, they pay in the long run. AEW is no exception — they put a lot of time and effort into relaunching CM Punk after he returned from injury and suspension, and by the time he was on another promotion’s injured reserve list, Tony Khan was vowing that AEW would “restore the feeling,” which is neither something you want to hear a wrestling promoter say nor something one has ever successfully accomplished. He could have kept the title on Moxley, his ace, the backbone of AEW, the safe bet. Instead, we got this. Listen to how happy the fans are when Hangman Page lays his eyes on the AEW Championship and say that it wasn’t worth the ride. You can’t. You’d have to be heartless. You’d have to be a fraud. You’d have to be, to use one of Terry Funk’s favorite epithets, a gutless individual.
Moxley vs. Page is a big, bad, mean motherfucker of a match, racing to exceed whatever expectations of violence the crowd had coming in. Page is dressed in white, and within seconds his tights are stained crimson with Jon Moxley’s blood, which jets out of his forehead when Page stabs him with a fork. When Moxley returns the favor, scraping barbed wire across his face, it’s slow and methodical by comparison, as if their veins have bought into the spectacle of the hope spot and the agony of heat.
The camera work is exquisite — there’s an early shot of Mox walking past the barbwire-wrapped tables where he looks like an enemy general looking up over the trenches, another where Page is blurred out in the background, wiping blood from his eyes as Mox stomps a pile of beer bottles into smaller, more dangerous shards that do more with the idea of cinema than any match that’s ever been billed as such, the lighting is sharp and forces your eye to take in the carnage, and the staging is perfect for the moment, simple and open, a sea of people watching their hero pay for his sins, egged on by the wildman at the heart of the chaos.
In 1995, The Pitbulls beat Raven and Stevie Richards in a double dog collar match that threaded seemingly every major ECW storyline of the time through the eye of its needle. In 1997, Lex Luger beat Hulk Hogan for the WCW Championship by fighting off the whole of the nWo. In 2001, Meiko Satomura secured her place as the ace of a generation of women’s wrestlers by withstanding the very worst the previous ace, Akira Hokuto, could dish out and paying it back double. In 2025, Hangman Page cut a path somewhere between all three, surviving Mox’s worst and wave after wave of Death Rider interference as AEW rallied around him. Upset about Bryan Danielson not getting a moment at WrestleDream? Here he is in a Blue Panther mask to take his revenge. Wondering where Darby Allin was? In the rafters of Globe Life Field, waiting for the right moment to rappel down to the ring. Need closure from the Swerve/Hangman beef for this to truly feel like a new chapter? Here he is, with the chain Hangman gave him, to take out Page’s former friends the Young Bucks.
Is it perfect? Not at all. It’s full of wrestling contrivances that won’t work for everyone (what was Darby going to do if the match didn’t go to a point where Mox was going to suffocate Page with a garbage bag, not play the cell phone video he recorded on Mount Everest?), but those setpieces point the way towards the immediate future and reestablish what AEW is about beyond that: the Death Riders are on their heels but still dangerous, Will Ospreay is going to need revenge before he sets off on his quest for the AEW Championship, Jon Moxley vowed to whoop Bryan Danielson’s ass if he ever showed his face at any wrestling show let alone an AEW one and is gonna have to make good on that if he wants to reestablish his place at the top of the universe, Page has an immediate contender in MJF who represents his antithesis, and, more importantly, while they’re never going to like each other, he and Swerve Strickland have respect for one another. And if none of that is as appealing as violence, well, there’s a bed of nails, a length of chain, pools of blood, and a literal hangman spot where Moxley goes purple.
Most importantly, he does what Hogan did not at Starrcade 1997: he taps cleanly, leaving no doubt that he was thoroughly, truly beaten, that there is a future beyond him. He laid out his terms in October 2024: Prove you belong here or die. The legend of July 12, 2025 isn’t just that Hangman Adam Page belongs here, or that Jon Moxley does, but that AEW does. Its future, and the future of American professional wrestling writ large, is as fresh and exciting as it’s ever been, as if anything is possible. I was a child the last time that was true, and Sting was my favorite wrestler. Watching Page clutch his newly won championship, I felt the catharsis I’ve been seeking from this sport for most of my life. I don’t know what comes next. I guess I’ll have to watch Dynamite to find out.
