It’s been almost three years to the day since Nick Aldis last laced up his boots, with an Eric Young piledriver being the exclamation point on a storied run through Impact Wrestling. It was different world then: CM Punk was AEW’s “Real World Champion,” Jade Cargill was a free agent, Trinity “Naomi” Fatu was the Impact world champion. Aldis had done just about everything there was to be done stateside not directly tied to WWE or AEW. He’d won the TNA World and Tag Team Titles. He became a two-time NWA World’s Heavyweight Champion for a combined 1,309 days. He even captured the IWGP Tag Team Championship with longtime partner Doug Williams. So it seemed like a natural progression for Aldis to make his way to a place like WWE to continue his run as one of the top acts in professional wrestling.
Yet while he wasn’t brought in initially to compete, that time has now come. This Saturday, on Night 1 of WWE SummerSlam, Aldis, 38, faces his biggest challenge to date when he meets Gunther on the biggest stage he’ll have stepped foot on.
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Like his former TNA brethren Bobby Roode, Petey Williams and Chris “Abyss” Park, Aldis was assigned the role of producer upon first landing in WWE, tasked with helping put together segments and matches to generally flesh out what we see show to show. To Aldis, Paul “Triple H” Levesque seemed to understand — TNA had been working with far less resources than WWE, but still managed to make a compelling product. That, paired with the WWE machine’s production budget and their years of in-ring knowledge, made Aldis and his old stablemates great fits for helping to create the on-screen product.
Nick Aldis has spent the past three years with WWE in an outside-of-the-ring role.
(WWE via Getty Images)
“If you look at the producers at WWE, there’s a great deal of TNA influence in that. And I’ve always maintained that I think a reason for that is because those of us who were part of TNA had to utilize a bit more of our creative muscle, because we had more limited resources,” Aldis tells Uncrowned. “We were making a television show, we were doing stuff with top talent and we were trying to nip at the heels of the big, bad WWE. We had to sort of make a lot of it work with our own resourcefulness and creativity.”
Aldis’ time as a competitor and producer, both out of necessity and eventually as a proper position, led to Levesque making him the General Manager of “WWE Smackdown.”
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“When I first reached out to Triple H … the opportunity was presented to me as, ‘Hey, we’d like to utilize your knowledge and experience to work behind the scenes as a producer,'” Aldis recalls. “I said, ‘Great.’ I told Triple H, ‘I want to contribute to WWE in whatever way you see fit.’ That was the way he saw fit. Then the GM spot comes along, and same thing, I accepted gratefully, with no hesitation. Turned to my wife [multiple-time WWE Women’s Champion and TNA Hall of Famer Mickie James] and said, ‘SmackDown GM.’
“She was like, ‘You’ll crush that, like, you’ll be great at that.’ I was like, ‘Yes, I will.'”
Nick Aldis has been a perfect foil for many of WWE SmackDown’s top talents.
(WWE via Getty Images)
Not coming in as a performer right away led to some speculation about his health, but the three-year gap between matches allowed Aldis to deal with some lingering injuries and get healthier than he’d been for most of his professional wrestling life. “My back had bothered me on and off for a large portion of my career,” he says. “And one of the blessings of that time was that I was able to finally go and see a couple of different specialists and really get to the root of what was going on.
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“I met this great doctor at Vanderbilt [University] here in Nashville, and he said, ‘I’ve figured out what’s going on, you’ve got this mad inflammation, like worse than I’ve ever seen.’ But he said, ‘But actually, your spine is good and your discs are pretty good.’ And he said that inflammation is what’s been causing the pressure that makes it feel like you’ve got a herniated disc or a bulging disc or whatever. So I was able to get that cleared up, and then as a result I’ve been able to just fully focus on health.”
Like his counterpart, “WWE Raw” General Manager Adam Pearce (also a former NWA World Champion), that ability to confidently communicate with talent both as an authority and as a peer has helped facilitate stories in a kind of player/coach role, with people who understood just how to get those talent and their tales across. While Pearce was the boisterous, gesturing GM who could blow a fuse at any moment, Aldis, with his heavy English accent, tailored suits and crisp haircut, approached his role as gentlemanly as possible.
Having worn all three hats of wrestler, producer and on-screen authority figure, it’s tough for Aldis not to roll all of his roles into one when he thinks about how stars are made and moments are fought for. “When Triple H made [my SummerSlam match] … the first text message I got was from Bret Hart,” says Aldis. “I remember in Bret’s book he talked about how, when he first came in, there was this real excitement about Dynamite Kid. And of course there was — Dynamite Kid was the man, right? One of one. And there was this excitement about [The British Bulldog] Davey Boy. And then Jim Neidhart, it’s like, ‘Wow, he can really talk.’
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“[The prevailing thought] was like, ‘Oh, this guy Bret, you know, he’s solid, good hand, girls seem to like him, good worker, but not ‘larger than life’ enough, not gregarious enough, not big enough, not enough of a 1980s in-your-face pro-wrestler,’ right? And then [Hart] talked about working his way through and getting to the point where he was sort of undeniable. ‘Beware the dark horse’ — that was what he wrote in his book, and I always remember that. And I think that that’s the energy that you want in your roster.”
In other words, with a roster full of young, hungry athletes with their own styles, own stories and owns goals to succeed, Aldis wants to see “SmackDown” become a place where there’s not just one, but a crew of talents akin to what the brand had two decades ago. “What I hope to see for ‘SmackDown’ is some of that ‘SmackDown’ ’02 kind of energy,” he says. “This kind of, ‘Hey, there’s a big group of people here who any one of them could break out and be the guy.’ And it’s kind of up to them to fight it out in terms of their promos and their matches and their connection with the audience and how they resonate. Social media now, right? Like, what are you doing to make people care?
“Don’t leave it all down to the company. Like, Cody [Rhodes], from undesirable to undeniable, right? It’s up to you.”
Nick Aldis points to Cody Rhodes as someone who’s done it right in WWE.
(WWE via Getty Images)
While he’s provided advice and done what he can to set an example for WWE’s next up, every now and again over the past few years, someone would almost bring the Magnus out of a wiser, more mature Nick Aldis. “The one thing that I’ve taken great pride in is the fact that, even though there have been a couple of times during my tenure as GM where it felt like there was demand for me to have a match, or there were seeds planted, or it felt like it was heading that way and it didn’t happen, the desire from the audience never wavered,” he says. “It almost seemed to keep going up, actually. It seemed to kind of keep growing, which obviously from an ego standpoint means a lot, because I’ve made this point a few times — I have deliberately never once lobbied to have a match in WWE.”
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Now, those seeds have blossomed into the tree of woe that is Gunther, WWE’s Austrian Pine — tall, tough, and almost impossible to topple.
After weeks of tension between the two, Aldis finally struck Gunther with the WWE Championship belt on the July 18 edition of Saturday Night’s Main Event, effectively ending Gunther’s SummerSlam title hopes. Their contract signing concluded with a low blow and a powerbomb through a table, by far the most physicality Aldis has been on the business end of receiving in the past few years.
After accepting the match against the former World Champion, new-age, legend killer, Aldis had to answer a few questions, change up a few plans, get back in the gym, and ultimately do his damndest to prepare for what may be the toughest match of his life.
First, though, he had to break the news to James, who took it about as well as someone who’s seen it all could. “[Her saying,] ‘Oh my God’ was probably the first reaction.” Aldis recalls.
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“Then just, ‘Well, how do you feel? And what are you going to do?’ And [then], ‘Alright, let’s do it, let’s knuckle down.”
Aldis’ wife, Mickie James, is a pro-wrestling legend in her own right.
(WWE via Getty Images)
With James firmly in his corner, there was one more person Aldis had to break the news to: their 11-year-old son Donovan, who was expecting a different kind of summer celebration. “We were supposed to be on a vacation in the south of France,” Aldis says.
“[But] it was nice to be able to talk to my son and say, ‘I know you’ve grown up around wrestling your whole life, and to you it’s just mom and dad’s work, but you have to understand that, for me, this is kind of what I wanted since I was 12 years old. And so I have a very short amount of time to get ready for it, and I have to be fully committed to preparation for this.'”
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The younger Aldis wasn’t just understanding, but encouraging. He’s filmed all of his dad’s training sessions and plans to put them out as a documentary of sorts some time after SummerSlam.
It’ll be interesting to see what makes the final cut, as three years out of the ring might as well be a lifetime. While Aldis has stayed in shape, the requirements of the job are hard and heavy. “You’re constantly waging this sort of war of, ‘OK, I need to take care of my health, I need to look good, I need to be able to perform,’ and those three things do not always work in conjunction with one another. I liken it to sort of spinning plates — you’ve got one over here; oh, this one’s about to fall; OK, we’ve got to get this one right. So you’re playing this constant game of maintenance, and then in rare moments, improvement.”
What he’s focused on improving most, though, is his conditioning. “I’ve worked with some really great guys who I trust and [I’m] deeply grateful to for giving me their time to help me try to get my sharpness back and my footwork and my timing,” Aldis says. “But I knew that the majority of my focus was going to be on conditioning. Because at the end of the day, if you run out of gas, nothing else matters.”
Well, there may be one other thing that matters, and that’s the pugilistic paw-prints Gunther tends to leave on just about everyone he faces. To paraphrase another former champion, “Everyone has a plan until they get slapped across the chest.”
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Aldis is no stranger to heavy hitters, with his past wars against guys like Samoa Joe, Scott Steiner, Trevor Murdoch and so many others. For Aldis, it’s not about never getting hit. His mindset for this match, just like all the others, is focusing on what you do once that hit lands. “You’ve got to kind of catch a wave and ride it as best you can,” he says. “At some point, you’ll bail. Then you’ve got to decide: do you go back to shore or do you turn around and paddle, right? Like, how far out do you paddle? Do you keep going until you find the right [wave], right? You know, here it comes — catch it.
“Like, you can’t control the waves, you can only control how you catch it and ride it.”
And even if Gunther lands that big wave, and Nick Aldis finds himself washed out, his resolve, even if it’s being pulled out from a years-long layoff, is what he trusts to keep himself going. “Honestly, [I’ll have to] grit my teeth and keep moving forward, right?” he says. “I know it’s coming, so, you know, I’ve been chopped before.”