Watch: Jon Moxley Wins IWGP United States Championship in New Japan Debut

Jon Moxley competed in his first match since leaving the WWE early Wednesday morning at New [...]

By Connor Casey

Jon Moxley competed in his first match since leaving the WWE early Wednesday morning at New Japan's Best of Super Juniors 26 finale. He was victorious in his debut for the Japanese company, defeating Juice Robinson to become the new IWGP United States Champion.

Moxley, sporting traditional wrestling gear rather than the jeans and tank top he wore throughout most of his WWE run as Dean Ambrose, put Robinson away after a brutal match with his new finisher, the Death Rider, which looks like a modified version of the Dirty Deeds double-arm DDT he used in WWE.

With the victory, Moxley became the first wrestler in history to hold the United States Championships in both WWE and New Japan. Former champions for the New Japan title include Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes and Jay White.

Though he has a multi-year contract with AEW, Moxley will continue to wrestle for other promotions including New Japan until the AEW weekly show on TNT begins airing this fall.

In a recent interview with Chris Jericho, Moxley explained one of his goals in joining AEW within months of leaving WWE.

"If I had a goal with AEW, that's that if we can prove that Vince's way sucks," Moxley said. "That's not what I'm going to focus on, because it's not about competing with WWE. We're just going to be over here doing our best and putting on our best product. If a byproduct of that is that it pushes WWE to re-evaluate their creative process and it makes Vince — not that he's going to step aside because we all know that he's going to die in the chair — but maybe he'll listen to someone else's ideas. Maybe he'll be open to doing it a different way."

Elsewhere in the same interview, he said his debut at Double or Nothing felt was more important to him than winning the WWE Championship back in 2016.

"[It was] kind of blur, it was very surreal, it was a great feeling, probably the best feeling of my career," he said. "It was the inverse of being uncomfortable in your own shoes, your so comfortable your almost not used to it. I had to get my bearings a little bit. It's like putting on a well fitting pair of pants. Definitely the highlight of my career thus far."

The new US Champion will face Joey Janela in his AEW debut at the Fyter Fest event on June 29 in Daytona Beach, Florida.

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