On the most recent episode of “FTR with Dax Harwood,” Dax discussed FTR’s AEW debut.
Harwood stated that FTR began tweeting The Briscoes before there was any plan for them to wrestle each other:
“In 2021, the whole year we had nothing. It was one of those things where pre-anxiety, because my anxiety was June the fourth if I’m not mistaken, or June the sixth, one of the two. But pre-anxiety, I took all that to heart. I was very frustrated, very upset, and very angry, like at everybody, not just Tony or or the EVPs. I was angry at everybody because, in my opinion, we had taken this risk and came over here to make a name for ourselves, to build a reputation, not lose one, and I felt like we were losing it. If we were losing our reputation, we weren’t going to go down without fighting. Those were some guys that we were always tagged in on social media as to, we want to see this match. We want to see these two teams go at it. So we, you know, just started trading verbal jabs. We never met each other. We never DMd each other. We never talked to each other. We had nothing to do, nothing of substance. We just had the match a couple of months prior with Darby and Sting that we were so happy with, but other than that, we were really kind of lost. We begged Tony if we could make this appearance at Ring of Honor. I think he knew the company was his at that point, but he didn’t know what was going to happen, or what he was going to do, or what the future was for Ring of Honor, but if we could drum up some interest, maybe that would help.”
He said Edge had given him ideas for a possible angle with The Young Bucks before FTR even got to AEW:
“I’d actually talked to Edge about the angle before we even went to AEW. I was like, ‘How can I make this angle personal’, and he gave me all these ideas about how we can say that we left the biggest company in the world to come find them. They were too scared to come to the biggest company because they may be relegated to a lower level because they will be exposed because of us. He is just so freakin smart, Adam, that is, Edge. So smart. But yeah, I’ve been thinking about this match for a very, very long time.”
The legal situation of using the name, Fear The Revolt:
“So it was a tag team from the North Carolina Indies for, I don’t know, I guess a year or so before we came from Kaleb Konley from Impact. Was it Impact or whatever, and his partner, Zane Riley. They called themselves The Revolt. I guess they call themselves The Revolt on the North Carolina Independents for a while. Not that I guess, I know they did. So our idea was me and Cash were the first guys in WWE to ask at the time for our release. We wanted to get out. After us, not because of us, I’m just saying after us, a lot of guys started asking for their release or whatever, putting it on Twitter, that they wanted to get out or whatever, but we were the first ones to ask for our release and make it known.”
“We were trying to think of FTR, the acronym FTR, names for that, and Fear The Revolt was something I thought of because we had always said Forever The Revival, Fear The Revival, we talked about that. But Fear The Revolt because we had revolted against WWE. That’s kind of the idea we wanted to put in people’s minds that we were the guys to revolt against the big machine and now we’re coming to this company who is an upstart company, and we’re going to try to help make it you know, whatever.”
“So we had videos made and trademarked the name. Then I got a tweet from Kaleb Konley where we’re tagged in that said we had stolen their name. I didn’t respond to it. I didn’t say anything to it. Then maybe a couple of days later, we got a text from him. He said, ‘This is Kaleb. Are you guys going to be called The Revolt?’ I said, ‘No, we’re not going to be called The Revolt. We’re going to be called FTR, which is going to stand for Fear the Revolt because we are revolting against the WWE, the big machine.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s my tag team name.’ I said, ‘Dude, I had no idea that was your tag team name. If you think for the last however long that you guys have been teaming, that I’ve been coming home on my day and a half off and looking up North Carolina Independent wrestling instead of hanging out with my wife and daughter, you’re sadly mistaken. That’s the last thing I was worried about was what you, your partner, or anybody else from the North Carolina Independent scene, or Independents in general were doing.’”
“I looked up their tag team and I saw they had teamed like three or four times for one company. I saw that Kaleb was in Impact, he was in Ring of Honor by himself, not with his team. I said, ‘Well, are you guys going to actually team and use that name because I’ve only seen you do some of the bigger shows like Ring of Honor and Impact. I can promise you that I would never, ever take a booking for a big show like that without Cash because he’s my partner.’ They had no answer.”
“We had [Trademark attorney Michael] Dockins talk to their lawyer. We said, ‘Look, we will pay for your copyright as The Revolt so you can have The Revolt. You will be called The Revolt. We will be called FTR and it will only mean Fear The Revolt. Then we will also give you a percentage of whatever merch we sell that has the name Revolt on it. They said no, they didn’t want that. We ended up winning and we got the name Fear The Revolt, but then Tony, who’s such a great human being, said, ‘Look, let’s not even engage in that. Let’s give that name to them. You guys don’t need that. If they feel so strongly about it, let them have it’, so we couldn’t have it.”
“The only thing that upsets me and I still hold this heat to both of those guys, the only heat that I hold towards them now is that I spent thousands and thousands of dollars to Mike Dockins to take care of something we could have taken care of by ourselves, but I spent thousands of dollars to him that I could have given and put in Finley’s college fund. You know what I mean? Or I could have taken care of groceries for a couple of weeks or whatever. That’s the thing that I can’t forget about and forgive.”
You can listen to the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
