Dax Harwood recently spoke on his podcast, “FTR with Dax Harwood,” about a variety of professional wrestling topics including the rise and fall of The Pinnacle in AEW.
Matt Koon told Dax Harwood, “The Observer Newsletter awards led to a tweet by you because AEW tweeted congratulations to all the other winners. You tweeted something, it was kind of cryptic, you said, ‘Tell us it’s April. April’s coming up without telling us April’s not coming up’, and you copy the fact that everybody was congratulated except you guys. Some people noticed that they had not yet congratulated the Tag Team Champions and maybe they’re doing it on the hourly. They did do it on the hourly after your tweet, but they said congratulations for feud of the year to the Briscoes and did not mention FTR. First of all, did you really feel a little slighted that AEW wasn’t tweeting congratulations to you, and how did you feel when you saw the Briscoe tweet?”
Harwood replied, “Yeah, I did feel slighted. I can’t lie. I mean, yeah, it was just because we worked so hard last year. We did, with what I feel was not the best content, not 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 hurt me a bit.”
Matt Koon said, “Well, everybody is saying also that because of the tweet, and because of everything, it’s like this big work. AEW has a pay-per-view coming up, and on Wednesday night, this show drops on Wednesday, on Wednesday night, there’s a Casino Battle Royale where there’s tag teams, and the winner is going to be part of this four way tag team match at the AEW pay-per-view, and that maybe you guys will be The Joker, and this is all just a big work to get people to believe that there’s an issue with you guys. What do you say to that feedback from people?
Harwood said, “I can’t tell you the truth. I wouldn’t want to do that to AEW and I wouldn’t want to do that to us, whatever that truth is, whether we’ll be there in the Battle Royale or not. I wouldn’t want to ruin that for anybody, the fans included. So I will say just watch Wednesday, and we’ll see.”
Koon: “But to be clear, your intention of the tweet was not as part of a work, though.”
Harwood: “No, absolutely not. No, no, absolutely not. No way. I was legitimately a crybaby. I screen-shotted every award that they had posted. I had a feeling we weren’t going to get mentioned because, like I said, we have reached out and said, ‘Hey, we will come back and work until our contracts are up. We’re okay with it. We took a couple months off to let our bodies heal to think about what we wanted to do. So we’ve made it known that we will gladly come back, at the very least, until our contracts are up, or until we can come to some middle ground or not and leave, but I haven’t necessarily heard anything back. I had a feeling they were not very happy with us.”
Harwood said he never had an interest in using the Four Horsemen name in AEW:
“No. God no. Even when Arn got the rights to the name of 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 and 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, because people would compare us to them and say, ‘But they’re not as good’, and that was really hard to get over. So you could imagine if we were a brand new group called The Four Horsemen how hard that would be to escape their shadow. There’s no way anybody can do that. So no, absolutely no way.”
“I will say though, we did talk to Cody a lot about forming a group with him, and this was before Max came along. We talked to Cody a lot about it. He had Arn, we had Tully, and we wanted to create the super group with Cody, us two, and we had some ideas of who could be the other members. I think around that time, Brock (Anderson) was starting to come up too. We felt that if Brock were with us, he could stand outside of the ring and watch us, and if we had eight man tags, he would be able to learn by standing on the apron, getting in just for a few minutes, and tagging back out. Then we could talk to him afterwards and tell him why certain things happened and you know, stuff like that. We really wanted to (do this) and I think Cody wanted to as well, but I think Cody was vehemently against being a heel, at least at that time.”
You can listen to the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
