NWA superstar and world’s champion Nick Aldis recently spoke to Andrew Thompson of Post Wrestling. Highlights from their interview can be found below.
On Rusev being a good fit in NWA:
“Absolutely. I mean look, you won’t find a bigger Rusev fan than me. I remember pretty much from the beginning, I would be like, ‘God, Rusev is money.’ I would text him [David Lagana] all the time, ‘God, Rusev is money,’ and he’d be like, ‘I know,’ and I remember when he first showed up on TV and they were doing kind of the Ivan Drago kind of stuff with him and Lana was very much playing that role. I was like, ‘This is money. This is perfect,’ and he worked with [John] Cena at WrestleMania so I go, ‘Okay great. They’re getting this one right. This one’s ready-made. This is a star,’ and for… whatever. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t his fault, and I think he’s a great example of, unfortunately, it’s over-engineered sometimes. There’s 50 people that are all paid to have ideas. It’s like now you have 50 ideas to sift through. Sometimes the obvious thing is right in front of you. I felt like with Rusev it was there. Like okay, this guy, totally unique look, he’s a horse, unbelievable athlete, he can work, charisma, whole thing is ready to go. I dare say that he would be… if I were AEW and I had the resources to pay for it, I think he would probably be [at the] top of my list. I think he would probably end back up at WWE, but I’m not sure how confident I’ll be that he’ll be on the open market for very long, but hell yeah. If we could get him at the NWA, even for a short period run, it would be huge.”
Says the NWA title was supposed to be defended at the G1 Supercard event at MSG:
“There was a Ring of Honor Title match at ALL IN and it wasn’t… not particularly memorable, right? Well I’d been told that I would defend the NWA Title at the Madison Square Garden show which would’ve been a huge feather in my cap and then it didn’t happen, and who’s to say why, but to me I always felt like there was this concern that once again, it would eclipse and outshine… and that’s sad because ultimately, it’s their show. They’re still gonna get the credit. Again, if you think about building the business around moments rather than sort of brands and bragging rights and things like that, in the grand scheme of things, it still would’ve been a huge thing for them but…They could’ve put me on first. I wouldn’t have cared. For us, which would’ve been a huge thing for us to say for the first time since Harley Race, the Ten Pounds Of Gold is gonna be defended at Madison Square Garden, and again because look, before that show, if you didn’t wrestle for WWE, Madison Square Garden was out of the question so it was like, I wrestled at Wembley Arena which is in a lot of ways is like Madison Square Garden to us in Britain, but it’s the Garden, right? And it would’ve been a huge moment and I was disappointed and honestly, there was a part of me at that point when I said, ‘You know, I don’t feel like this relationship — they’re getting a lot from us and we’re not getting a lot from them now,’ and that’s when we kind of decided, ‘Okay, maybe it’s time for us to just go ahead and prove who we are’ and that’s when Powerrr came to be. We gotta make our own thing here.”
Always knowing that he would put Cody Rhodes over at their ALL IN title showdown:
“We never had a single conversation, ever, none of us ever had a conversation about who’s gonna win and who’s gonna lose. There was a never a moment where any one person sat me down and said, ‘Hey, would you be willing to do the honors for Cody at ALL IN?’ There was never a discussion about that, because we all just knew what the right piece of business was. There was never a negotiation about like, ‘Well okay, what if we do this? What if we do that?’ And I remember certain people [were] trying to stir me up. I remember Bubba Ray Dudley and people [were] like, ‘I think you should go over.’ I was just like, ‘It’s business.’”