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Earlier this month, AEW’s Malakai Black posted a response to a fan on social media who claimed he refused to “take a pin or put anyone on it.” Black denied that he had any problem with losing matches and the wrestling world moved on.
But then Black and his faction mates Brody King and Buddy Matthews were booked in a cage match on the January 27 episode of AEW. Collision. The match against FTR and Daniel Garcia was announced a week in advance, as the show would go against WWE’s Royal Rumble event and needed all the publicity it could get. It was also initially promoted as a steel cage elimination match.
Closer to the date of the show, AEW began referring to CollisionThe main event is an “Escape The Cage” elimination match. There were some questions about the rules and how it would work that we didn’t really get official answers to until Saturday night, but it still turned out to be a fun match won by the babyfaces when Mark Briscoe helped ensure Garcia beat Black to be the last man to leave the cage.
That would have been it… if Dave Meltzer hadn’t hinted in Wrestling observer radio that the “Escape” stipulation came about because no one at House of Black wanted to do the job:
“When they first announced the match, it was an elimination cage match. When they first announced it was Escape The Cage, when I heard it was Escape The Cage, I thought it was like ‘Okay, we’ve got all these guys here, but someone complained about doing a job.’ Essentially in this game, five guys have to do a job.
“As for the boys, I know that Daniel García will do a job in a game like that. And I know FTR will do a job because, you know, Dax Harwood does a million jobs when the circumstances are right, and Cash Wheeler isn’t opposed to it. So, you know, Malakai Black never does jobs, and when this was happening and I was watching this, one of the things I was thinking when I saw this is that these damn House of Black guys never do jobs…”
Malakai hasn’t responded this time, but his two teammates have, as has AEW wrestling administration coordinator Will Washington. You probably don’t need me to tell you that we disagreed with Meltzer’s assessment of the situation, something they made clear when responding to Twitter/X accounts that added quotes from Observer Radio and speculated further about what Dave said.
It’s funny how someone’s opinion becomes fact because they’ve been watching wrestling for a long time. The format and stipulation of the cage match were always what they were going to be. It’s not our fault that the graphic text has changed. https://t.co/zGuNP61TxN
— Big Bad King Brody (@Brodyxking) January 29, 2024
I don’t normally comment on things like this, but before this idea spreads or gets out of hand, the wording change was just for clarity.
It was absolutely escape rules when the first match graphic appeared. https://t.co/3nubqqtQNL
— Will Washington (@WillWashington) January 29, 2024
Feel free to judge this round of “wrestlers and wrestling companies vs. ground sheets” in the comments below.