Malakai Black won the NXT Championship in April 2017 at the WWE NXT TakeOver: New Orleans pay-per-view event before working on the main roster from 2017 through 2019. He joined AEW in July 2021.
While speaking on the Undisputed podcast with Bobby Fish, Black revealed that he wasn’t liked by many people while in WWE NXT. He said,
“I remember when I was the quote-unquote, like, chosen one in NXT and I did not have a lot of friends because everybody wanted to be the chosen one, you know what I mean? I had a lot of people that did not like me because of that and I was just going like, ‘I’m sorry guys. I didn’t do anything on purpose’. But it was just the way that the industry was at the time and what the quote-unquote machine picked at that time.”