Nick Aldis Talks About His Reign As TNA World Heavyweight Champion

Former TNA World Heavyweight and Tag Team Champion Nick Aldis a.k.a Magnus recently took some time to participate in an interview with PWMania.com. Aldis commented on being TNA World Heavyweight Champion as well as what worked and did not work while he was champion.

I didn’t mind the build up so much. The wheels for that were set in motion much earlier than that. It was a culmination of a Bound for Glory series, where we had the final match with AJ which was one of my favorite matches. If someone was to say to me, show me one match that sums up what you are most proud of you and your career in TNA, I would probably send them that match of me and AJ (Styles) in the final of the Bound for Glory series. I just enjoyed the story we told. From an athletic sense, I think we did a lot of things that made sense. I loved the finish. Again, that was a Jeff Jarrett finish. He came up with the finish where AJ won with the spinal tap and I then sat on the apron just looking out longingly, I came so close. It made me. If I had won that match people wouldn’t have bought it. It wouldn’t have made me as much. Whether there were situations where I was more strongly established in a losing effort because that’s when the business is at its best is when it can make both guys look like a masterpiece.

Aldis would then praise Sting for helping him in his career.

But that led to me eventually working with Sting in what is probably the most significant thing to happen to me in my career to get to beat Sting with a submission. There is only one guy that gets to make that decision and that’s Sting and that’s what meant the most to me is was that yup, he was the one that said, ‘that’s what I want to do and I want to do it for you’. I’ll never forget that. I didn’t necessarily love that they made us do the handshake afterwards like, we didn’t like that but you’ve got to pick your battles in the business. That wasn’t a hill to die on. We went ahead and did this and then we were supposed to do this thing of me getting cocky. My whole thing was I didn’t think I was established enough as a babyface because I had been a heel for so long. I just wanted to be a babyface longer then when I did turn heel that I didn’t want to telegraph stuff. I think it only exists because of ratings. They have to make it that it’s obvious that something is going to happen because God forbid someone doesn’t tune in and like me think of the big picture. It’s better for someone to miss something really amazing that happened and go, ‘man, I can’t believe I missed that’ and then they’re never going to miss another episode. Then to be oh, I’m pretty sure he’s going to be a bad guy on the next episode so I’ll watch it. That’s just my philosophy.

Aldis would then commented on Dixieland, which was a heavily criticized gimmick steel cage match.

So we did the match the combined cage and ladder match with Jeff which I thought was a cool concept. I don’t know if I would have called it Dixieland but there you go. And the finish? It was kinda cool. I can’t really remember. I know that Spud came and pushed the ladder and pushed Jeff off the ladder and he took a crazy bump. Then the whole idea was that they just wanted to show me, making the decision then and there in the moment. Shall I go and get it or shall I not? It was cool to do something different. To be given that trust to do it. Unfortunately, what happened after that I was a victim of circumstances. I had a concussion in which I wasn’t really able to recover even though they were taped shows. They just had to kind of work around it and AJ was leaving.

Then basically, I felt like I just got the dirty bathwater with AJ leaving. I just felt like a lot of that heat just got transferred and fed to me even though I had nothing to do with it. It was just that I was associated with a very dark period with it. I will say this, I worked really hard on my end and I had a great series of matches on live events for the people there to be seen in person with (Samoa) Joe. We took a lot of pride and we worked a lot of cage matches all over the country, when I had the title. I really enjoyed main eventing Lockdown with Joe in the cage as part of it. It was just a lot of different things. I would have a really good match and then we’d have some kind of weird finish that I wasn’t really thrilled about. It was a blessing and curse being a champion. For example two weeks before everyone is left to their own devices and then everyone goes that was really great and then as soon as you get the title everyone has to give their input and tinker with it. I think that was just the perfect example, of that there was never any real clean it was always tinkered with. It was a mess of things to have to deal with. It was very convoluted.

Aldis revealed that the reason Eric Young became TNA Champion was because of his mainstream television show.

Then they thought that by EY having a mainstream television show, that EY (Eric Young) was going to do all this mainstream media and then they thought it was a good idea for him to be the world champion. Okay, I’m more than happy to do the honors for EY whose worked really hard and deserves it. He’s a great worker so I was more than happy to do it. That was the beginning and the end of it. I went it was a bit of a waste to spend all that time to get me to a point especially since I had just turned 27 I was like, that’s fine. I got a raise from just being off the title and that pretty much sums it up. It didn’t have any effect on me business wise.

While we are talking about business, I will say this when I had the title, there was no discussion about Spike (TV) dropping TNA. The ratings had been as good as they had been in two years and the live events were up consistently from the time when we were from that time to the time before. I made a point to stay very close with live events guy called Raffaele who has subsequently left and now works in professional soccer. He would make a point to say to me, hey, this house was up from last time, just that you’d like to know, champ. Everywhere we went he would just make sure to keep me aware of those things, he was another guy that made believed in me. He thought that it was just the right thing to do. When I did business and dropped the title to Eric, I said, I did business with the company and I did it the right way. I think it says a lot when, I guess the business has changed but look at me, speaking like a veteran but you know what I mean? There were only two people after I dropped the title who made a point to come up to me and saying thank you for doing business and thank you for increasing business as a champion. It was James Storm and Hector Guerrero. They were the two guys that said, business went up when you had the title and you did business with this guy and thank you for doing that. That meant a lot to me.

You can read the entire interview here.

Related Articles

Latest Articles

Videos