Willow Nightingale may be best known for being the most positive wrestler in AEW, but she's also developed quite the reputation as a hardcore wrestler. Along with Marina Shafir, Nightingale was the first woman to participate in Anarchy in the Arena this past May. And among her two most notable AEW singles matches are the Manitoba Massacre with Skye Blue back in May 2024, and a wild street fight with friend turned enemy Kris Statlander at All Out 2024, a match many will argue is the best match of both Nightingale and Statlander's careers.
So it makes all the sense in the world that Nightingale is part of the first ever women's Blood & Guts match tonight on "AEW Dynamite," something Nightingale revealed she was over the moon about during an interview with "Yahoo! Sports." But while there was plenty of talk about Blood & Guts and Nightingale learning she'd be in the match when AEW began filming promotional material for it, plenty of other talk was centered around Nightingale's hardcore wrestling roots. And as it turns out, she's been a fan of the genre long before she wound up in AEW.
"I was a huge deathmatch wrestling fan before I started wrestling," Nightingale said. "CZW, Tournament of Death, Cage of Death, through there, Big Japan Wrestling ... I was a big Danny Havoc fan. So that's really more so the stuff that I had been watching before I started wrestling.
"And then when I started doing it, everybody was like, 'You don't want to scar your body. Don't do that.' Then I finally get to TV and they're like 'Hey, do you want to do the blood-and-guts stuff?' I'm like, 'Yeah, I want to do the blood-and-guts stuff.' That's really where it comes from."
