The first day of the real world can be a daunting one. You’ve put away the cap and gown, ready to get into the real shit. Nose to the ground, grind and learn and rise. This is the proving ground that paves the way to whether your success or your fall.
Nick Wayne faces this now. Newly eighteen years old, Wayne is set to impress and defy (heh) the odds and expectations before him. AEW has put a lot of pressure on him, assigning his first match to the company against his rival from the Indies, Swerve Strickland.
Swerve is nasty and underhanded and his team of the Mogul Embassy are just as gnarly. This hungry young lion needs to overcome a team against him. With a foe that is familiar with him, the stakes are high for Nick.
Starting his career a year after the loss of his dad, Buddy Wayne, Nick has set the independent scene on fire, and at a young age, too. Doubtless, you’ve seen his matches across the likes of Defy Wrestling, West Coast Pro, Black Label Pro, Prestige Wrestling, and most notably GCW. He’s been in the deep waters and swam with piranhas.
Now, for as great as the independent scene truly is, he’s about to swim with the sharks on live television. He’s going to swim, no doubt. He’s going to stun and astonish because the people behind him see so, so much in him. Especially friend and rival Darby Allin – he’s the one who publicly declared that All Elite Wrestling would sign him once he became of age, after all.
When you’ve seen a Nick Wayne clip, you’ve seen the impressive flips, spots, and maneuvers that everyone comes to expect from exciting and fresh competitors. But when you watch a Nick Wayne match, you’ll see someone who is able to slow it down enough and tell a story. He’s the epitome of “watch beyond the clip”.
And boy, oh boy, after watching his match with Swerve at Defy 50, the lessons learned between the two are going to make for a magical debut. Never doubt AEW or Nick Wayne. Swerve sure doesn’t. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
The aforementioned match did see Wayne lose to Strickland, but at Defy: The Realest, he was able to defeat Strickland for the Defy World TItle. But this is the “big leagues”, so to speak. Wayne has to prove that the killers of the Indies are still there, ravenous and voracious.
Now that we’ve got the story out of the way, here’s why you need to fuckle your seatbelt: the dude’s been a GCW Tag Team Champion alongside Jordan Oliver of The East West Express, defeating the legendary tag team of Motor City Machine Guns at GCW Joey Janela’s Spring Break 7 in March 2023.
Wayne has also stepped foot in the ring with legends and aces such as 2 Cold Scorpio, Konosuke Takeshita, Mike Bailey, and Kenta (who took the Defy title Wayne won from Strickland). He’s fought overseas, most recently and memorably at DDT Pro in Japan, against their best such as Tetsuya Endo and Yuki Ueno to name a few.
However, perhaps one of the biggest matches of his young career was an amazing bout against Will Ospreay in June 2022 at GCW I Never Liked You. At the event with the harsh name, Wayne managed to do something that only those at the top of the international wrestling scene could do – test him. Will’s face, twisted with disbelief as he worked to match the teenager’s ferocity and tenacity, gave me Bret Hart/1-2-3 Kid nostalgia. With someone who operates at the level of Ospreay, seeing Wayne match it kayfabe and performance-wise, it’s nothing short of impressive. He may have been unsuccessful, but the exuberant challenger held on through everything until the bitter end. All those near-counts kept propelling him heartstoppingly close to victory, but in the end, he was not ready. He was closer than a lot of people would have been, but he was not ready. That is to come.
It’s one thing to have fans behind you one hundred percent in smaller venues, but being a piranha in an ocean full of sharks, you’re going to have to do a lot more eating. Nick Wayne possesses such an appetite.
Wayne is the rookie who even seasoned competitors will have to pull out all the dirty stops just to halt him. The kid is plucky, displaying a fighting spirit and it’s going to take more than your best if your best is not good enough. It’s what you want in a babyface – someone who will fight when all else is drained and all hope is depleted. You wipe that sweat, ignore the bruises, and rise to your feet, no matter how hard you shake because these people are clapping against the stands and barricades for you, they’re cheering and screaming for you, they are believing in you. Let that adrenaline and hope coalesce with every fiber of your mortal being and make something goddamn immortal, kid.
Doubters will be silenced, and the sin of being better than those at an elite level will be committed. Lessons will be learned and notes will be taken. But for these sins, you must be willing to prove you’re something more than a freshman.
