The following is an excerpt from Fightful's long-form feature on Nidia, doing her first interview in well over a decade. Check it out at this link, and see the full interview above! When aggregating this story, please link back to the long-form itself.
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"We talked to Vince, you remember how we won that money, right? Or we inherited that money. We were going to get that money, and Torrie got into Playboy, and they were like, ‘What you’re gonna go to the best Swedish doctor and you’re gonna go,’ ‘cause I was going to get breast augmentation and I needed some time off. So, that’s a lot of information, huh? So, I was going to get a breast augmentation. I asked for the time off. They approved, so they wrote it into the storyline. What they wanted to do was to send me to the best doctor in Sweden and I was gonna come back, and we were going to highlight them, etc, etc. That was the way the story was going to go, and Jamie was like, ‘That’s kind of anticlimactic. How far is that going to go?’ Which, in hindsight, it probably would have gone far, right? But, we pitched a different direction and he said, ‘Yes,’ and they made me blind. I was just like, ‘We shouldn’t have messed with him. Now he’s messing with me. He made me blind!’"
It's a little surprising to think that there was more to Nidia vs. Torrie that wasn't covered, because they wrestled non-stop for a year straight. By the sounds of it, the best was yet to come.
Nidia was sent to Raw in the 2004 Draft, her name called out by General Manager Eric Bischoff. She didn't seem too excited when we spoke about it.
"Yeah. They called it the A show," Nidia told us, giving a thumbs down.
Her on-screen character was excited however, eagerly removing her shirt to put on a red, Raw-brand tee.
This move was a plan long before the draft. Nidia taking to wrestling so well was a gift and a curse, as it led higher-ups to make the change.
"They tried to move me to RAW before. They’d been trying to move me to RAW for a bit. It wasn’t the first conversation they had about moving to RAW. They were like, ‘You wrestle really well, and that’s where the belt is. You need to move to RAW.’ We talked them out of it. (Smackdown) was a really tight group. I didn’t want to leave and they didn’t want me to leave. So, we would corner Johnny Ace or Vince (McMahon) or Dean (Malenko) and kind of plead our cases. Like, ‘Man, do you really need it? Anyway, you got this person and you got this person and you got this person? I don’t even want the belt, just leave me over here,’ and it worked. Like it bought me some time on Smackdown. That last one, there was nothing we could say. They’d heard it all. They were just like, ‘Dude, you’re going to RAW.’"
So, she did. All that wrestling they wanted her to do amounted to five-minute matches on Raw and Heat. She was winning about once a month, working with the likes of people she spoke highly of -- Gail Kim, Victoria, and others. In the end, the move just wasn't good for her love of wrestling.
"Yeah. I wasn’t a fan of RAW. I mean, I already knew, and I might have gone in with a bad attitude ‘cause I didn’t want to leave Smackdown. They pretty much had to drag me while I’m holding onto the door. ‘No!’ Yeah, I didn’t want to be there. I probably didn’t have the best attitude about it. It was just so different. There were a lot more egos, I feel, on RAW than there were on Smackdown. I remember the first time I realize it, somebody asked me, I was on RAW, they were like, ‘What are you going to do tonight?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have any plans. What are you going to do tonight?’ They were like, ‘On the show.’ I was like, ‘Ohh, on Smackdown ‘what are you going to do tonight’ means something completely different.’ It was a very social group and on RAW it was mostly work. They were there to work," Nidia said.
In July, Nidia was given a World Title shot on Raw that lasted all of three seconds. Even consistently wrestling the champion in Trish Stratus wasn't enough to keep Nidia interested, probably because her title match lasted all of a few seconds. The contrast between brands was too much. The fun wasn't there the way it used to be.
"I think by then I had already tapped out," Nidia said of her Summer 2004 run. "It was so hard to put matches together on RAW. Because on Smackdown it was a team effort, you know? It’s like Torrie or with Dawn or even with the guys—whenever you put your piece together, it was for the good of the match. So, it’s like, ‘You’re gonna do this, you’re gonna do that, you’re gonna do this.’ For RAW, in order to even make it fair, it was such a huge fight that by then I had already given up. ‘Just do whatever you want. I’m not gonna do this for six hours so that I can get in a clothesline.’"
