Malakai Black Reveals Issue He Has With Particular Aspect Of Pro Wrestling

AEW star Malakai Black appeared recently on Developmentally Speaking, and talked about his view on wrestling - specifically what the industry could use more of in the modern age. He stated:

"Wrestling needs emotion. Wrestling needs genuine interest, genuine love, and genuine anger. [...] Wrestling needs less Michael Bay and more thought-provoking methodology. You take guys like Gunther, who are insanely good. I don't think I've ever watched that man have a match that made me, 'Eh.' He's so incredibly good, and that is in a modern setting. 

"He knows how to draw emotion out and that's why I've always been into character stuff and building stuff throughout these lenses of characters because it allows an audience member to connect from an emotional level, whether you agree or not with what he says or not says, and leaving it up to you to decide. The emotional connection to the storyline or match is what will eventually, or hopefully, if the match is good, will be the payoff instead of having a lot of quick matches. Don't get me wrong, we need quick matches too. We need a little bit of everything. It's a big circus of everything."

Black's comments come in the midst of WWE Superstar Gunther's record-breaking Intercontinental Championship reign. His opponent for WrestleMania was recently revealed to be Sami Zayn, who won a qualifying gauntlet match on a recent edition of Raw.

Gunther's reign has featured several feuds which have seen the crowd get heavily behind his opponent, including names such as Sheamus, Chad Gable and The Miz.

In terms of some parts of modern wrestling moving away from creating emotional resonance with the crowd, Black explained:

"I feel like we're sometimes driving away from working the position on the card that we wrestle and trying to steal the show every single time. I don't think the attitude of 'I want to do my best' is a bad attitude, not by any shape, but I do feel sometimes you have to know when it's you're time to shine, and sometimes you have to understand who have been building a certain storyline for months, years, and this is the big night so make sure they get all the attention so the company looks better."

H/T to Fightful.