MJF talks a mean game on the microphone, but he is a real person. The Salt Of The Earth recently let fans in on a side of him that we rarely see.
During this week’s episode of AEW Dark on YouTube, Cody Rhodes talked to MJF about going from “undesirable to undeniable.” Maxwell Jacob Friedman admitted that he never felt undesirable in pro wrestling. He did have a rather impressive run as a high school football player where he faced some awful bigotry.
Then MJF went on to open up about his childhood and facing antisemitism. This was something he admitted messed him up, but it also helped motivate him to never be bullied again.
“Let’s go there, we can go there — I’m gonna go there. So when I was little growing up, I played football — I loved football. For those who aren’t aware, I am Jewish — the name might have given it away and there was no other Jewish kids on my football. So, it was an adjustment for me because the other kids didn’t exactly love the fact that there was a Jewish kid taking their spot. So on the first day of practice I beat out some of the other kids who had been there a little longer than me for the middle linebacker spot and I remember the next week [Censored] and a band of douchebags walked up to me and they said, ‘Hey Jew boy’ and they threw rolls of quarters at me and they told me to pick it up and I was pretty floored and it messed me up pretty bad.”
“I remember just going home and bawling my eyes out. I learned that day that you have to kill the person you were born to be to be the person you want to be. So, I was never going to let myself be bullied ever again and I made it a point to go to the gym every day. Eat right and train right.”
“Now I can proudly say that [Censored] is a drug addict, dropped out of college. I’m famous, rich, I’m best friends with the coolest guy in the world and I’m ridiculously f*cking handsome. So, who won?”
The guys who bullied MJF in school are probably not on television every week, so he considers that a win in his book. It’s awful that MJF had to face that kind of ignorant behavior, but it sounds like those experiences helped him grow stronger in the end.
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