March 15, 2021 Observer Newsletter: AEW Revolution, WrestleMania 37 ticket details

If ever there was proof that the last second of a show can override almost everything that happened before, it was the AEW Revolution PPV on 3/7 from Daily’s Place in Jacksonville.

Everyone knew going in that a show built around an explosive barbed wire match in the main event was going to be judged on the explosions. It’s a match invented by FMW in Japan, popularized by the May 5, 1993 Atsushi Onita vs. Terry Funk match at Kawasaki Baseball Stadium before 32,000 fans (announced as 41,000 in case you read the inflated number elsewhere). It’s been copied multiple times in the U.S., in a number of independent promotions and twice (once in 1993 and again in 2000) by ECW. The end result was always the same. The fart in church ending when the last big explosion of pyro to climax the match lays an egg.

With history behind it, Kenny Omega came up with the idea more than a year ago, and Jon Moxley was picked as the opponent. The idea is that those matches have been successful in Japan based on explosions, but the body of work in the matches was rarely good. The idea going in was to have the greatest and most spectacular match of its kind, with both believing the other was the perfect opponent for that job.

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