MJF is letting the rest of the roster know that he is better than them in his own way.
Maxwell Jacob Friedman, from the minute he stepped onto the television screen, oozed the charisma of a throwback villain. Now, he reflects on his influences and why modern wrestling makes him want to puke.
Ahead of Blood & Guts, a nod to the old school War Games match, Maxwell Jacob Friedman told Yahoo! Sports that when he watches wrestling on AEW programming it makes him ill and that's why he finds inspiration and throwback names like Ric Flair, Tully Blanchard, and Nick Bockwinkel.
“When I first got into the industry, I was already a student of the game,” Friedman said. “I enjoyed watching the [Nick] Bockwinkels, the [Ric] Flairs, the Tullys [Blanchard] — who I now get to work with every week — do their thing. The smartest thing about them, contrary to what you see now stylistically in professional wrestling, was that they didn’t want to get hit, they didn’t want to mess their bodies up.
“When I watch professional wrestling on AEW Dynamite, I cringe, I want to puke in my mouth a little bit, because I see these guys and they are murdering themselves. They are jumping from the top rope to the floor, they are doing the loopy loops, the twisty turns, the flippity do-das, and they are killing themselves. Some of these people who are younger than me, and I’m already wildly young, might not be able to walk anymore when they get to my age.”
Maxwell, as the leader of a faction regularly drawing comparisons to The Horsemen, will have the opportunity to stamp his legacy in the first-ever Blood & Guts match on Wednesday, May 5.
Fightful will have live coverage of AEW Dynamite every Wednesday.
