MJF Recalls Cody Telling Him At ‘ALL IN’: “I Brought You Here For A Reason”

MJF takes his foot off the gas for just a second and provides some insight about what he felt at ‘ALL IN’.

At the age of 22-years old, Maxwell Jacob Friedman has put together quite the resume’ for himself as he is a former MLW World Middleweight Champion and a former CZW World Heavyweight Champion but in the mind of MJF he will not hesitate to make it clear that he is the best that professional wrestling has to offer. MJF has been competing on the independent scene for three years and this past September he had a spotlighted match at Cody and The Young Bucks’ ‘ALL IN’ show.

The 22-year old worked shows with three thousand people in attendance during his career but 10,000 plus inside of the sold-out ‘Sears Centre’ was on another level for him. MJF recently joined Sam Roberts’ ‘notsam Wrestling’ Podcast and talked about how he was sitting in the ‘ALL IN’ locker room with talents who had been wrestling far longer than he had been competing and noticed that they were taken aback by the massive crowd and that made him feel comfortable to a certain extent.

“I don’t know, I had done [Joey] Janela’s Spring Break, and I had MLW shows… yeah, two, three [thousand], maybe, some WrestlePro shows that, like legitimately if you pack out that Rahway Rec Center it’s a lot of people. I had done big shows but to that magnitude, it was interesting sitting in the locker room with guys who’ve been wrestling ten, twelve, fifteen years at ALL IN, and they were saying, ‘Holy sh*t. This is a lot of people’, and I’m sitting there like, ‘Okay, okay.’ I don’t know if I was trying not to think about it. All I was concerned with was showing the world who MJF is and what MJF is all about.” He explained.

MJF recalled having two brief discussions with Cody before and after his match with Matt Cross. MJF asked Cody if he wanted anything specific from him and after the bout he asked “The American Nightmare” what did he think of the match and Cody simply told MJF that he was brought to ‘ALL IN’ for a reason and to go out there and do his thing.

“I had one discussion, and it was with Cody Rhodes, and I had walked up to him. This was before the match; I said, ‘Is there anything you would like from me, specifically?’ And he said, ‘I brought you here for a reason’, and that was the conversation. He said, ‘Just stick to the amount of time that is allotted. If you go over the time, I don’t care. I’ll have the ref…’ you know what I mean? But that was the speech that was given to everybody and, after the match I walk up to Cody [and] I go, ‘Did you see…’ He stopped me again [and] he goes, ‘I brought you here for a reason.’ So I was like, okay, and it’s crazy that somebody like him and somebody like The Bucks were, A, willing to give me that opportunity, and B, have that trust in me considering I’ve only been doing this for three years which is telling, but it’s also telling of their character and them as human beings.” MJF said. “That opportunity meant a lot to me, but that opportunity was earned, and I think that a lot of people might struggle with that, but I was… I’ve literally wrestled [in] nearly every single top tier independent promotion in the world. U.S. now, UK, Canada, I’ve been all over the place, but the most goosebumps I ever had because the second my music hit, my match wasn’t announced, the second my music hit and the second they showed the Burberry tron with MJF on it, they rained down boos. Rained them down. They knew damn well who I was.”

Fast forward five months after ‘ALL IN’ and Maxwell Jacob Friedman was announced to be a part of Cody, The Young Bucks and the Khans’ All Elite Wrestling promotion. 

If the quotes in this article are used, please credit the ‘notsam Wrestling’ podcast with an H/T to Fightful for the transcriptions.