During his appearance on the Universal Wrestling podcast AEW superstar Malakai Black spoke about the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak back in 2020, and how there was so much uncertainty of the affect it would have on the entire world. The House of Black leader also admits that the pandemic was negatively affecting him in WWE, as he found it harder to grasp his character without any fans there to respond. Highlight are below.
Recalls the first days of lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic
“The first day of lockdown, I’m sitting with my wife on the couch and we just did all our groceries because we’re expecting…ya know, we’re expecting the apocalypse to basically happen and waking up in a wasteland the next morning [laughs]. I’m sitting on the couch with my wife and my wife goes ‘we’re in lockdown,’ I’m like I have no idea what this means, what does it mean, what are we doing? I think that state of confusion just twinkled all throughout the world and specifically into our world because no one knew what to do, ya know? I mean everybody was just like ‘what’s happening?’”
Says the pandemic negatively affected him:
“The pandemic was obviously not good for me at all and I’ve always been told that the reason why is because Vince [McMahon] could not gauge because he didn’t have an audience. We come in with this raw style but then we were guided to be smart about how the structure of like…how the match structure would like be more presented and more potent, basically. That’s why me and Buddy [Matthews] were like, I think one of the few first…again, with the Tommaso’s [Ciampa] the [Johnny] Gargano’s, etc., that had a hybrid style of coming with that high impact indie style with the blend of traditional pro wrestling and storytelling and TV wrestling.”
(H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.)