A week after Maxwell Jacob Friedman’s now infamous pipe bomb promo and information keeps coming out as others are opening up about that night and what was planned versus what happened.
While many fans are still going back and forth whether the promo was a work or shoot, it’s looks more and more like it was a work.
First, Chris Jericho made his comments about how his rival could leave if he’s not happy, and now Dave Meltzer has explained how the promo didn’t go according to plan.
A different plan
According to Meltzer, the plan was for MJF to cut a heel promo and have his mic cut off halfway through. It was hoped that it’d make the segment look unplanned and that MJF was out of control.
If this sounds familiar to long time wrestling fans, it’s because it was meant to resemble Brian Pillman’s worked shoot promos during his time in WCW in the mid 1990s.
It would’ve been a great idea and would’ve kept MJF as a full blown heel as he could’ve stomped around the ring and went to the announcers and ripped into them about being silenced.
However, things happen on live television and in this case the mic didn’t switch off and MJF went on for roughly 9 minutes.
Because of the technical botch, MJF had to improvise and he went on a visceral tear on Tony Kahn and the WWE guys that “can’t lace my boots.”
This led to the crowd cheering him, and it was like he was viewed as an AEW guy standing up to a WWE invasion type of thing.
Meltzer mentioned how the fans cheering for him made AEW “seem uncool” just like WCW fans cheering for the nWo made WCW look “uncool and incompetent.”
This is believed to be the turning point as it hurt WCW’s faces and injured WCW to the point it may not have survived without a hard reboot.
CM Punk to the rescue
CM Punk coming out to chase off MJF was planned and the promo wasn’t mentioned the rest of the night.
This is where things get interesting and MJF’s face turn could continue. Punk is one of the former WWE guys MJF was referring to, and he’s going to be defending his new home in AEW.
Or was before his injury. It’ll be fun to see where they go with this next since it appear MJF was on the verge of facing Punk in a feud for the AEW Championship.
Who Kahn picks to take Punk’s place is important if they want to keep the current angle going, and that could make or break everything.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4oOXLfmxTk
