Malakai Black came close to wrestling in NJPW long before Forbidden Door was even a concept.
Since debuting in AEW, Malakai Black has been treated as a threat along with the terrifying House Of Black. Prior to this, he was signed to the NXT brand of the WWE before being called up to the main roster to little success. Black was however an NXT Champion, but he almost didn’t get that chance to show his talent in the WWE.
Ahead of Sunday’s AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door event, AEW star Malakai Black spoke with Denise Salcedo about his excitement for the PPV and how he grew up as a fan of NJPW. He also shared that before he signed his NXT contract in 2016, there was talks about him doing a tour with NJPW.
My goal in professional wrestling was always Japan and preferably New Japan. When I grew up I never watched WWF/WWE at the time because we didn’t have access to it……. I grew up watching New Japan because we had a channel called EuroSport, and it had NJPW. That was my introduction to wrestling, as a whole, and what I grew up with and later on WCW. So New Japan always had a special place in my heart and it’s also how my style somewhat got orientated… it’s much more martial arts influenced so I started doing martial arts because of what I saw. Right before I moved there were talks between a company that I worked for that had a good working relationship with New Japan at the time and myself as to bringing me over for a tour or multiple tours, that was obviously the big question for New Japan and I had the contract for NXT on my table. I was like ‘well even though New Japan is like the goal’ at the time, NXT at the time would have been a 3 to 5 year contract, guaranteed money whereas NJPW, they run multiple tours but we don’t know they might have kept me for one tour. So I went with the route we all know. I always felt that in the back of my mind, that I still wanted to do New Japan in any capacity. I’ve worked with them when they did the European tours back then. I did some work on them. But not on a scale like we’re about to do on Sunday,where it’s an actual collaborative event between two companies. So when Tony made this announcement, I was hoping that I was gonna be involved, when he did finally make the announcement, the rumor mill backstage kinda started coming up because we saw some of the New Japan officials walking around and we saw some of the wrestlers walking around. So we all knew something was brewing and when it was finally there, it’s just cool. We live in such a unique era when it comes to wrestling, there is so much going on and everything has its place which I think is really really cool… It’s very exciting,”
Malakai Black To Denise Salcedo
Of course, Black will wrestle in a fatal four way match for the All Atlantic Championship at the event. The match will also feature Miro, Clark Connors and PAC.
H/T to Fightful for transcription
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