Nick Aldis is proud of the way he has helped build up the NWA.
Aldis is a two-time NWA Worlds Heavyweight Champion. In his second reign, he held the gold for over 1,000, and he was widely viewed as the face of the company. Throughout this run, he worked with a number of stars, and several of them subsequently received opportunities elsewhere.
In an interview with Ella Jay of SEScoops, Aldis emphasized how he’s proud of the way he has helped build the NWA into what it is today and reinvigorate the brand. He noted that while he doesn’t pay the other wrestlers personally, several people are now earning money by wrestling when they weren’t doing so before.
The thing I take the most pride in with the NWA is what I’ve been able to do in terms of a sort of butterfly effect, for everybody around it, like there’s half a dozen guys now who are getting a regular paycheck who were not before. I’m not the one paying them, I’m very aware of that, and I’m made aware of that all the time. But it fills me with a lot of pride to think like, I worked for a year and I only made what I made on the shows from the promoters themselves, the indies. Off the back of that, we were able to build this brand and reinvigorate it and cultivate this thing that could become an operation, like an actual wrestling operation.
Aldis then highlighted the success of Kamille, the reigning NWA World Women’s Champion, as one of his greatest successes because she reached new heights following her association with him. “The National Treasure” also stated that some of the wrestlers he had high-profile matches might have benefitted from working with him in main-events because these bouts may have been the final piece of the puzzle that helped them land elsewhere.
“Kamille is in many ways sort of my greatest accomplishment, you know what I mean,” said Aldis. “The guys who I lobbied for to be brought in who have then been able to great opportunities with AEW and so on and so forth. Even before that, guys who I wrestled in title matches that drew really well who then shortly thereafter were signed to WWE or New Japan or whatever.
“I’m not saying that I [was responsible], but maybe it was the final sort of piece of the puzzle where they went, ‘Oh, he was in a main event and the people were with it.’ Sometimes you just need that last little bit for someone who’s scouting you to go like, ‘Okay, yeah, there’s something.’ If I had any small part to play with any of those guys, then that’s a big deal to me.”
