AEW: Malakai Black Gets the Last Laugh After Third Match With Cody Rhodes on AEW Dynamite

Saturday’s edition of AEW Dynamite saw Cody Rhodes finally pull off a win against Malakai Black. Rhodes was unsuccessful in his last two attempts against the former NXT Champion, resulting in Arn Anderson cutting (hilariously) psychotic promos about pulling a gun on people and the rest of The Nightmare Family growing more resentful of Rhodes, all while the fans in the audience have been consistently booing “The American Nightmare” despite his insistence that he’ll never turn heel. Black took to social media after suffering his first defeat in AEW and claimed he had still accomplished his mission against Rhodes. 

“The entire world is a graveyard, and if you think this was about putting my shoulders on the mat; you’re rudely mistaken. My job was to destroy you and your world. The entire world hates you, you’ve become the beast I set out to make you, and I was willing to sacrifice my blood for it. Enjoy the seeds I planted for months. House always wins. #HouseOfBlack,” Black wrote. 

Rhodes talked about why fans have gradually turned on him this year in a recent interview with Busted Open Radio. 

“If you’re a wrestler in the ring, you can hear and if you don’t hear [reactions], you’re doing yourself a disservice. You’re doing the whole company a disservice, you’re doing the match you’re in a disservice. I can hear but I also play chess, not checkers,” Rhodes said. “So I think it’s fun to speculate and there’s so much that we’ve seen in the past, “That’s how this went and that’s how this could go.” The challenge I’m facing in the direction I’m going is something that has never been done in wrestling before. There’s tons of just old plays that we could run here, ‘Oh, kick this guy in the balls and abuse my EVP power.’ Very soap opera bullshit. I don’t mean to say that harsh, but the challenge for me now is to go in a direction that perhaps no wrestler has gone before. I don’t come out of either tunnel, if that’s probably the best way to put it, and I’m looking forward to it as the most fun I’ve ever had in my career has been navigating some of these new spaces. For example, in New York, we had 25,000 people and that reaction’s a little different. Last week, I’m in the concourse doing a book drive for community outreach and it’s the opposite of that reaction in Philly. That beautiful feeling of, ‘Alright, these are my people,’ depends [on the setting]. Some places I go, they’ll be my people. Other places I go, they won’t, but that’s your right as the fan to do what you want.”