Former WWE star Aleister Black appeared on Nightcap to discuss various topics, including his journey to falling in love with wrestling.
Black said, “Well — so here is no wrestling in the Netherlands. So I remember, I was four or five years old. And I’m sitting on the couch with my dad, and he’s flipping channels. And we had Eurosport. And Eurosport, for a brief time, had WWF at the time. And he’s flicking through channels, and I see Yokozuna. And [it was] just a brief moment. I’m like, ‘What’s that?’ And my dad even stops and then he flicked the channel. I’m like, ‘Wait Dad, go back.’ Obviously, he didn’t go back, but for some reason that’s inter-grained into my brain.”
On going from martial arts to wrestling:
“Later on, we had New Japan Pro Wrestling on TV. So I divulged… and I saw two guys fighting in a ring. I grew up in the ’80s and the ’90s, so I grew up with like Bloodsport and Best of the Best, so all these action movies. So I’m thinking, ‘This is fighting.’ So my parents put me on karate, they put me on judo, they put me on Muay Thai. And obviously by the age of nine, I knew the difference between martial arts and pro wrestling. But then when I was 15, I had the opportunity to turn into pro wrestling, did that, and then my main style became Muay Thai and kickboxing as my influence. And so one helped the other become a wrestler.”
On whether he ever expected to end up in WWE:
“No. No. No, absolutely not. I often joke, saying like, ‘We had to create the mountains to climb over to become a wrestler, so we had to make them first. So no, I didn’t even think that I was ever going to get out of Europe. And never coming out the Netherlands — maybe Germany? And then I just kind of kept pushing and pushing and pushing. So yeah — no, never.”
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(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
