Fellow poors, lend me your ears.
Or is it your eyes? No matter. Lend me your attention. Yes, that will do.
Alas, our eyes are now fixed on the Prudential Center in the borough of Jersey new. The long and winding road which will lead us to this impending duel of the ages will no doubt be arduous. Even still, we can only hope for the destination to be worthwhile. As long as we avoid the stinking cesspits along our way, we should arrive as fair and as well as the day we departed.
There is one man who would have us believe that these cesspits of which I speak are in fact unavoidable. No, not because they call to us but because they are necessary for our very own way of life. For in these cesspits do we – each of us – dwell. What more can be expected from a large hoard of gluttonous and total poors simply surviving in towns far inferior to the greatest town of them all – not even a town, but an island – one both long and filled with rough and tumble backstreet guys, much like he himself was once upon a time.
While close to home in proximity, All Elite Wrestling’s Full Gear presents little in the form of comfort to the self-proclaimed “devil” himself, Maxwell Jacob Freidman. What I would argue though is that there exists a little bit of that same devil in each of us, hence the almost magnetic attraction so many of us feel to the generational talent of generational talents. The only difference?
Ours are certainly less well-to-do. General laboring Lucifers, if you will. Blue collar Beelzebubs.
Poors, y’all. They’re poor. Stick with me here.
Anyway, while Max marches toward his impending destiny – one he has worked for his entire life – we stand idly by with a choice to make. We can continue supporting those we have always supported and hating those we have always hated, like the middling masses we truly are, or we can consider a universal truth as gospel, both in wrestling and in life: people are fickle.
It’s simple really. We can wait for those we look up to today to inevitably break our hearts and turn to evil when things get too hard or become increasingly stale. Or we can turn to the devil we know – the devil who openly admits to his beliefs and oftentimes abhorrent behavior. We can turn to Maxwell Jacob Friedman and his destiny of being eternally draped in gold no matter where he exists in professional wrestling.
We could hope for some gold by association, but that would of course be foolish, not to mention greedy. What we can stand to inherit however is a modicum of joy and the foresight to have supported a generational talent before the bandwagon left the stable. Sure, we’d be doing nothing much more than collecting horse apples at the back of the long line of the Friedman coronation parade, but to not feel quite so poor – if only for a moment – would it not be worth it?
He offers us a chance to rise above our sometimes greasy and oftentimes humiliating various positions in life. He reaches out his kingly hand to us (hypothetically of course, because GROSS).
The time to fall in line is now. There have been literal years to consider, so if your knee is not bent by Saturday, November 19, you will only have yourself to blame.
Once the largest prize in wrestling is won, so begins the most glorious reign in history. The devil himself, perched upon a throne of brilliance, with an overwhelming army of poors below him. What an image. What a reality.
Of course, he’ll credit us no compliments or share with us no gratitude. We wouldn’t deserve such words anyway. We’ll hail him from our parents’ basements, from our McDonald’s lunch time booths, from behind the protection of our Dungeons and Dragons online characters, and from the safety of our littered Super Wal-Mart aisles.
He will look on reveling in his own glory, and his alone, waiting for the day he can celebrate his historic victory with the only fans he truly appreciates – those on his beloved Long Island. On that day, we can all imagine what it’s like to be a member of his council, on top of the world and adjacent to one of the most powerful performers in the wrestling business, and all that at just 26 years of age.
Of course, we’ll have to do so from afar. Who can afford air fare to New York City on any of our minimum wage salaries these days? Heck, they can barely provide us enough comfort to keep our stock of discounted Elite wrestling tees piled as high in our dressers as our ramen noodles are in our pantries. For that is the way of the poors after all. OUR way.
Look, Jon Moxley is great. He’s no generational talent though. Too bloody. Adam Page is wonderful, no doubt. But he is far too busy discerning the difference between cowboy shit and “I’m a man” shit. Bryan Danielson? Sure, credit where credit is due for certain, but he’s been too busy dropping dos to the ocho. Kenny Omega, you say? He may be a Meltzer darling, but backstage he gets bitten playing aces more than even the poker greats do at the Vegas tables.
And what’s more, even if after all this you choose one of these “superstars” above Max (we poors are hopeless after all), they’ll just break your heart someday if they haven’t already, and then what? Indecision. Regret. Apathy.
You’ll never feel that following Maxwell Jacob Friedman. You may absolutely loathe him, but you’ll definitely adore doing so. You’ll adore it until you realize the future of wrestling is better than you and you know it. He’s nothing like us, but kings rarely mingle with peasants. We’re already poor, the least we can do is avoid being mid. Think on that, then take some of that one-ply we all have in our bathrooms and wrap it around your hands before reaching deep within and pulling your heads out of your collective asses. The time is now. HIS time is now.
Prodigy of the poors.
The absolute and undeniable future of this very business.
The next and best All Elite Wrestling champion of the world.
Your daddy, Tony Khan’s, and mine.
Maxwell. Jacob. Friedman.
Now, about bending that damn knee already...
