NWA World Champion Nick Aldis discusses signing with the NWA and how the brand has evolved, the current wrestling landscape, favorite matches he’s had, and much more.
With there being an abundance of exciting wrestling promotions to choose from these days, the National Wrestling Alliance often doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. The historic promotion has had an amazing resurgence over the past two years with Nick Aldis leading the charge as the NWA World Champion.
Marty Scurll, Jake Hager, PJ Black and many others have challenged Aldis for the gold since 2017 and all of them fell short. His marquee match with Cody for the NWA Championship at 2018’s All In event was one of the best bouts all year and gave the brand even more exposure.
In other words, Aldis is doing quite well for himself at the moment and can seen anywhere from NWA’s Ten Pounds of Gold show on YouTube to Ring of Honor’s weekly television program. He also spent a considerable time in IMPACT and was at one point scouted by All Elite Wrestling.
Aldis is determined to not only take the NWA to new heights as its champion but also change the wrestling business on the whole. Whether it’s taking his title to other companies or bringing in fresh faces to the NWA, he has high hopes and major plans for his immediate future.
Daily DDT spoke with the National Treasure himself to get his candid thoughts on why the NWA is destination viewing, what led to his departure from IMPACT, why WWE is no longer his endgame, almost signing with AEW earlier this year, and much more.
Daily DDT: How did the opportunity to sign with the NWA come about and what was it about the brand that enticed you to join their ranks compared to your time in IMPACT?
Nick Aldis: Obviously, I had a relationship with Dave Lagana dating back to IMPACT, and I briefly crossed paths with Billy [Corgan], hadn’t really worked with him to any significant degree, but he was a fan of mine and really, I was just disenchanted with the product overall.
I was looking and felt that every wrestling company was going after the same audience. Everyone was going after the discerning fan that’s a lifer for wrestling, and I think that numbers have proven that if you cater to that fan base, you lose the rest. I think there’s a sweet spot where you can satisfy everyone.
The proliferation of social media and wrestling fans’ insatiable appetite for opinion to bring down the number one wrestling leads to a culture that unfortunately can exclude a lot of the more casual fans and I think that’s necessarily fair.
I don’t think any one person’s dollar is more valuable than another’s, but I cherish and respect the fans that just watch once a week and don’t engage in social media about it and don’t write blogs about it and talk with other fans about it just as much as I do those fans.
Passion is great, but ultimately, it’s a commercial business and I believe there’s a lot of fans out there who feel that they aren’t invited to the party. To me, the feedback I got from the things they always reverted back to were either the Attitude Era or either the late ’80s with the NWA and Jim Crockett Promotions.
We knew this was the case in TNA as well, we knew there was a specific number of people that just watched our product and IMPACT never appreciated that and we dropped the ball and that’s we lost them. There were fans who watched WCW and after WCW went away, they didn’t watch wrestling anymore.
We were getting them back bit by bit, they trust our brand to deliver them the things they like about wrestling. It’s Rocky. They want to see the struggle and the culmination of two guys’ rivalry leading to the final blow-off, someone has to win and somebody has to leave.
This isn’t a knock on people doing skits or doing silly stuff because there’s a place for all of it. There seems to be there’s this unhealthy mentality in the business where if you are a proponent of the wrestling, you are encouraged to hate every other type of wrestling and hate every other type of wrestling fan.
That type of culture gets nobody anywhere. We pay a little bit of feedback we get on our product, and one of the ones that comes up consistently is “This is wrestling I can be proud of, this is what I like, this is what I look for in pro wrestling, this is what I haven’t had in my pro wrestling for so long.”
And we like that, but if they start dumping on other types of pro wrestling, we don’t have any time for that. We’re not in that business. We’re not interested in taking down anyone else because I’m all for every one of my brothers and sisters in this business to make money.
To answer your question, Dave and Billy reached out to me in the summer of 2017 and said, “You never reached your potential” and I said I agreed. WWE wasn’t an option and nowhere else was sort of tickling my fancy.
I looked at it and went, “I’ve done everything I can do” and especially in IMPACT, I’d done everything I could do. I’d been the world champion, I’d been the tag champion, I’d been in marquee matches and rivalries with guys like Samoa Joe and AJ Styles and obviously beaten Sting in the middle of the ring on Pay-Per-View.
There’s not really much I can do here except it’s a step down. I’d rather take on a new challenge. Once Billy laid down his vision for the NWA and what he wanted to do with it, I realized there was a great opportunity there to basically to deliver the one thing I always wanted to do in wrestling was to spend more time on doing this long, dramatic build to one match instead of churning out storyline, storyline, storyline, Pay-Per-View, storyline, storyline, storyline, Pay-Per-View.
There’s an ability here to make it more of destination viewing by making it more like a prize fight instead of having a schedule where we have to try to fit our creative around. Instead of trying to fit the creative around our schedule, we fit our schedule around the creative.
DDT: Do you feel the pros outweigh the cons of social media in wrestling nowadays?
Aldis: I think that’s all dependent on how you use it and how you utilize it and what you put stock in. Yes, the ability to reach your particular audience and monetize them is huge. It’s a great situation for a smaller startup company like ours because we can target and find the audience we resonate with. Where I think people get off on the wrong exit is it becomes a very inaccurate barometer of public opinion.
I can tell you for a fact that TNA and in particular Dixie [Carter] had a hugely disproportionate view of what the Twitter conversation represented in the wider audience because they represented at the time one-third of our overall audience.
About one of the other thirds of that audience is we had at our peak where we were doing two million viewers was kind of what I was talking about people were the fans that used to watch WCW who, for whatever reason, weren’t WWE fans and they didn’t like that product and they found something different and they liked it and we had them.
Around 2010-2011, the product told them “All that stuff you liked that made TNA unique? You don’t want that anymore.” And we lost them. We never got them back. Twitter is very easy to manipulate to make it look like you’re doing better than you really are. “Look, we’re trending!”
It’s really not that hard to be trending in any given moment if there’s really not much else going on. All you have to do is something stupid or say something controversial and chances are you’ll be trending, you know what I mean?
It’s not equally converted to Pay-Per-View buys and merchandise buys and things like that. What it can do is maintain loyalty with a portion of our audience is creates a false sense of security and a bit of a pathway to laziness and that’s certainly what happened with IMPACT.
DDT: What was your motivation behind returning to IMPACT for that brief stint in 2015?
Aldis: Well, the short stint, it was never a contract. It always just a negotiated thing where they’d pay me this much and I’d go and do it. I knew Jeff [Jarrett] was having problems and I knew it was a chance for him to get back on the saddle and I believed he deserved to run the company and take on that product. I did it out of loyalty to Jeff.
I don’t what the reality of the situation was, but at the time there were three things that factored into my decision to go back. One, the money was decent. Two, it was a favor to Jeff. And three, at the time it was implied it was a pathway for me to do the World of Sport show with ITV.
We even got as far as me walking out and doing a press conference with ITV and World of Sport. We were supposed to be working together and I don’t know how all of that changed and how all of that blew up, but honestly, I felt like I was used like a bargaining chip in that and they were also using that as a way to entice me and come on be on IMPACT as well.
There was some dishonesty there, but I don’t where it fell apart, hence why I never signed a contract and I was just kind of going show by show and it was an option for me to work with Alberto [El Patron]. I’d always admired him and wanted to work with him and so that was the final thing before I said, “Okay, cool, I’ll come in and work with Alberto, that’s fine.” And that was that.
DDT: Talk a little about the Ten Pounds of Gold show the NWA has on its YouTube channel. How did that come about and what type of wrestling fan do you feel it caters to?
Aldis: When I first agreed and said, “Okay, I’m on board, let’s try to bring this brand back to prominence,” I sent them some of my favorite episodes of HBO 24/7, Showtime All Access, UFC Countdown and things like that, combat sports have taken pro wrestling and made it better. Nobody, not boxing, not MMA, nobody used to run packages. Nobody used to even run a two-minute hype package before an event, but wrestling always was.
Wrestling has been doing that for decades. And they would borrow from wrestling. Tell me the first thing you saw that had pyro that wasn’t pro wrestling. There were all these dramatic elements and hype elements that real sports borrowed from pro wrestling. They’ll never admit that they did, but they did.
They realized “Wow, people care so much more when they really feel a connection to the personalities.” I said, “Where did we go off base here with wrestling?” We went so far off course. Again, we concentrated so much on this very small niche portion of the audience that was only concerned with a pro wrestling match that had an opinion on every single thing. “Oh, that promo was a B+” and “This match was a 3.3 out of 5 stars.”
My argument is, I don’t care if they want to do that, but that’s up to them if they want to do that. My point was, those people clearly aren’t going anywhere because this is like a hobby to them. They’re never going to stop watching because they love doing this stuff. Even if every match on this show gets one star, they’re still going to want to do it because they like putting this stuff out, so why are we catering so much to them?
I care about the dollar, and this isn’t a knock on any of the people that do this stuff, but I don’t care about this guy who’s not paying my bills and what star rating he gives my match because he’s not paying my bills. The people who are going to read his stuff, whoever they may be, they’re going to keep watching for the most part. I’m not saying you should pay no attention to it, I’m just saying you should pay the proportionate amount to what it represents. In the meantime, you’ve got to keep doing things that keeps a wider audience engaged.
If you went by what that core online audience say about Roman Reigns, he wouldn’t even be on the show, which is ludicrous. I’m sure they’d have the numbers to show it. He draws a lot of women, the kids like him, he sells merchandise. There’s a need to make sure that you keep a breath of every potential customer.
Every set of eyeballs in the world is a potential dollar you can make. That’s sort of the mentality that we adopted, but we also said, “Okay, we know we have to start somewhere, so we’re going to start with the audience that we think we can get the most quickly is the slightly disenfranchised, old-school kind of fan and the discerning ones, the ones that will watch every type of wrestling out there.
We cultivated a good thing with a good base quite quickly, we did enough to generate buzz where people are saying, “Hey, have you seen this Ten Pounds of Gold show? It’s really interesting. It really makes me care about watching this match that I never thought I would care about.” When we got to the beginning of last year, we knew we had Cody’s attention, and obviously, that was a great opportunity for everyone involved, that was a win-win.
We went, “Okay, is All In going to be our first real ‘This is what we can do’?” And it was.
We used All In as our platform to show this is what we can do. Within the space of one year of buying a brand where everyone was saying, “Why are you buying this brand? What a dumb thing to do.” Even [Jim] Cornette, who is one of our biggest supporters, he said at the time, “Billy Corgan just bought the National Wrestling Alliance! What the hell is he thinking?”
Fast forward to a year later, Cody and I have 11,000 people standing up before we even touched with Earl Hebner holding up the NWA Championship. It’s proof of concept. We take our time and we wait for the right thing to come along. We don’t try to shoehorn it.
That’s the real beauty and benefit of only having a very small amount of people who pay, myself included, that’s only a handful of salaries to pay. We find where it works and say, “Okay, that’s a good time to run, let’s do that,” like a boxing promoter do. Boxing promoters don’t say, “Every week we’re going to have Monday Night Box and build to a show called Summer Box.”
It doesn’t work like that. They have to find the right matchup first, you have to find the rivalry and the undercard and everything else that’s going to support the main event and that’s how we approach it. It’s so funny to me because it doesn’t seem that difficult to explain, but some people have a real hard time understanding that.
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.
DDT: The NWA and Ring of Honor have had a great working relationship for some time now. Do you think more companies can benefit from working together?
Aldis: I don’t think it’s a case of benefiting anymore as it is a case of surviving. That’s just my take. Some companies have to pull their head out of their (expletive). That’s the reality.
Instead of worrying about signing guys to exclusive deals and trying to screw over other companies who are in the same boat as they are, what they should be doing is figuring out… What we do is eliminate the typical rules and parameters of, “This guy is under contract and that’s the only promotion he can wrestle in.”
We recently sat down and said, with me for example, “Anywhere in the world, who are your top five title matches that you can do right now?” I said, “I said this guy from WWE, this guy from WWE, this guy from New Japan, this guy from wherever,” and obviously me and Cody III, the rubber match. Just to remind ourselves that anything is possible. So many companies exhaust what they have because they’re not thinking outside the box.
We proved how easy it was to happen. Ring of Honor produced All In. That was a Ring of Honor show for all intents and purposes. It was just co-produced by Cody and the [Young] Bucks. In order for Cody to have what he wanted, which was the match with me, Ring of Honor had to work with us and out of that, we ended up with a more long-term relationship.
They also brought in other people that they used who weren’t under contract to Ring of Honor and frankly, we don’t see as ambitious as other people do as we could end up doing that with other companies, or with the company. Ultimately, who has their hands on more history in this business than WWE. When you’re scrambling to make moments that mean something, a real easy thing to do is build off history, and nothing has more history right now than the Ten Pounds of Gold.
DDT: After a ton of speculation from fans that he was either WWE or AEW bound, it was announced at Best in the World that Eli Drake would not only be your partner for your match with The Briscoes but also that he was the newest member of the NWA roster. What do you think Drake brings to the table in the NWA?
Aldis: I had a big hand in bringing him into the NWA. He had at least two other offers, one from one of the companies you mentioned, and one from Ring of Honor. Dave made his pitch and Dave asked me to call him and basically tell him my experience because Eli saw what we had done with me and said, “I want that.” Why wouldn’t you? I called him and we had a good talk and I told him what I thought this could be for him long-term.
He’s a few years older than me, he’s 36 and I’m 32 and I’ve always had one eye on the future post-wrestling and I’m sure he kind of has that too because he’s a creative guy, he’s a smart guy with a good business brain and I’m sure he wants to have an option or at least the opportunity to work in behind-the-scenes role going forward if he wants to do that and it’s a seat at the table.
I think we offer more than anyone else right now and we truly offer guys to tell their story the way they want it to be told. We have the least amount of cooks, the least amount of agendas, and I’m a partner in NWA. I’m not just the world champion. We’re very judicious with who we bring in as far as contracts go. We want guys who look good, who can talk, who can go and deliver the big moments and I think that Eli is that guy.
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.
DDT: You also successfully defended your title against Marty Scurll a few months back at the Crockett Cup and it was The Villain who helped you to the back after the attack from The Briscoes at Best in the World. Can fans expect anything to stem from that or was it simply a case of a friend helping out a friend?
Aldis: I think you’ll have to watch this space. After the Crockett Cup, and I think I’m safe in saying this, I think a lot of people would like to see that match again. Maybe Marty deserves his moment.
What have been your thoughts on what Cody, The Young Bucks and Tony Khan have accomplished so far with All Elite Wrestling and how beneficial do you think it is to wrestling to have another company out there for wrestlers to work for?
DDT: If you could have one dream title defense as NWA Worlds Heavyweight champion, who would it be against?
Aldis: I’m just going to say it. I have a vision of eventually headlining Starrcade with the ten pounds of gold on the line, but Starrcade currently belongs to WWE. That to me would be the pinnacle, my crowning achievement for the body of work I’ve done with this with this brand and this championship. To me, the two perfect-world opponents for that would be Randy Orton or Triple H, based on the historical significance of it.
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.
DDT: Do you have a match that stands out as your favorite from your NWA career that some fans may not be aware of?
Aldis: It’s definitely one of the higher profile ones I had, but I think the one I had with PJ Black was important to be because we sold out Center Stage in Atlanta with that match. We were on top and that was the first show Ring of Honor was promoting there since Cody and the Bucks and Hangman [Adam Page] had left. For us to go in there and sell it out, I took some pride in that.
At the very beginning, Bobby Cruise announced, “This is the first time the NWA Championship has been defended at Center Stage since 1993” and we got a huge ovation for that. The audience was very respectful and that’s a good town for me because they appreciate what we’ve been able to do.
I took personal pride in that because I know a lot of people were worried about that show and how it was going to perform without Cody, the Bucks and Hangman, and it was full. That to me was a real matter of personal and professional pride. I had a match for Harley Race recently. It was a good match with Leland, he’s not particularly well known, but I had a real good match and by the end of it, I had the crowd in Missouri really buying that he could win and that’s what I want to do. Just the fact I could deliver a good main event at Harley’s show with Harley in attendance was a big deal to me.
DDT: What are your goals with the NWA brand and beyond?
Aldis: Our next major goal is to, we’re in the process now of developing our episodic television show. Like I said, I’ve had a big hand in that, we’re going along nicely with that. Billy’s going to be back from his Europe tour with the Smashing Pumpkins, and when he gets back, we’ll finalize all those plans.
That’s our next major goal is develop and deliver this really good episodic show that’s different and I truly think that if we get this right, we’ll fundamentally change the way pro wrestling shows are formatted, much like they did in the early to mid-90s with Monday Night Raw and Nitro. It’s been that way for a long time and I think it might be time for something else. We think we have an idea of how to do it and it’s an exciting thing for me to have my stamp on something historical.
And like I said, I want to headline a big show. I want to get to a point where we can headline half a dozen big tent-pole events like the Crockett Cup every year and fill arenas and do it our way with integrity. I take personal pride being here in the mid-Atlantic area.
A lot of the fans here have a real nostalgia, generational affection for the NWA. They stop me in the street and tell me, “I really appreciate everything you’re doing. My grandfather used to take me to watch Harley Race, Ric Flair, Dusty Rhodes.”
It means a lot to a lot of people in this area especially. I just want to help keep building it and be involved in the big moments. In 2018, I was arguably involved in the biggest moment in wrestling, or certainly one of them. That’s my intention. That’s why I got in this business: to be involved in the big moments. I want to continue doing that.