It appears that NWA Worlds Heavyweight Champion Nick Aldis was asked to join All Elite Wrestling. Speaking to
Daily DDT, the NWA star revealed that Cody Rhodes – the Executive Vice President for AEW – had spoken to him about inking a deal with the all-new promotion.
Aldis and Rhodes do have history together, as the NWA Worlds Heavyweight title was defended at All In last September, with Cody defeating Aldis to capture the title for the first time in his career.
Aldis revealed that he does want to work with AEW; however, he doesn’t want to abandon the company that took the time to invest in him. Unfortunately, the two parties never came to an agreement, thus the reasoning the NWA Worlds Heavyweight Champion hasn’t been confirmed with the all-new promotion (transcript courtesy of wrestletalk.com):
“I’ll tell you the truth: I was made an offer by AEW. I counter-offered with, ‘I’d like to be able to do both.’ I’d like to work with them because obviously I have great admiration for Cody and the Bucks for what they’ve been able to do. But I wasn’t prepared to walk away from the two years of work I’ve done with the NWA. And that was that. I left it open with, ‘If you can find a way to keep doing this and do your show, I’ll do your show.’ They essentially wanted to offer me a contract and have me walk away from what I’m doing here and I said that doesn’t make any sense to me. Really, there’s no reason to. It’s just a hangover from the way things have always been done. Obviously, we hear this ‘Change the World’ phrase a lot, but that was my pitch to them. ‘If you really want to change the world, why can’t we do that?’”
“Because that really would be a change for one guy to work there but also come here. I’m still on very good terms with Cody and the Bucks and I had a very nice conversation with Tony [Khan] and everyone was aware of it. Billy and Dave were aware of it. At the time, my stance was if I can do both, then I’ll do it and I think that as it shakes out and everyone starts to realize the demand that will be on them with cable TV and stuff like that, those possibilities will be way more apparent in the next coming year for some guys.”
It’s possible that Aldis will join the AEW promotion someday, until then, the NWA Worlds Heavyweight champion is currently focused on expanding the NWA brand.