wrestling / News

Nick Aldis Reveals He Helped Conceptualize the Ten Pounds of Gold Series for NWA

April 25, 2019 | Posted by Jeffrey Harris
nick aldis nwa Image Credit: NWA

Fightful recently interviewed NWA World champion Nick Aldis ahead of his Crockett Cup match with Marty Scurll. You can check out some highlights below.

“I think that Tim represented the core of what the show was going to be about; which is authenticity. I think that Billy and Dave could have very easily stripped everyone or I could have just beaten Tim on the show and they could have chosen not to cover it. And then just started from there. That would have been a lot of people’s approach. I think it’s pretty common knowledge at this point that they approached me from day one, before they started with Ten Pounds and I was actually even involved in the conceptual sort-of birth of Ten Pounds.”

Aldis on his involvement with the 10 Pounds of Gold series: “When we had a conversation about what I wanted to achieve in my career and what I thought we could do and what I thought I could offer and what was missing in the business, and things of that nature, my primary observation was that I’m not a boxing aficionado. I’m not an MMA aficionado. But when the right fight grabs my attention, I watch it and I buy it. And the reason I do that is because of the packages they do, but they’re not packages, you know? They’re entire kind of really well-produced series that really makes you care about these two guys and what it means to them and the preparation going into it and by the time you get to the conclusion, you’re like, ‘I have to see this fight now.’ We had that conversation and I said, ‘why can’t we do that? Like, why is wrestling confined to episodic wrestling shows where guys wrestle each other for no reason?’”

Nick Aldis on how the NWA is able to be different now: “We can do it however we want. You can watch any number of hours of wrestling, original content, every week on any device. And what I said was, ‘what we have to do is something that makes people care about the build-up of one match, where they actually care about the destination; the big fight, the finale, the conclusion of this storyline.’ It was Billy and Dave who really liked [Tim Storm]. They met him while they were doing their due diligence after Billy had purchased the NWA. The other championships, they either sort-of disposed of them or they stripped them or had just decided to fade them out. And the world championship; that title belt was really the asset and they talked to me about it and they said, ‘We really like this guy. He’s a schoolteacher and there’s just something about him that we really, really dig.’ I saw it too, and I said, ‘Yeah, this guy’s a super likeable guy.’ Like Tim said in one of the first episodes, this was his first mountaintop. This meant a lot to him and it genuinely did. To me, he represents the tone of what we’ve ended up being all the way so far, which is authentic.”

Nick Aldis on his impact with the NWA: “Eventually, it attracts money. It attracts television. It attracts sponsors, and then you have a healthier economy overall for everyone. I think for us, we benefited from a great deal of serendipity last year. We had a lot of situations that were pretty much the only option we had, but then ended up being the best thing for us. [Ten Pounds of Gold] being a prime example. I had to get out there and work to make money. ‘Oh, we’re going to get a ring, we’re going to get a bus full of wrestlers, we’re going to get television.’ We had to start more organically than that. For me, personally, I wasn’t there with any sort of agreement or anything, so I had to go out and work.”