Freddie Prinze Jr. discussed the mental toughness required to create iconic wrestling promos on this week’s episode of the “Wrestling With Freddie” podcast.
He said the following about MJF:
“When I look back at my career at 26 years old compared to what this dude is at 26 years old, like, I was sh*t, and I was the top dog at 26. I was getting every script before anybody else. I was getting higher paychecks than anybody else from my generation and I was nowhere near the level that this dude is at right now.”
“Something also that I found very beautiful about this story (MJF and William Regal) is sort of the hatred of this older generation towards millennials, and the hate is real. To all you young people out there, that hate is real. I love you guys. I’m 46. I’m kinda in the middle. I get both sides.”
“Not to go off on a weird non-wrestling tangent here, but I just want you to know the hate you’re receiving from these older people is real. They don’t feel that you’re having to work as hard as they did coming up. They hate the fact that you can make millions of dollars on YouTube and Twitch and TikTok and not have a boss telling you that your sh*t and not good enough while at the same time not realizing that they never had to deal with social media and the pressures of hundreds of thousands and millions of fans telling you that your sh*t and not good enough, and kill yourself, and you suck, and you shouldn’t play video games, or you shouldn’t do this. They hate you and they put zero effort into understanding the sh*t that y’all have to go through.”
“I’ll be honest with you, the things y’all have to go through with social media and all this stuff and failing in front of millions of people, and a willingness to fail, is 10 times harder than one single boss telling you that you weren’t good enough that week. They hate that you can make millions of dollars and pretty soon billions of dollars. They hate the 21 year olds who have their own jets and fly around. You can go on Instagram and watch any one of these old guys that pretend like they have it all worked out and talk sh*t about you. Straight up from a 46 year old, I love y’all. You guys have to deal with real problems out there and this story reminded me of that. It was just like the disrespect from Regal calling him sunshine and that’s the worst you had to deal with. No, it’s not. Every failure this kid makes is on social media. People want to talk trash to him all the time. He’s talked about being Jewish in the business and the antisemitism that he’s had to deal with, and it’s more public now than ever, all this kind of hatred and stuff with social media. You see all these people pressing a heart button on something that’s just repulsive and disgusting.”
“So I have love for you all. I respect the grind that they don’t think you have to do. It’s just a different grind. You don’t have to start in the mailroom anymore. You don’t have to do that. If you’re talented, you can go right to the top by nothing more than word of mouth. I’m not talking about the people that are like, if I get 100 followers, I’ll put on a banana suit. That’s not the grind. That’s you selling your soul for followers. But the actual talented streamers and the talented YouTubers out there that are putting in the work and effort and making sure they’re getting content up there every single week and having to endure all the madness and nonsense that comes with that, I got love for you, I got respect for you, and I genuinely understand it.”
You can listen to the complete podcast below:
(h/t to Wrestling News for the transcription)
