Nick Aldis talks turning down AEW, building the NWA brand, and more!

DDT: Between Ten Pounds of Gold and how every title defense you have as NWA Worlds Heavyweight Champion has a big fight feel to it, why do think most other championships in wrestling today seem to have lost their luster and don’t feel nearly as special or as important as the NWA title does?

Aldis: I think the history is the selling point. Whenever you can run a package that shows Terry Funk, Harley Race, Dusty Rhodes, Ric Flair or even into the early 2000s, Jeff Jarrett or AJ Styles, all of them holding the same championship, for a casual viewer that’s immediately, “Oh, okay.” And then to me and Cody and back to me, it’s like, “This a real prize.”

That’s something we didn’t really know we had until we started running with it and then it just so happened that I had all these international dates just after losing the title the first time and every single one of them asked if they could make an NWA title match.

Before we knew it, we had this sort of thing where I was going to defend the title on four different continents in one year and then suddenly you realize we achieved what we wanted to do with the NWA which was the traditional values with a modern delivery system.

I could be the traveling champion and put it out there with Ten Pounds of Gold and documented it and put it out in different ways like packages instead of going, “Here are the results, he defended the title here, blah blah blah.” We show clips and we made packages. We showed me traveling all over the world. That’s just effort. That’s not money.

Okay, there’s a little bit of money involved and Dave Lagana just so happened to fly with me and bring all of his equipment and shoot and edit everything, but Dave’s running the company. Compared to hiring a sound stage and getting a load of people and a load of wrestlers and a load of events, the cost of that is minimal, but we were amount to able create something that was a body of work. Not just me, but the entire NWA that is now usable and can be built off of.

It puts us in a very strong position, especially now we head into the rest of the year with AEW and WWE moving to FOX. There’s going to be some real monumental shifts happening in the entire business. Ring of Honor is going to be in trouble and IMPACT is going to be in trouble and it’s no secret that there’s only so many hours in a day they can spend watching wrestling and only so many dollars they can spend, they’re going to make a decision.

What we have is a usable model and a product in Ten Pounds that we can put out that people know is quality. They know what they’re going to get. Each people that we’re adding, our retention of our audience is excellent. That’s the way we wanted to build. One of our in-company motto is, don’t over-promise, just over-deliver. In wrestling, obviously a lot of people have a tendency to over-deliver.