Aleister Black talks about his time in AEW.
The former AEW star made his return to WWE back in April after a four year stint with his previous employer. But before Black made the transition back over to WWE, there were plenty of negative rumors surrounding Black and his creative control. Despite the lack of singles matches in AEW, The House of Black was a rather dominant faction.
The former NXT Champion won more often than not, which made the narrative of the former AEW star not wanting to be pinned come alive. Hell, there was a narrative that the 40-year-old wasn’t happy in AEW. For the first time since his departure, Aleister Black addressed these rumors during an interview on the Ringer Wrestling Show and shut them down soundly.
“If you look at the pay-per-view matches that we did, we always knocked it out of the park. When we had these six-man matches, it was against local talent. Nothing against local talent, but the object was, ‘We want you guys to run through these guys.’ Cool. If you have five and five on TV as a segment, there are six people in that match, let’s say we have a higher profile six-man tag, everybody wants to get something in and at one point, especially with me and Buddy, we kind of took a backseat so we could get Brody in front of the spotlight because people didn’t know Brody that well. We let him take the reins in these things. It becomes this thing where people want to desperately have a narrative. ‘He never wanted to be in AEW.’ That’s completely false. That’s absolutely not true. I had a great time in AEW. I had a lot of fun. Did I do everything that I wanted to do? No, but that’s okay. At the end of the day, that’s not my company and I don’t have any say.
“It’s the same way, ‘He didn’t want to lay down for people.’ If you really think that I have so much pull in the company that I can say who I’m not going up against or lay down against, you think I’m not going to vouch for myself or put myself in the main events? You think I’m going to politic, ‘I’m not going to lay down for this person.’ It doesn’t make sense. Now, I know how that came to life.
It’s not something I’m not going to speak on because it’s part of a grander thing in wrestling that affects more people. Because I know what it is now, and who it was, I’m just going, ‘Well, that’s a shame.’ I don’t like that, for a big part, has been a running narrative because I’ve always loved wrestling and I still love wrestling, and I loved being in AEW. My match with Adam Copeland was one of the funnest things I’ve done in wrestling."
Black also discussed why he chose to leave AEW for WWE and he felt that business wise, it was the only decision that made sense to him.
"At the end of it, I made a calculated business decision and I looked at what I wanted to do, where I wanted to do it, and how I wanted to do it. This is where my wife [Zelina Vega] was. Listening to option A and what they wanted, option B and what they wanted, and I picked the one that, business-wise, made sense for me. I feel I had a lot left to do here and on this side, what they wanted me to do, that didn’t completely align with what I want to do, so I’m going to go the other route.”