While Malakai Black portrays a villain on AEW programming, the former NXT Champion is anything but in real life. In a Facebook post that started floating around Twitter on Sunday, a wrestling fan attended the Bluegrass Wrestling Con on Saturday in Ashland, Kentucky, and wound up bumping into Black outside of the venue. He asked for directions, and after the fans helped them he wound up paying for them to have free VIP passes as a way of showing his gratitude.
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“As we were walking up the sidewalk we ran in to this nice gentleman trying to find his way there,” Jenny Barrett Cunningham wrote. “We showed him the way and when we arrived at the ticket counter, he told the young man taking the ticket money to give each of us a VIP pass and he’d take care of the expense. I looked down and the VIP pass was $370 EACH! 😳. Needless to say we had an amazing time and feel so very blessed to have met this man who allowed us this experience. His name is #malakaiblack.”
Black was released by the WWE earlier this year. But thanks to a clerical error with his contract, he only had to wait 30 days before he could jump to another promotion rather than the usual 90 days. He arrived at AEW Dynamite: Road Rager on July 7 and promptly entered a feud with Cody Rhodes. He’s since built up a 6-1 record in AEW while also winning the PWG World Tag Team Championships alongside Brody King in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla.
Since his release, Black has talked in numerous interviews and Twitch streams about why he chose to sign with AEW right away and some of the problems he faced while in WWE.
“(Joining AEW) was the immediate thought process,” Black said while on Metal Injection’s Squared Circle Pit. “I was sick of it, even before everything went down. I loved my time in NXT, but I felt I did nothing of importance on the main roster. It was too much bipolar 50-50 booking, they would push me and pull me off TV.”
“Honestly, that’s (50-50 booking) the entire product right now,” he added. “There’s nothing really consistent. Everything changes week to week, or is done to the point of beating it to death.
