Nick Aldis Featured Image

In the third and final part of SteelChair Magazine’s exclusive interview with NWA World Champion Nick Aldis, Aldis discusses which British wrestler he sees as a perfect fit for NWA, what audiences emotionally invest in, his new book about his journey with the NWA, and much more!

Going back to your roots, British Wrestling. Are there any current wrestlers from the UK that you’d like to see in NWA Powerrr?

“I think Rampage Brown would be a great fit. Ollie’s (Brown) always reminded me of Arn Anderson. He’s rugged but super athletic and has blistering fundamentals. Give me a guy who does the fundamentals so perfectly and crisply any day over guys that do super intricate moves. I love watching a craftsman, and he’s a craftsman, and that’s what I try to be. You know, Curt Hennig, Arn Anderson, even Shawn Michaels. Shawn innovated a lot of stuff, but underneath was this beautiful execution of fundamental wrestling moves but done in such a way that was just captivating. Bret Hart, he’s my hero. Perfect example. I see that in Ollie, he’s got that size and intensity, but he’s also got the athleticism and the wrestling acumen to be able to tell that story.

I think the cool thing about our show is that even guys that aren’t “good promos,” can suddenly have effective interviews because you don’t have to be a great promo. You don’t have to have this natural ability to speak and captivate people with a speech to be a good interview. If you’ve got the right interviewer, and we’ve got the best with Sean Mooney, Dave Marquez, Joe Galli.  So you can get some compelling verbiage out of someone because we can say, “Hey, just be yourself.”

I had a match with a kid named Brandon in Minneapolis; he’s one of Ken Anderson’s students. It’s a good example of what I was talking about before, getting these people to bite that maybe this kid might pull the sword out of the stone. Before we went out, I said to him, “I really want you to do a short interview before the match because it’s all about emotional investment. People have got to believe there is something to fight for in this. You can’t just be a random guy against a star. It doesn’t work.” I told him that I’d love for him to go out and have the announcer do a stickman interview with him asking him how he feels about the biggest opportunity of his career. Ken said that he’s green, he’s not a good promo yet, and I said it doesn’t matter. If he speaks normally, from the heart, and tells the truth it will be enough for people to think, “F*** it, I want this kid to win.” That’s what we did, and by the end of it, people suspended their disbelief.

We had old-timers on that show like Al Snow and The Nasty Boys, and even they were like, “I can’t believe how over that kid was” (laughs). Our whole thing is to try and make that extra effort, and again, focus on the emotional investment of wrestling because a lot of wrestling I see either goes too far one way or too far the other way. It’s either too much wrestling for wrestling’s sake, and it’s hard to emotionally connect with it, or they try to remedy that by doing angles that are so overdramatic that they can’t possibly be believed. It’s like, I know you didn’t try run me over with your car because otherwise, we’d be pressing criminal charges. Like a real person, how many people do you truly hate? Hopefully, none if you’re a healthy-minded individual. Emotional investment doesn’t have to be love or hate. It just has to be ego, alpha male. Who is gonna win this pissing contest?”

Yeah, if you think about the UFC and Conor McGregor vs. Nate Diaz. That was all about two alpha males and two egos colliding.

“Absolutely, and Nate Diaz’s promo, the first one he ever cut to call out Conor McGregor was one of the best promos I’ve ever seen. If they had never done anything else after that, they still would have sold a ton of PPV’s. When he stood there and went, “Conor McGregor, you’re taking everything I’ve worked mother*****,” basically saying you’re making all this money, and I’ve been doing this for ages, so the best way for me to do that is to whoop your ass. It’s like if I beat you, I’m showing everyone that I’m worth that money. Everyone can relate to that. Everybody in the world can relate to being jealous of someone that’s got more money than them.

Nate DIaz calls out Conor

That’s kind of similar to a lot of the underlying principles of the storyline between me and Marty now. I can be like, “Oh, big money Marty just swooped into this big-money deal, and here I am carrying a whole promotion on my back, and I’m making a fraction of what you’re making.” And everyone’s like, “Damn, that’s real” (laughs).”

I’ll be honest, I heard about your Marty angle before I saw the promo, and I was a bit sceptical. But when I saw it, and I saw you’re “Money Marty” comments, it just clicked.

“Right. Marty plays it so well because he sits there talking about the times he had to be jealous of me when I got Gladiators and TNA, and now he talks about finally getting success, and suddenly I’m jealous of him. But, of course, I’m jealous. I’ll always be jealous if someone is making more money than me. So the motivation is obvious to the audience because I’m not saying I hate him, we don’t hate each other. I’m just sitting there telling him he’s challenging me for my title, which is my entire career at this point, and he’s making all this money, but now he wants to take this too. So it’s like, “F*** you.”

Who knows when we’re gonna get to do it now, so that’s why I feel more comfortable talking about it from the creative side of it. But it’s like, none of it is not true, but at the same time, we don’t really harbour those feelings to one another (laughs). And that’s why we work together so well because we both have the same philosophy of taking the people on a ride.”

So in a time where people are stuck at home and looking for things to watch, what three NWA matches both in the current era and past would you suggest for fans to watch?

“Well, if nobody’s seen my body of work in the NWA, I would encourage them to go back and watch NWA 70 with me vs. Cody, our rematch from ALL IN. Chances are there’s people that saw my match with Cody at ALL IN and never saw anything else, so I would encourage them to go watch our 2/3 Falls match from Nashville. It’s available for free in its entirety on YouTube. I would encourage them to watch the first episode of NWA Powerrr, and for anyone who is stuck at home and is looking for content to binge and stuff, please, please go give NWA Powerrr a chance and start from the beginning, episode 1. I think we’ve done twenty episodes, so twenty hours or more to consume. And my match with Tim, and that’s one of my favourite matches because Tim’s a great character and human being, but I don’t think anyone’s kidding themselves saying he’s Shawn Michaels in the ring (laughs). So to be able to take the people on a ride and achieve that with Tim was a huge, huge deal for me.

The Marty match and the Cody match from NWA 70 are my two best matches. The episode of Ten Pounds of Gold called ‘This Is The NWA’ covers pretty much the entire Crockett Cup (2019) event, and it’s such a brilliant piece of editing from Dave. It’s such a beautiful cinematic piece. It’s like 20 minutes long. I remember the first time I watched it. I text him saying, “Thank you for doing this.” It’s like my body of work. I can point to this forever and be like that was me. So that would be the current things I’d send them to.

Overall, if they’re new fans that are only familiar with WWE, New Japan, or AEW and haven’t appreciated the NWA’s historical significance, I would tell them to go back and watch Flair vs. Harley from Starrcade. The three Flair/Steamboat matches from 1989, particularly the one in Nashville. Any Dusty or Flair promos. Dave Lagana put something on his Twitter asking what’s the best 30 seconds of wrestling, and one of the ones I said was there was a Flair and Dusty promo where Flair’s wearing this hat and Dusty takes it off and throws it, and then there is this huge pull apart. It’s brilliant. Also, I’d probably say, Flair and Ronnie Garvin.”

The one at Starrcade or where Ronnie won?

“The one where Ronnie won the title, I think it’s in Detroit. I watched that a lot gearing up for my match with Tim Storm because I wanted Tim to be Ronnie Garvin in that. I wanted him to be this rugged, slightly unrefined, but working-class hero that’s going to fight his way through. He’s not going to do it with skill, he’s going to fight. Ronnie Garvin might not be remembered historically in the same bracket as Flair, Steamboat, or Dusty, but man, for that style and that time period, it was so definitively NWA versus what the WWF was doing at the time. Flair and Ronnie Garvin was this rugged, physical, athletic, and intense contest.”

Flair and Garvin Promo

Those chops from Ronnie on Flair are nasty (laughs).

“Yeah, yeah. Again, it’s because they wanted to be different. Tully Blanchard once said, “Our audience was guys who wanted to see a fight, and the WWF’s audience was kids, but they did more money because if it’s kids, mum and dad have to bring them (laughs).” They took pride in being the pro wrestling show for adults, and in many ways, we’ve tried to do the same thing in the modern era with a modern delivery system. We’re on YouTube, watch it whenever you want. We’re going to do stuff that’s funny here and there, we’re going to do stuff that’s a little cute here and there, but overall, this is a show that you don’t have to be ashamed about. We want to be a pro wrestling show for adults, and that doesn’t mean we’re going to be obnoxiously rude or vulgar, we just mean it’s going to be angles, storylines, and delivery that will be relatable to a grown adult.”

Also, if there is anything you to update the fans on or let them know about, please feel free.

“Follow the NWA on socials. It’s @NWA on all of them. For me, my Twitter is @realnickaldis, @nickaldis on Instagram, and you can check out my stuff. I’m not really trying to plug anything as money is tight for everyone, but I am working on a book. I am writing a book, right now, basically starting at the end of my TNA career to put the reader in the mindset of where I was at in my career and how I was feeling about the business at the time when the NWA started and basically taking it through the very beginning of the NWA to where we are now.”

Oh, awesome! Any idea when it might come out?

“I’m hoping I can get it done for a first draft by maybe May or June, and then maybe hopefully try to release it by the end of the summer or maybe early autumn. I’m working on it pretty fast, and I’m also getting quotes from a lot of different people involved like Tim Storm, Billy and Dave, even Dave Meltzer’s agreed to contribute to it and stuff like that. So it’s really more about the modern era NWA than it is about me, but it’s just told from my perspective.”

 

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By Humza Hussain

Humza Hussain is SteelChair Magazine's Interviews editor. He has been a lifelong professional wrestling fan and has conducted interviews with names such as DDP, Aleister Black, and Bayley. He also writes film news, reviews, and interviews!

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