15 Misconceptions About AEW You Probably Believe

12. “Tony Fumbled Malakai Black”

Amid this tedious and exhausting time of tribalism, a wrestler is no longer automatically bad purely because they work for All Elite Wrestling. In this latest phase of the new competition era, now that jumps from WWE to AEW are more frequent, the wrestlers are actually valuable. Tony Khan just fumbles them, that’s all - and he “fumbled” Malakai Black.

Or did he?

While Malakai’s stuff is a lot more distinctive than many of his stylistic peers and successors, informed by his heart-stopping and creative use of muay thai, he gets used by the majors because he’s a Good Wrestler. He’s there to have good back-and-forth matches - “bangers”.

(His hardcore fans will dismiss that, insisting that he’s a genius mind whose ability to tell epic sagas has yet to be harnessed, but everybody else has no clue what he’s on about at virtually all times. The “cryptic” promos are either a load of waffle, or few possess the intellect to decode them. One of the two.)

In the ring, Malakai was never really afforded the opportunity to prove that he could truly hang at the level of the key AEW pay-per-view singles match.

The reasons for that have been discussed to death, but in any event, the guy who is good in the ring (gothic version) simply wasn’t as good as Will Ospreay, Hangman Page, and Swerve Strickland - the latter of whom proved that doing a job every once in a while can actually be the start of something.

Malakai either didn’t want to go on that same journey, or he was no longer good enough.