Nick Aldis says he never really got a fair chance in TNA. Not because he couldn’t wrestle, but because, according to him, people had already decided who he was before he even walked through the door.
Speaking to Soundsphere Magazine, Aldis recalled arriving in TNA only to discover that much of the locker room didn’t see him as another wrestler. They saw him as the guy from Gladiators who, in their minds, had been handed a television spot because Dixie Carter liked him.
“When I came into TNA, a lot of the people there didn’t even know that I was a wrestler. They thought I was a guy from a TV show that Dixie had fallen in love with and wanted to put on TV. So now, of course, they’re all like, ‘Oh, f*** this guy.'”
It got so bad that Aldis stopped pitching his own ideas. Instead, he’d tell Doug Williams what he wanted to do, then let Williams take the idea to the rest of the locker room because he already knew what would happen if it came from him.
“If I had a good idea for a spot or a finish in a match, I would say it to Doug and have Doug go tell them because if I went and suggested it, they were just going to say no… They were convinced they had to know better than me.”
Doug Williams wasn’t just a friend. Aldis says he was one of the few people actively trying to change the narrative.
“Doug helped change a lot of that perception… He would visibly consult with me on stuff so everyone could see that we were equals.”
Eventually, the work paid off. Aldis climbed the card, became TNA World Champion and finally reached the top of the company. Except, he says, the victory didn’t solve anything. Within weeks of winning the title, Aldis suffered a serious concussion. Around the same time, his relationship with then-executive John Gaburick completely fell apart.
“I worked every spot on the card, worked my way up to the top of the card, became the world champion, and within four weeks… because I didn’t tow the line for John Gaburick the way he thought I should, and because I got a really severe concussion in the match where I won the title, he completely changed his perception… He did a 180 on me.”
Aldis believes the mission after that was simple: make sure he no longer looked like the face of the company.
“He was going to do everything he could to basically devalue me so that he could justify taking the title off me and f**ing me off, and I would never be in that top spot again.”
He says everyone backstage could feel it. People who had once gone out of their way to talk to him suddenly kept their distance. Not because they suddenly disliked him, but because they knew which way the political winds were blowing.
“You could feel everyone in the company knew this. Suddenly they didn’t have as much time for you as they did before because everyone has to live in the autonomy of whoever’s calling the shots.”
Still, Aldis says he doesn’t blame everyone who was there. He singled out Al Snow and D’Lo Brown, insisting they weren’t the enemy. They were simply trying to survive in the same political environment he found himself fighting against.
“I like D’Lo and Al. I don’t want people to think I dislike them… They’re just trying to survive. Everything comes down to guys trying to survive.”
Looking back, Aldis believes the hardest battle he fought in TNA wasn’t for the World Championship. It was convincing people to judge him as a wrestler instead of the story they’d already written about him.
Do you think backstage politics prevented Nick Aldis from reaching his full potential in TNA? Let us know in the comments below.
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