Dax Harwood discussed Full Gear 2020 on the latest “FTR with Dax Harwood” podcast. He discusses every match on the show, including the FTR vs. Young Bucks match. Harwood discussed his own behavior as well as the “less than ideal” events leading up to the match.
Harwood stated that his anxiety issues began prior to FTR’s match against The Young Bucks at Full Gear 2020:
“This is where I first saw the signs of anxiety. I remember leading up to this match, I thought and thought and thought about it in my kitchen and in my living room. I would take my iPad downstairs or whatever, at my old house at the time, and I would watch wrestling and try to think of ideas and, how can we make this match a classic? How can we make this match live up to the expectation, almost the unreal expectations fans had probably put up there, and probably the same with us, the unreal expectations we had put up there for ourselves. I remember dude, there were nights where, and I never realized this until I started talking with my therapist, but there were nights back to back to back where I couldn’t fall asleep because I couldn’t get this match out of my head because I couldn’t figure out certain points of the match. I pride myself on being able to usually do that, to be able to structure matches together pretty quick and figure it out. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited, but more than anything, I was nervous and anxious about the match.”
“When I say I can see a match play out in my head, I don’t mean step by step. I mean, the beats and the drama and the story that we’re going to tell and I couldn’t figure it out. I would stay up until twelve, one, two in the morning and couldn’t fall asleep. I would lay in bed and try to force myself to fall asleep. I would get up so pissed at myself because I couldn’t figure out the match and because I couldn’t make myself fall asleep. I was mad at myself for the two things that I wanted to do, but I couldn’t do them. It would just drive me crazy.”
“I remember waking my wife up one morning. It was like two or three in the morning. I was like, ‘Babe, I cannot fall asleep. I can’t get this match down. I’m going to shit the bed, blah, blah, blah. Thinking back on it now, that was the first sign of anxiety for me and probably my first first anxiety attack, but I didn’t know what anxiety was at the time.”
On whether or not FTR and The Young Bucks were on good terms prior to this match:
“I wouldn’t play it down and I’m not gonna lie to our audience. I think you know that better, but I don’t want to say it was Kumbaya. I don’t want to say that it was all roses and we were best friends or whatever, but I will say it here. Cash and I felt that we owed The Young Bucks, you know, something. They brought us into AEW. This is our first opportunity working with them. We wanted to show them that we were here to do business and we wanted to make this the greatest rivalry of all time. That was our plan. So we had custom made Jordans for those guys and we had them delivered to them. One side was The Young Bucks Lakers colors and superkicks and the other side was our Celtics colors and it was super fists. It was a gesture to let them know that although there’s probably a little bit of professional competitiveness, we were still here to do business, we’re here to do the right thing by the company, and we wanted to have the absolute best rivalry ever in tag team wrestling.”
On his intended vision for this match:
“In my mind, we were gonna lose. We were the heels and we were going to lose. My idea was we were going to hit them with some of our signature things and it wasn’t going to work. Then it was like, fu**. We’ve tried everything and they’re still beating us to the punch. We gotta get on their level and that’s how we’re going to beat them. Cash tried this beautiful 450, which I’ve seen him hit before on the Indies, missed it, boom, right into us, just one single Super Kick, bam, cover 1-2-3. So in my mind, all we had to do was come out the next week on TV, and say, ‘We had a lapse in judgment. That was our fault. We tried to play their game and we lost. That’ll never happen again. When we come back, it’s our game and we’re gonna play by our rules.’ That was my thinking going forward. It just never materialized that way. We never had another rematch for another year and a half. That was my plan, my idea, and I thought that’s where it was going, but things didn’t work out that way.”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
