NWA World Champion Nick Aldis was a recent guest on the Arm Drag Takedown with Pollo Del Mar and talked about the state of the professional wrestling industry today.
Some of the topics Aldis touched on was the over-use of big spots in matches.
“[Wrestling] got hoodwinked into thinking the most important thing in our business was the match in the ring” Aldis said.
“I got into this to tell stories and to get people invested into characters and emotion. I wanted to be an entertainer! I wanted to be able to indulge in all the things pro wrestling provides which ‘real sports’ don’t.”
Aldis believes that using an older promotion model, similar to what UFC is using, may be the key to gaining fan interest.
“Essentially, if you changed the final outcome of the UFC builds with an NWA World Championship match from the 1980s, the whole lot of it leading up to that is very much the same. The reality was, if you wanted to see these two guys go at it, without interference or in the full match, you either had to buy a ticket or you had to tune into this pay-per-view or this special. That’s essentially what UFC’s model is. They put out [UFC Embedded], they put out smaller cards on free TV, but everything else they put out is press conferences, interviews, profile pieces, all of which is leading to the fight. The fight is the attraction.”
Aldis also discussed his storyline of the “unknown champion” and turning it into something much bigger.
“Dave [Lagana] and Billy [Corgan], as the Managing Editor and Executive Producer, took that story and instead of [pretending] certain elements [that] some people might look at as ‘negative’ didn’t exist, they, in fact, embraced that and made it a compelling part of the story. In fact, that’s the part people have been most interested in. … You can find the elements of people’s real lives and make them into a compelling story, if you know how to do it right.”
