Nick Aldis talks turning down AEW, building the NWA brand, and more!
DDT: It seems WWE isn’t so much the be-all, end-all for wrestlers the same way it would have been years ago with there being so much variety in wrestling these days. How have you seen that shift happen in the last few years?
Aldis: I think there’s just so much talent. WWE is not under any obligation to sign every good wrestling. They’re under an obligation to sign the guys that they think they can do something with and deliver. Remember, they’re in a very “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. They sign a guy everyone likes and then they don’t really have an idea of what to do with him and then they get heat for dropping the ball with him.
Or they’ll sign someone and push him to the moon over all these other guys, then people will say they dropped the ball with this guy, this guy and this guy. There’s only so many hours of television, there’s only so many hours of content, and there’s only so many guys you can get over at one time.
My advice to guys who have asked, based on my own experience, once I got out of my own head in my late 20s, once I changed my overall philosophy, and I didn’t realized I was living my whole career in TNA with this in the back of my mind, I had been spending my entire career with the one goal of getting to WWE, which is totally the wrong approach to anyone.
Making your entire goal of, “I need someone else to make that decision in order for it to happen,” is a horribly insecure thing to do to yourself. Obviously, you can’t control the way someone else thinks.
Your goal should be to draw money. Now, that’s where you do have more power. If you bother to make the effort, like Marty did with his Villain vignettes, or like we did with the Ten Pounds of Gold series, or like I did before Ten Pounds of Gold with a series of vignettes I produced, if you’re willing to make the effort and show the audience with conviction when they look in your eyes that you’re dead serious about who you are and who you want to be, you’ll get somewhere.
If you can cultivate that for yourself without needing anyone else’s help, you have real power and real freedom. Then, you think, “Hey, maybe WWE will want to book me for a one-off. Maybe we both want to see how this goes on both sides before we can commit to anything.” That’s totally fine. I think that, again, as the landscape shakes out, that’s a possibility.
I’ll tell you the truth: I was made an offer by AEW. I counter-offered with, “I’d like to be able to do both.” I’d like to work with them because obviously I have great admiration for Cody and the Bucks for what they’ve been able to do. But I wasn’t prepared to walk away from the two years of work I’ve done with the NWA. And that was that. I left it open with, “If you can find a way to keep doing this and do your show, I’ll do your show.”
They essentially wanted to offer me a contract and have me walk away from what I’m doing here and I said that doesn’t make any sense to me. Really, there’s no reason to. It’s just a hangover from the way things have always been done. Obviously, we hear this “Change the World” phrase a lot, but that was my pitch to them. “If you really want to change the world, why can’t we do that?”
Because that really would be a change for one guy to work there but also come here. I’m still on very good terms with Cody and the Bucks and I had a very nice conversation with Tony [Khan] and everyone was aware of it. Billy and Dave were aware of it.
At the time, my stance was if I can do both, then I’ll do it and I think that as it shakes out and everyone starts to realize the demand that will be on them with cable TV and stuff like that, those possibilities will be way more apparent in the next coming year for some guys.