Dax Harwood recently discussed The Pinnacle, whether he felt slighted by a recent AEW omission on social media, how FTR has been labeled difficult to work with in various promotions, and more on his FTR Podcast. Here are some highlights:
Having the label “difficult to work with”:
“Still happy today unless you’re listening to some of the internet wrestling community and read the reports, I’m the most unhappy man in the world. You know what’s crazy is, I want to take just a second to talk about that. Like, I tweeted about it and said that, I get painted and I have for years man as being unhappy or difficult to work with or whatever because I stand up for myself and that’s weird, you know. Like, I was talking to my friend CM Punk, you may have heard of him just the other day and, you know, it’s crazy and I’m speaking for myself and not him, but in this industry for so long, especially with only one place to go until just recently, in this industry with one place to go you’re always just supposed to fall in line. You’re always supposed to do what you’re told with no questions asked. And if you don’t, if you fight back just a little bit and speak up and push back just a little bit, man, you get painted in a certain narrative.
“The ways they use that paint is they go to the dirt sheets and they anonymously say, oh, he’s unhappy and he’s so difficult to work with. No, I just want the best for my career and for Cash’s career, too. And, you know, I’ve always wondered why. Like, I’ve never gotten to any kind of, I’ve argued with Tony, I’ve argued with Bruce, I’ve argued before with Vince, Mark Carrano, I’ve argued with these guys but not to the point where, you know, it was like, your mom’s a bitch, you know what I mean? It was me arguing my point and why I think this might be better or this could work better. So, you know, in this industry, it seems like if you try to be better or try to better yourself or try to better your position and you do it without being a backstabber and you did it face to face, man, you’re labeled as difficult to work or unhappy.
“But if you are a backstabber and you go behind people’s back, maybe cut their throat to the promoter or the booker, then nothing ever gets said about you, it’s just weird, man. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’m not just talking about my 19 years in wrestling, I’m talking about my 38 years on this earth. I have said it a million times, I have a beautiful wife, beautiful daughter, lucky enough, blessed enough, fortunate enough to have the house that. Not saying it’s any kind of multi-millionaire house, I’m just saying I have a roof over my head and I’m lucky to have food in my belly and I’m lucky that I’m able to provide for my family. And then on top of all of that, the fucking ice on the cake, I get to perform and do a job that I dreamed of when I was five years old and you can’t get any better than that. So, yeah, the happy thing, I wanted to get that out there.”
Tully Blanchard becoming manager of FTR:
“I didn’t want there to be like this big reveal that he was our manager. I just wanted to subtly happen. But, as we talked about before, in TV wrestling, it’s not all focused on you and so it happened a little too soon. We just walked out and the next week and Tully was our manager. I wish there could have been some sort of backstage thing where we introduced Tully and got to talk and allowed him to do, you know, speak because he’s an incredible speaker.
“But we didn’t get that opportunity. We only were able to have him walk out and that’s how he introduced him. So to answer your question, there was no talk of combining the three of us or even the five of us, you know, for later down the road. It was just something where we thought Tully would be a great fit for us and would give us a little bit of a rub because we wanted eventually to go down as the greatest tag team of all-time.”
Was Dax interested in incorporating a Four Horsemen concept into AEW?
“God no. Even when Arn got the rights to the name, The Horsemen, no way because there will never be another four horsemen. Aside from the Barry incarnation, every incarnation of the horsemen after Ole became less and less. So with the comparisons, it was already really hard for me and Cash because of the comparisons to Arn and Tully, anyway. People would compare us to them and they said, oh, but they’re not as a good and that was really hard to get over. You could imagine if we were a brand new group called, The Four Horsemen, how hard that would be to escape.”
If Dax felt slighted by AEW’s omission of FTR from their congratulatory tweet on FTR vs. The Briscoes being named Wrestling Observer Feud of the Year for 2022, as seen below:
“Yeah I did feel slighted, I can’t lie. I mean. yeah, just because we worked so hard last year and we did, you know, with what I feel was not the best content, the best effort to maximize our momentum from last year, I feel we did our best to make everything work. And for them not to acknowledge us, really did, you know, it hurt me because and I’m sure Road Dogg will say I’m taking this too seriously, but it did hurt me a bit because I worked so hard last year. Cash and I both worked so extremely hard to make 2022 a year that, you know, will go down in the FTR history books. But two things, I’m just so glad that they did at least acknowledge The Briscoes and give Jay that moment to shine. But the second thing was, after I got my feelings and probably rushed to tweet instead of thinking about it and saying, hey, just delete it, don’t say anything.
I started thinking and I’m like, okay, we are a team that’s got a little bit of buzz about us, we’ve doing this for a while and we have no clue, they have no clue more importantly what our future is going to be. So, should I really be upset at the fact that they omitted us because I don’t know if I owned a company and I didn’t know if my employee or my talent or whatever wasn’t going to be there in a month, would I highlight him or her? If I’m gonna make a commercial and I own a carpentry company and my lead carpenter is going to go to my biggest competition in town and I’m making a commercial for local television, hypothetically speaking, would I highlight him? Because if I’m highlighting him and these people see that he’s at the other company and maybe I’m shooting myself in the foot. So, I started thinking about it and I said, you know what, I can’t blame them, it’s not that big of a deal.”
Congratulations to the 13-Times & Current @ringofhonor World Tag Team Champions @jaybriscoe84 & @SussexCoChicken aka #DemBoys aka #theBaddestTagTeamOnThePlanet #TheBriscoes on being awarded @WONF4W's 2022 Feud of the Year! pic.twitter.com/KgdXweAoaS
— All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) February 25, 2023
(H/T to Joshie Lopez and WrestlingHeadlines.com for the transcription)
