Nick Aldis Talks About His Bicep Tear From 2015

In an interview with Busted Open Radio (via Wrestling Inc), Nick Aldis spoke about the bicep tear he suffered in November 2015 and how he recovered to get where he is now. Here are highlights:

On his current position as NWA champion: “Part of the reason I’m sitting here now in this position is because I had to take a moment where I said, ‘you’ve either got to get out of this business, or you’ve got to slap yourself around a bit and hold yourself accountable.’

On his bicep tear: “I tore my bicep at the end of 2015 and that was a really rough surgery and a really rough recovery and stuff like that. Obviously, I have always held a lot of my personal value in my physique and my fitness and stuff like that and there are pictures of me where I just look like death, I look horrible. I came back too soon because I had a kid to feed. I just looked at myself like, ‘what are you doing? I had no imagination, no ideas, I felt like my body of work because of Impact and TNA and the ill-will that they had earned themselves — which was completely out of my control — I felt like my body of work had been somewhat forgotten. Like the fact that I submitted Sting on a pay-per-view. I mean I’ve beat Kurt Angle, Jeff Hardy, Samoa Joe, AJ Style, Bobby Roode — all these guys that have had all this success. I went, ‘what’s going on here?’ I felt like I’d been pushed to the side and I have, so what? Who cares? Tomorrow’s another day.”

On his time in TNA: “I think it’s unfair how people never stood back and appreciated how much that company achieved in such a short period of time,” Aldis said of his days in TNA Wrestling. “It gave me everything, I think I feel comfortable saying this, I’m 99% certain that I could have gone to developmental in WWE and I chose to stay in TNA because I looked at the landscape. I had friends in [WWE] developmental who were miserable, you know this was before NXT and the Performance Center, because they were all wrestling each other in little spot shows in Tampa and stuff and being made to do all these sort of remedial jobs and stuff. They were kind of like, ‘I’ve paid my dues.” Like why am I being made to do this again? Like they hadn’t paid any dues and it left a sour taste in a lot of guys’ mouths. I went, I’m sitting here getting to work with Bully and D-Von, I’m working with Beer Money, I get to sit under the learning tree of Sting and Kevin Nash, Kurt Angle, Booker T. I’m working with AJ Styles, Samoa Joe… Doug Williams is my tag team partner like I’m getting such an education [in TNA].”

On The Young Bucks: “You talk about The Young Bucks. One of the reasons why we’ve stayed close and they’ve been happy to extend opportunities to me when they can and stuff like that and work with us, is because we were all in that forgotten locker room. Me, The Young Bucks, Okada. I mean, New Japan told TNA this guys’s going to be our franchise player, not is probably going to be, is going to be and they still [didn’t use him well.] We were all there playing Gator Golf in the dressing room because we weren’t booked.”