During his recent interview on Talk Is Jericho AEW superstar Malakai Black spoke about his departure from WWE, and how he knew months in advance it wasn’t going to work out. He also comments on the positive atmosphere in the AEW locker room. Highlights are below.
Says he felt like it was time for him to depart WWE:
“Towards the end of my stint in WWE, I felt it was time to go. I felt they made the decision for me. I told my wife months in advance, ‘this isn’t working out the way they promised me it was going to work out. I’m going to move on to different things.’ I felt like I hit a wall and they don’t want to push me over the wall and I wasn’t going to keep bumping my head into the wall because eventually, I feel I owe myself more in life. I want to be a player.”
On the positive atmosphere of the AEW locker room:
“The good thing about being (in AEW), it’s such an amazing locker room with new and young talents. Some walk up to me and want information, and I’m glad I can do that because I feel, I’m 36 and I hope I’m blessed enough to go another 15 years, but we don’t have that guarantee. It might be five or six years and my knees or back give out. I want to make sure that what I leave behind is not only a body of work that people can look at, but also be around for this generation of kids who will eventually inherit the business and say, ‘I picked up XZYZ from Malakai’ and I helped make them better. I want to help make the next generation of wrestling be better.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)