Nathan Cruz: 10 Years of Stealing the Show in NGW

2. 2009: NGW Eternal Glory – Last Man Standing Match vs. Matt Myers

“Going into 2009 I was a heel but there wasn’t really much direction for me to do anything. So I pitched the idea of myself versus Matt Myers in a feud, coming out of the First Anniversary Show where I would congratulate him for being the biggest star in NGW and for getting us through our first year, then say I’m the biggest star right now.

“When we were 10 years old Matt and I were wrestling in our back gardens, dreaming of being wrestlers. We used to go and watch All-Star Wrestling at Hull City Hall. Now we’ve main evented Hull City Hall. And every time we’ve had those main events it’s always been a record crowd for NGW, I guess because the city has become so attached to our characters and our story. I’m so proud of those matches. I think if you watch them back to back they tell a great story. I think myself and Myers have been a big selling point for NGW.

“Back in 2009 we ended up doing a four or five month storyline culminating in a Last Man Standing match at the first Eternal Glory show. I remember having a big argument with Alex Shane before it. He’d started wrestling on the shows and there was going to be a tag match with himself and Dave Rayne versus Jack Toxic and Alex Cyanide in the main event. Cyanide was champion at the time and Alex thought their match should go on last, but I said no, I was 19, yelling down the phone at him and telling him that our match should go on last because we had local press behind us, we drew the biggest crowd at that time to see myself and Matty. I said in the end ‘fine, you go on after us but you won’t be able to follow us’ which was pretty ballsy of me to say. I remember coming back from that match, I sat down in the dressing room and Alex looked at me and said ‘you were right’. I think that might have been the point when Alex thought that I might be the guy he could drop the Show Stealer name to.

“That was a pivotal moment. It was the first real ongoing storyline in NGW that the audience was emotionally attached to, and it propelled myself from being this heel wandering around doing nothing into somebody the crowd knew about and hated.”

• matt myers
• nathan cruz
• ngw
• rampage brown
• Zack Gibson

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