Malakai Black has already scored two remarkable wins over Cody Rhodes, and he’ll go for the trifecta when he faces “The American Nightmare” again this Saturday on AEW Dynamite.
Feuding with a star of Rhodes’ caliber, let alone defeating him twice, upon his arrival in AEW immediately established Black as a top star, and the man formerly known as Malakai Black doesn’t take this prominence for granted.
In an interview with Jay Reddick of the Orlando Sentinel, Black looked back on the first two chapters of his feud with Rhodes and compared this conflict to cutting off a dragon’s head in order to “get ahead.”
“If I’m going to do something, I might as well do it with the biggest diamond of the company,” Black said. “As a wrestler, I can’t say I have anything but respect for him. But to get ahead, you have to cut off the head of the dragon, and he was one of the biggest dragons.”
Black has been renowned for his persona, both in WWE and in AEW, and in this interview, he peeled back the curtain a bit by shining some light on his character. He described the complexities of the man fans now see on AEW TV; when asked about some fans’ tendency to cheer him, he credited their “violent nature” of mankind as a trait that might be attracted to this darkness.
“He’s sadistic, but thoughtful,” Black said. “He isn’t careless. He’s capable of showing respect and emotion, but he’s very particular about it. He gets cheered sometimes, and I think that’s because deep within everybody, we all have a violent nature when we draw more on the negative side of things.”
