It’s been almost four months since Alistair Black was called up from NXT to the WWE Main Roster. He was in a tag team with Ricochet for a while — they even had a WrestleMania match, which is already starting to seem hard to believe, but were then separated in the Superstar Shake-Up. Since becoming a singles wrestler on Smackdown, Aleister Black has done… almost nothing. He’s cut a bunch of promos in dark rooms alone, but that’s about it. He wasn’t even invited to Saudi Arabia, apparently because his tattoos are too scary.
If you told me that nobody ever had a plan for Aleister on the main roster, I wouldn’t exactly be shocked. So it made sense, during his appearance on Sheamus’s Celtic Warrior Workouts YouTube series, when he said that his call-up happened quickly and apparently without much planning of any kind. (H/T to Wrestling Inc for the transcript.)
I wasn’t scheduled to be called up. It was a last minute decision. I was just done [with a workout] and it was 11:30, and I didn’t have to be at the live event until 1:00. So, I was just going to take a 45-minute nap. I had my phone by me, and my phone starts to go off and it’s Coach Bloom. He said, “I have some news for you,” and as a joke, I said, “You are firing me.” And he said, “Something like that, this Sunday you’re flying to Tennessee, and this Monday you make your debut on Raw and Tuesday on SmackDown.”
A quick, surprising call-up can work great sometimes, and even lead to stardom (remember when Paige first arrived?), but for that to happen the Superstar in question needs to be given room to grow and a storyline to spotlight them. Lately it seems like all Aleister has is a chair in a dark room.
