MJF is one of the best wrestlers in the business right now and one of its best talkers. Many fans consider MJF’s promos as highlights of every show he’s on and he speaks with such confidence and authority that he makes almost everything he says, no matter how exaggerated, come across as real and believable.
It’s because of that incredible speaking power of MJF’s that one of his fellow AEW stars was humble enough to admit that, even though he had much more experience in the business compared to the current AEW World Champion, he wasn’t all that confident in himself ahead of a scheduled verbal confrontation with Maxwell Jacob Friedman.
AEW’s Matt Hardy felt MJF was going to ‘eat him alive’ if he didn’t deliver in a promo
Speaking on his Extreme Life podcast, Matt Hardy described how he was simultaneously up to the challenge of going against MJF on the microphone and also worried that he was doomed should he stumble or otherwise not deliver as strong a promo.
“So there was a lot of excitement going into this. So I don’t know if intimidation is the right word, but it very much felt like a sink or swim type of situation for me, which was really exciting.
It was like, ‘listen, I’m gonna go toe to toe with, what many consider, what I consider, one of the best talkers, one of the best guys of the generation in MJF’. And either people are going to think I can hang with him, or they’re gonna think that he ate me alive.
And I loved that feeling of going out there and going, ‘Oh God, we’ll see how this goes’. So it was really exciting for me to be tested in that way. And just to be able to show everybody that I’ll go toe to toe with anybody on the microphone.
So it was very, very exciting for me. But yeah, definitely had some nerves and some butterflies going on.”
Maxwell Jacob Friedman will likely deliver his next scathing promo after this Sunday’s Forbidden Door PPV when he defends his AEW World Championship against NJPW legend Hiroshi Tanahashi.
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