The CC Clubhouse: Nixon Newell Talks WWE, AEW and Retirement

Nixon Newell on Her Engagement

First of all, big congratulations on your engagement. That's very exciting, delightful news. How did it come about?

So, I'd had the ring with me for a while. We went to Mexico, and I was going to do it there, but it never quite felt like the moment.

But [Miranda] is a big skateboarder, loves Venice Beach, loves California. It ended up happening on the Fourth of July while she was skating around Venice, watching fireworks sitting on a cement block.

I've got knee issues, so I couldn't actually get down on one knee, it was too cold, I'd have got stuck. So, I just pulled the ring out and did it standing. The face she made, I thought for a second she was going to say no. It was more just, 'holy shit, it's happening. She said yes and I was like, ‘sick’.

Proposing at a skate park it's like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but the mission is a marriage proposal.
"Exactly! Collect, S-K-A-T-E… propose."

On Retirement and Her Last Year in Wrestling

So last year you mentioned 2026 is going to be your last year of competition. Is that still definitely the case?

Yeah, I think so. I find wrestling a job now more than pure enjoyment. That’s not a dig on any promoter or any wrestler I work with; I still have a great time in the matches themselves. But I'd rather leave wrestling before it leaves me and go out while I can still have fun with it, instead of turning it into a nine-to-five. I'd rather end on a high than need to retire. 

I guess when the impact and the punishment is on your body, and the commitment of the travel and everything surrounding wrestling, when that's not offset by the excitement and the high, that stuff makes it all so much more difficult.

Yeah, and it's a shame, because I do love wrestling. But I prefer the teaching aspect now. It's not a case of like; I have to retire because of an issue. It's more that I want to retire ‘well’. I just enjoy teaching people more. The fire struck back up when I started teaching. That's why I was like, I’m definitely ‘done’ full-time this year.

You talked previously about wanting to get a ‘fire’ back

After I got released from WWE the second time, I gave myself a rough two-year window to see how it felt. This year hasn't been busy, which isn't down to any one reason, there's just a lot of indies and a lot of wrestlers, and only so many spots. 

But the fire really came back when I started teaching. That's when it clicked: I'm done full-time after this year, and I'm going to be a lot pickier and more specific about what I take next year. If ATTACK! asks, I'll do ATTACK! If CZW asks, I'll do CZW.

ATTACK! will always be my home no matter what. That's why I said ATTACK! is one of the few promotions where if they asked me to work for them a hundred percent, the answer is ‘yes’. No matter who it is, what type of match, no matter how long, ATTACK! is always going to get a yes.

Is there anything on the bucket list before then?

Match-type wise, I'm done, I got to wrestle Ricky Shane Page in a death match at CZW. Now it's really about people.

I want to wrestle Charlie again, Shayna Bazler again, I'd love to wrestle Kay Lee Ray again. There are people I haven't faced yet who I really want to, James Ellis, in particular, I think he's fantastic. Kanji's someone I'd love to wrestle too.

Beyond that it's mostly wanting to go somewhere I haven't been, like Australia. 

You mentioned your time in WWE, what was the pitching process like? Do you remember any of the ideas you were floating to them?

You get given a writer, and you pitch through them. Or if you don't feel like you're being heard or something, you can go higher up too, so I did both. There was one idea that almost got picked up. It was basically a football hooligan gimmick, like Green Street. I didn't care about winning or losing, I just wanted to hurt people in the dirtiest way possible. I was even going to ask Randy Orton if I could bring back the punt.

I sent the vignette team the film and said, this is the character. They loved it, apparently Triple H loved it. But then, three days before the vignette was due to film, it all got pulled. I knew exactly what that meant.

I’m baffled why that's never been done.

It's crazy, right? I wanted to do it myself, like a British punk football hooligan. But Americans don't really get football outside of the World Cup, and even then, not really. And being in Houston, it's hard to find someone who can even film that kind of thing properly.

On Working with AEW, Fan Reaction and Receiving Death Threats

Now the dust has settled on the fall out of your stint at AEW, do you look back on that and think how mad the outcry on all that was?

Oh yeah. What was crazy about it was the dirt sheets had no actual idea what was happening, so they were just assuming, and that's what got all the traction, the assumptions, not the true story.

And then random people who also didn’t know what happened as they weren’t involved in any of the conversations with us and the higher ups, interjecting and creating this whole scenario that didn’t happen.

That must be so surreal to watch

It was wild, it blew up over a lie. We had an understanding with the higher-ups. We had an open invite back, it was like ‘cool, we understand thank you so much. We'd love to have you guys back, but that’s fine. We respect you coming to us and not kicking up a fuss.’

But it was people with no knowledge of the situation, interjecting and blowing it up into this entire lie. Like saying I’d had [argued with] people, who I’ve never spoken to before or haven’t even met. 

I knew it was going to blow up when someone posted ‘Nixon Newell pounds beer after walking out of AEW’. I'm like, I am British. It was a singular Michelob Ultra. How is that pounding a beer?

It's just so crazy. I just don't understand why that would be the case?

I don't know either. There are certain people online who genuinely despise me for no reason other than I got hurt (in the 2017 WWE Mae Young Classic). Like I try and be good person, I'm polite. But there's a handful of people who absolutely despise me, and it just blows my mind. I’d love to know why.

I think there's a sort of weird thing in a lot of content creation where things just escalate beyond anyone's control. It's strange what gets picked up on.

Yeah. For a long time, I want to say four months, almost, I had death threats every day. 

For not working a tag match on Collision?

Yeah, it was crazy.

We weren't asking for a fifteen-minute time limit extravaganza. We were promised at least six minutes and something of worth and didn't get it. We knew going in we were losing, that's not a problem, most of my career is losing. We understood their stance, they understood ours. It's a business. But then for some wrestling fans to be like ‘kill yourself, you walked out on AEW.

Do you think that accelerated wanting to be away from wrestling?

Yeah, absolutely. I used to be really bad at taking online feedback to heart, but after the second injury I said, ‘it means nothing, it doesn’t affect me’. 

But there was a brief time after [the AEW incident] which made me feel it a little bit more intensely.  It made me really emotional because I was going back to the time I got hurt in the Mae Young, where I had a full year of people telling me to kill myself. It almost gave me a sort of PTSD from that time. And it put me in a dark place. Luckily, I had Miranda, she was like, 'they say mean nothing, you're happy in yourself, you're healthy, you’re happy’.

I remember one night, months after that, some dirt sheet posted about me again, and it wasn't in a nice way. I just broke down. I said, ‘Why is it always me? Why can't they pick on someone else? Why is it always me?’. And then the next morning I woke up and I was like, nah. Absolutely not.

Though some wrestling fans will say, ‘you're only retiring because of that’, when this has always been my plan. As soon as I got released from WWE, I said, two years max. So, it's not a new thing, but it’s definitely made it easier for me to leave, I don’t have to deal with that anymore.

Do you think wrestlers deleting social media is becoming more of a frequent thing, like Chelsea Green leaving X/Twitter? Do you think women wrestlers have it worse online?

I don’t blame her. Absolutely, hands down, this isn’t a knock on the whole male species, but there are a lot of men who feel women are inferior to them and are easier to prey on, it’s easier to pick on them. I’m not saying the men don’t get it too though.

But it's not all fans, 99.9% of wrestling fans are fantastic, they'd ride or die for you. It's that 0.1% that can be so debilitating. You won't experience hate like a wrestling fan's hate. But then you also won't experience love like a wrestling fan's love.

When it's great, it's incredible. But when it's horrible, it's the worst. I wouldn't wish that, even on people I despise. I wouldn't want them to go through some of the stuff that I've been through online. Because it’s absolutely horrendous.

On Life After Wrestling 

You mentioned coaching. Could you see a future where you could have a more of a backstage role in, in one of the bigger companies? Would that be something that more suits you?

I'd absolutely be down for that. Miranda, when she has shows at the evolution Dojo, I produce a lot of the matches for the young boys, and I'll do the little odd jobs back there, which is I'm really enjoying, 

I would absolutely love to go back as a producer or a coach in some aspect, like a guest coach. I'm really enjoying producing. So, if someone came to me and said, ‘we'd like to bring you in to try this’. I'm not saying I can teach you all these cool wrestling moves, but I truly believe in myself and in my selling. And I think that's what wrestling lacks a lot right now is selling.

Whenever I was there, they'd always compliment my selling, to the point where, they actually, had to ask me to stop selling my knee because I was really believable with it. I feel like that's such a missed art in wrestling right now, it's storytelling.

Post-wrestling career, what are the hopes and dreams?

I've got my personal training license now, so I'm going to start taking clients in a little while, when I get my feet wet and can be the best mentally and physically, I can be

I'm also thinking about learning dog and cat grooming, buying a truck, and doing a mobile grooming business alongside personal training. So, then I can have my two loves and just play with puppies and kittens in the day and then train people at night or vice versa. Obviously I still teach at the wrestling school. But yeah, that's kind of my plan, and I still plan on doing OnlyFans.

And do you have your final dream match to end your career in mind?

Mark Andrews at ATTACK! Pro Wrestling’s Mistletour. It has to be him, he’s been my coach, tag partner, one of my best friends, my big brother. It has to be Mark.

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