In an interview with Andrew Grevas for 25YL, Jon Moxley discussed what it was like to work with Dusty Rhodes while he was on the FCW roster. He stated that he felt privileged to work with both Vince and Dusty in his time with WWE before going into detail about working with Dusty.
I would sit in the office with Dusty in the afternoons and just shoot the shit, in between training sessions. We would talk creative and ideas and he was still able at that point in his life to get excited about an idea just the same way he did at his apex in the late ’80s.
Jon goes on to say how happy he was that he got to main event WWE’s edition of Starrcade in his hometown, even if he’ll never get to main event WrestleMania. “Even though it was WWE’s version, still, it was my hometown and Dusty created Starrcade.”
In their short time together, Dusty saw the incoming Dean Ambrose as “the coolest person in the world.”
He had this vision of me, of how I was going to take over WWE. These vignettes would be in a smokey bar, the camera zooms in on my back, Dean Ambrose leather jacket, in the Viper Club. He called it the Viper Club but he meant the Viper Room. He had this vision of me as a Johnny Depp, River Phoenix, “you’re James Dean baby”.
He would later use some of the ideas that Dusty came up with in his first post-WWE promo, and you can definitely already see the influence in his New Japan work. Despite his frustrations with the company at large, it seems like Moxly is mostly focused on one man. “Dusty saw me as the coolest person in the world and Vince saw me as an idiot. That’s the difference between the two.”
