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

DDT: Where does your match with Cody from All In rank among your all-time top career highlights thus far?

Aldis: It’s definitely up there. I think for me, my personal favorite match is the one with Marty [Scurll] from Crockett Cup. The funny thing about All In is that as incredible of a moment as that was, for me, the opening minute was my pop. That was my moment. Eleven thousand people standing before we even touched, that was my moment.

I said, “As long as we don’t completely screw this up, Cody winning the title is going to be his moment.” And he deserved it. It was very easy to get to that. To get to a point where they weren’t just, “Yay, Cody!” and by the time they got to that, I don’t care what anyone says, if it was Cody and anyone else, it wouldn’t have been the same.

The in-ring in London… the way we did all of that just worked and just fell into place. The thing that turned the corner was when they first announced it at the press conference, we deliberately decided that I wouldn’t be there so that I could then say, “Well, hey, nobody asked me.” It was real.

The thing with this was that all the attention is going to be on him and I’m going to be jealous. That’s how people will feel, so let’s give them that. By the time we got to London, I think the way I dress and carry myself and the way I speak, people suddenly realized, “This guy isn’t some schmuck. This isn’t just a gimmie for Cody.”

We did so much in the build for that match. Even though that’s what everybody wanted, we did enough to make people question what was going to happen. At the weigh-in the day before, I’d arguably got myself into the best shape of my life, I dwarfed him at that weigh-in.

That was another area where people who had never seen me in person and only on TV were like, “Oh, damn! That’s kind of an obstacle.” I think because so much emphasis was put on me in the NWA product that I was the only guy that we did enough to make even the most hardcore of fans think, “What would happen if he lost, though? That wouldn’t make any sense.” And then they thought, “Well, maybe he isn’t going to lose. Maybe he’s going to beat Cody.”

We created enough doubt where by the time we got it, people didn’t know what was going to happen. They knew what they wanted, but they didn’t know. That’s when you really get them and I think that was really a testament to me. That pop at the beginning proved that even if I had won, they wouldn’t have necessarily soured on it. That was their way of saying, “We want Cody to have his moment, but if you win, we understand.”

That was the way they took it and that was the way I took it. It was a proof of concept and that was their way of saying, “Thank you for delivering it to us in this way.” We did it, but ironically, I thought the rematch in Nashville was a ten times better match, the 2-out-of-3 Falls. People forget that at All In, that was the first time Cody and I had ever wrestled. By the time we wrestled then, we realized the chemistry and everything. Anyone will tell you that the first time you wrestle someone is very rarely the best time.