A month ago, I stopped watching AEW Dynamite. There wasn’t anything behind it, really — I don’t enjoy the direction the company has gone since All Out, but I’ve endured worse for the sake of decent wrestling — but I was thankful, frankly, to have MJF out my wrestling life.
I do not like Maxwell Jacob Friedman. I never have. As the editor of Fanfyte, I published a couple of pieces about MJF that I disagreed with, but wrestling is a form of entertainment where considering “all sides” on matters of kayfabe makes sense. People are allowed to like what they like! It’s fine. But, man — coming back to Dynamite to find that we’re still doing MJF vs. Danielson, that an hour long iron man match is potentially in offing, made me wonder why I came back.
I do not like MJF.
Dynamite offers as succinct a reason why, so I’ll work through this, as nicely as possible.
In the ring, MJF is basically Ric Flair for people who don’t understand what made Ric Flair good. This stuck out to me in the second half of his match against Konosuke Takeshita. There are two halves to Ric Flair: he is an incredible wrestler, but he’s also a stooge. Unless you’ve never seen a Ric Flair match, you know how this goes: he has the conditioning and he has the skill, but it’s ultimately fun to watch a braggadocious jackass get his comeuppance, and Flair’s matches tended to provide that, even if he lost.
There’s a particular Ric Flair spot that’s a parallel to one of the later spots in MJF vs. Takeshita. Let’s say Flair’s wrestling Sting, who is chopping him in the corner. Flair fires up, turns Sting into the corner, and delivers a flurry of chops. Sting absorbs all of them, beats his chest, and puts the fear of G-d into Flair, who begs off. “NOOO!” he yells, loud enough for the arena to hear it … only to thumb Sting in the eye and reassert his control.
It’s a simple enough spot, but in shifting control back to Flair, it offers the promise of Sting running roughshod over him. What if he didn’t get poked in the eye?
I understand that wrestling has changed considerably since the days of peak Flair (though that spot is still in rotation), but when heels who are grounded in what he perfected pitch their matches so that they, too, can have highlight-worthy hero sequences drives me crazy. The strike exchange between MJF and Takeshita, where MJF was firing back at Takeshita, slipping out of a top rope lariat, and trading shots fighting spirit style with a superkick and a rolling elbow.
Who did it serve to have MJF, on two months of not wrestling, firing up to meet a plucky babyface? Not Takeshita, who continued his run of noteworthy matches. Strangely enough, it doesn’t help MJF, either. His angle with Bryan Danielson centers on Danielson’s theory that MJF is lazy and can’t keep up. Well, that’s disproven, and with a clean win. I’ve got shit to do in my life, so pardon me if seeing if he can do it for a much longer period of time holds absolutely no appeal for me.
I recognize that this is subjective, and I recognize that it works for a lot of wrestling fans, but, frankly, I feel like I’m watching a wrestler in the middle of discovering himself, not a world champion. A long time ago, he took the concept of the Four Pillars of Heaven and applied it to himself, Jungle Boy, Sammy Guevara, and Darby Allin. Of the four, I’d rank him second after Allin, who is also booked well and is one of the signature competitors in the TNT Title division. MJF has been at or near the top of the card since he was Cody Rhodes’ second, but the only feud where it’s felt like he’s been appropriately booked was against CM Punk, much of which hinged on Punk’s post-return zen against Max’s sometimes belief that he’s the underdog. There, he actually was.
Max’s current place in AEW feels like a combination of destiny and luck. He did not come back at All Out for anything less than the AEW Championship, but his road there was awkward and sloppy. He ditched The Firm, reinvented himself as a tweener, went back to being a heel, and is now back to his pre-return edgelord self.
His promo was an astonishing example of this, beginning as a middle-aged dad’s recollection of how great high school was for him, getting laid and driving his Camaro so fast he was drowning in “speed tickets.” Junior prom rolls around and he and the girl he’s with leave in said Camaro, and she gives Max head while he’s driving. I feel insane typing this, but he then smashes into a phone pole at 90mph like he’s in Hereditary, wakes up concussed, finds that the girl is still alive, and switches seats with her before the police arrive. Yes, in case you didn’t know, he is a scumbag. He nearly committed involuntary manslaughter! And the asshole who did that as a high school kid is going to wrestle Bryan Danielson as an adult who mostly hits people over the head with a varsity ring.
What a baffling promo. It wasn’t morally appalling, it just didn’t make any sense. The pedant in me wishes to point out that everybody except for him in the story is a strawman. I mean, of course, but if the cops roll up on a totaled Camaro with two high school kids in it with a comically long list of speeding tickets under Max’s name, which is also on the registration, they’re not going to be curious as to why he wasn’t driving? They’re not going to ask the girl any questions? Her parents aren’t going to sue?
It’s stupid, but it sounds like something an evil prick would do, so Max says it and it occupies the same kayfabe space as the promo he cut against CM Punk where he experienced antisemitism and the hero’s welcome video from Dynamite’s first Long Island appearance. We know an absurd amount about high school Max. That he has this mode in him makes him more versatile than, say, The Rock, whose promos are in a similar realm as Max’s in that they rely on running people down in a way that feels like listening to someone yell through a PowerPoint presentation of one-liners. Turns out, this is why I stopped watching AEW.
There are just too many little things about MJF that don’t work. His final appearance of the night was on commentary for Danielson’s match against Rush, the last match Danielson needed to win to get his iron man match. Danielson was checking on Takeshita, bloody after a post-match attack by MJF, so the heels locked the door to the training room from the outside and waited in the hallway for him to come out. Fine, he has to rush to the ring like Sting or The Sandman, only he’s in the building so there’s no ECW Extreme Chopper to track him.
I don’t know what the pre-tape situation is, but I’m assuming this one wasn’t shown to the live crowd. Rush’s music was playing, then Max’s did, and he forced referee Aubrey Edwards to count to 10 for a countout. This is the tiniest thing to kvetch about, I know, but in literally every single version of this angle that’s played out in the history of wrestling until now, the babyface’s music hits before any of this happens. The crowd pops, the crowd goes silent, and the crowd murmurs about where the face is. It works for the live crowd, who maybe didn’t see the pre-tape, and it works for the home viewer, who saw it at home.
Instead, Max gets Aubrey to count, and she does so slowly. Max has three possible routes here: first, he can stand by helplessly as Aubrey sandbags the count; second, he can punch Rush and draw a disqualification loss for Danielson, which would kill the match at Revolution; third, he could punch Aubrey.
He goes for the first option and attacks a bloody, wounded Danielson after the match. Why go this route? Because wrestling booking has limits. You can have him punch Rush, but that’d be overturned and Danielson would get the match, but maybe without wrestling Rush, which is a highly anticipated match — WWE’s swerve with the steel cage match at Raw XXX shows why that’s bad. He can’t punch Aubrey because AEW is broadcast on cable television and punching a woman is reprehensible, even if you shared the sexual history of a woman you nearly killed and sexually harassed Aubrey on the way to the ring.
For MJF to thrive as the character he is now is impossible. It requires that there’s no filter, but oh my G-d imagine him without a filter. Because there’s nowhere to go but to the commentary table, Max spent that segment emasculated, bickering with Tony and stooging like a midcard heel about how Danielson nearly missed the match because he was lazy. Did he get one up on Danielson in the end? Sure, but if storytelling is a road, this is one I’m driving into a telephone pole at 90mph to get off.
