Aleister Black Says His Last Two Years In WWE Were "A Slow Death"
The former NXT Champion shared his post-release thoughts on a lengthy Twitch stream last night.
Released from WWE as part of the company's latest round of cuts on Wednesday night, Aleister Black hit Twitch for a Q&A session almost immediately, touching on a number of different topics relating to his time in the world's biggest wrestling promotion over the course of 55 minutes.
The 36-year-old said that while there may be "bad days" ahead of him, he wasn't immediately sad or depressed about his release:-
"I am not sad, I am not depressed. I am, I’m okay. I’m sure there’s going to be dark days coming up, there’s going to be bad days, you know? It’s all kind of up and down, and I think we should have a nice conversation. I’m getting texts like crazy, there’s a crazy hype train going on."
That being said, Black referred to his past two years in the company as a "slow death":-
"It’s bittersweet. Cause I owe everything to WWE. Not to diminish my prior work, but obviously my prior work had gotten me to the dance. And, you know, I think the last two years were a slow death for me. I think that it was very hard to get the creative approved despite numerous conversations that I’ve had with Vince, and everybody trying really hard. It did numbers on my self esteem too. Because at one point you’re like ‘the ratings are good, the numbers are good, the merch is good, why are we not, you know?’ It’s like one of those things where they, like, the word intrigue was always there. ‘Oh we find you very intriguing.’ I’m like ‘okay good. Let’s present something there, let’s doing something. I have thrown so many things at the wall, cause I keep creating. I keep creating characters and gimmicks and storylines over and over and over and over and over."
This would roughly align with his "promotion" to the main roster. Called up haphazardly alongside Ricochet, Tommaso Ciampa, and Johnny Gargano in February 2019, Black continually struggled for the momentum he enjoyed in NXT, all the way up to his explained disappearance from television in October 2020.
Black made a full-on return to television last month, though WWE had no long-term plans for his feud with Big E.
As with many of WWE's other recent releases, Aleister was told that "budget cuts" were the reason he was being let go:-
"I got told it was budget cuts. Whether that is budget cuts or not, doesn’t matter. I’m here now and I’ve had a great time."
Aleister will be free to sign with another wrestling promotion from 31 August, assuming he is bound to a standard WWE 90-day non-compete clause.
H/T Wrestling Inc. for the transcriptions.