You are never too old to see
things that you have never seen before, and that is what happened
to me on Wednesday evening while watching television with my son.
I didn’t report on this on Thursday, because I needed a day for it to sink in, and also to see if mainstream media would cover this episode … and they did, both here and overseas.
It related to professional wrestling. Say what you want to say about it, but it is a global, worldwide phenomenon, where reality often intersects with fairy tales, and vice versa.
Every wrestlers’ background is fair game for exploitation, both good and bad, and that is what happening during the All Elite Wrestling telecast on Wednesday night.
Let me explain …
Maxwell Jacob Friedman has been the most prominent bad guy in not only AEW, but in pro wrestling, during the past few years.
He is young, good looking, snarky, underhanded, and very good at what he does.
He goes by his initials, MJF, and by the way, he is also a 25-year-old kid from Plainview, Long Island, which he tells everyone in attendance at arenas around the country to get the fans’ ire up, playing it all up as if he had a silver spoon in his mouth from day one of his existence.
For pretty much his entire seven-year wrestling career, MJF has been portrayed as a character who you would instantly want to hate, because he is so snarky, but on the telecast the other night, he went completely out of character in a soliloquy the likes of which I have never seen before.
Here is pretty much how it went, after he told the audience in the arena and at home that he has a myriad of developmental disabilities.
He said: “When I was growing up, I played American football. For those who aren’t aware, I am Jewish — although the name probably gave it away.
There were no other Jewish kids on my football team, so it was an adjustment.
The other kids didn’t exactly love the fact that there was this Jewish kid taking their spot.
When I had the first day of practice, I beat out all of the other kids who had been playing longer than me for the middle linebacker spot.
The next week these douche bags walked up to me and said ‘hey, Jew boy’ and threw rolls of quarters at me and told me to pick them up.”
He continued as the tears welled up in his eyes: “I was pretty floored and it messed me up pretty bad and I went home and balled my eyes out pretty bad.
I realized that you had to kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you want to be and I was never going to allow myself to be bullied ever again.”
And when he was done, he received a standing ovation from the thousands in attendance, the very people who had booed him when he walked into the ring just a few minutes earlier.
MJF has never hidden his Jewishness; in fact, he revels in it, wearing a scarf as part of his ring attire that looks like a talis, the prayer shawl one wears signifying manhood.
However, he had never openly discussed such incidents—and I don’t know if anybody has--on live television.
There have been dozens of Jewish wrestlers over the years, led by Bill Goldberg, who also was so obviously Jewish with the name and all that you couldn’t help knowing his background.
There have been numerous other Jewish wrestlers, such as Kane, Alexa Bliss and many, many others, but their Jewishness was never, ever brought up on national television or anywhere else.
So, what MJF did was very likely the first time that a Jewish wrestler has ever done so in the history of wrestling, be it scripted or not.
Look, the whole thing revolved around his upcoming match with CM Punk—who might be Jewish himself, as per rumors—and that Punk and MJF took a widely circulated photo when MJF was a young man, around the time of the supposed bullying—and that Punk somehow let MJF down with his attitude that the photo was taken on “just another Friday night,” when to MJF, that Friday night was not only Shabbat, but a major turning point in his life, so it wasn’t just “another Friday night.”
Yup, there is a lot of unanswered questions revolving around what MJF did, but I don’t think that even a pro wrestler—or a pro wrestling company—would allow such a verbal exhibition like this was to go on if it wasn’t true.
Even the announcers, who take umbrage with everything MJF says each and every week, were completely dumbfounded, with one actually saying that for the first time, he felt sorry for him.
This might even be a change of face, meaning that MJF will go from the top villain in the industry to a “babyface,” or a good guy.
But whatever the case, I do think it was all real and above level, and it surprised me, mesmerized me, made me happy at his candor, made me sad and angry at what had happened to him—yes, I have had my own anti-Semitic episodes, too, and my own daughter went to the same high school as he did—and made me want to put my arm around this guy and tell him that I knew exactly what he was talking about.
With anti-Semitic incidents rising to unprecedented levels not just in the New York Metropolitan area but around the country and the world, I simply don’t think that he did what he did without thinking this out, one piece at a time, one word at a time.
It was heartfelt, and made MJF real, not the cartoon character he is normally portrayed as.
Watch this thing for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAf6epYTUAM
Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.
I didn’t report on this on Thursday, because I needed a day for it to sink in, and also to see if mainstream media would cover this episode … and they did, both here and overseas.
It related to professional wrestling. Say what you want to say about it, but it is a global, worldwide phenomenon, where reality often intersects with fairy tales, and vice versa.
Every wrestlers’ background is fair game for exploitation, both good and bad, and that is what happening during the All Elite Wrestling telecast on Wednesday night.
Let me explain …
Maxwell Jacob Friedman has been the most prominent bad guy in not only AEW, but in pro wrestling, during the past few years.
He is young, good looking, snarky, underhanded, and very good at what he does.
He goes by his initials, MJF, and by the way, he is also a 25-year-old kid from Plainview, Long Island, which he tells everyone in attendance at arenas around the country to get the fans’ ire up, playing it all up as if he had a silver spoon in his mouth from day one of his existence.
For pretty much his entire seven-year wrestling career, MJF has been portrayed as a character who you would instantly want to hate, because he is so snarky, but on the telecast the other night, he went completely out of character in a soliloquy the likes of which I have never seen before.
Here is pretty much how it went, after he told the audience in the arena and at home that he has a myriad of developmental disabilities.
He said: “When I was growing up, I played American football. For those who aren’t aware, I am Jewish — although the name probably gave it away.
There were no other Jewish kids on my football team, so it was an adjustment.
The other kids didn’t exactly love the fact that there was this Jewish kid taking their spot.
When I had the first day of practice, I beat out all of the other kids who had been playing longer than me for the middle linebacker spot.
The next week these douche bags walked up to me and said ‘hey, Jew boy’ and threw rolls of quarters at me and told me to pick them up.”
He continued as the tears welled up in his eyes: “I was pretty floored and it messed me up pretty bad and I went home and balled my eyes out pretty bad.
I realized that you had to kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you want to be and I was never going to allow myself to be bullied ever again.”
And when he was done, he received a standing ovation from the thousands in attendance, the very people who had booed him when he walked into the ring just a few minutes earlier.
MJF has never hidden his Jewishness; in fact, he revels in it, wearing a scarf as part of his ring attire that looks like a talis, the prayer shawl one wears signifying manhood.
However, he had never openly discussed such incidents—and I don’t know if anybody has--on live television.
There have been dozens of Jewish wrestlers over the years, led by Bill Goldberg, who also was so obviously Jewish with the name and all that you couldn’t help knowing his background.
There have been numerous other Jewish wrestlers, such as Kane, Alexa Bliss and many, many others, but their Jewishness was never, ever brought up on national television or anywhere else.
So, what MJF did was very likely the first time that a Jewish wrestler has ever done so in the history of wrestling, be it scripted or not.
Look, the whole thing revolved around his upcoming match with CM Punk—who might be Jewish himself, as per rumors—and that Punk and MJF took a widely circulated photo when MJF was a young man, around the time of the supposed bullying—and that Punk somehow let MJF down with his attitude that the photo was taken on “just another Friday night,” when to MJF, that Friday night was not only Shabbat, but a major turning point in his life, so it wasn’t just “another Friday night.”
Yup, there is a lot of unanswered questions revolving around what MJF did, but I don’t think that even a pro wrestler—or a pro wrestling company—would allow such a verbal exhibition like this was to go on if it wasn’t true.
Even the announcers, who take umbrage with everything MJF says each and every week, were completely dumbfounded, with one actually saying that for the first time, he felt sorry for him.
This might even be a change of face, meaning that MJF will go from the top villain in the industry to a “babyface,” or a good guy.
But whatever the case, I do think it was all real and above level, and it surprised me, mesmerized me, made me happy at his candor, made me sad and angry at what had happened to him—yes, I have had my own anti-Semitic episodes, too, and my own daughter went to the same high school as he did—and made me want to put my arm around this guy and tell him that I knew exactly what he was talking about.
With anti-Semitic incidents rising to unprecedented levels not just in the New York Metropolitan area but around the country and the world, I simply don’t think that he did what he did without thinking this out, one piece at a time, one word at a time.
It was heartfelt, and made MJF real, not the cartoon character he is normally portrayed as.
Watch this thing for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAf6epYTUAM
Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.
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