Malakai Black and Swerve Strickland have been connected in a very unique way since their time in WWE NXT.
Swerve Strickland is no stranger to having a musical influence with his attire, but he recently revealed that a current All Elite Wrestling star gave him an early part of his wardrobe.
During a recent appearance on McKenzie Mitchell’s Threads podcast, Strickland talked about his persona’s attire at the start and revealed he wanted to mature as he continued wrestling.
“At that time, I was kind of growing up doing The Jackson 5 entrance with ‘I Want You Back,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, how do I mature this though? Because I still want to keep musical influence in it, but I’m not a kid anymore. I’m going into my mid-to-late-20s; how do I mature this?’ And that’s when Travis Scott’s [Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight] album came out,” said Strickland. “And I saw him sitting on a throne on the album cover, and there were a lot of crows and everything. And I could hear the music, and I was just like, ‘Man, this feels really dark, it feels very menacing. I want to try and portray that and match that same feel with my look.'”
Swerve Strickland receives a gift from Malakai Black
Strickland would then reveal that this change was happening right as Malaki Black — then Aleister Black — was coming up in NXT. As the two got close, Black eventually gave away a piece of his clothing to let Strickland use.
“And at the time, Aleister Black got signed to NXT. So me and him were very, mimicking a lot of our stuff together and watching tape,” Strickland said. “He saw where I was going, so he gave me his vest, and so I started wearing his vest while he was NXT Champion. So a lot of time, you’ll see me in a black vest, that’s Malaki’s…or Aleister’s at the time, that was his debut NXT vest. So he gave that to me, and I started wearing that.”
If you use any of these quotes, please credit Threads with a link to this article for the transcription.
