Dax Harwood On FTR Facing Young Bucks At Full Gear 2020, Why It Happened So Early

On a recent edition of the FTR podcast, Dax Harwood talked about finally getting to FTR vs the Young Bucks at Full Gear 2020. Dax revealed that he, Cash Wheeler, and the Young Bucks would have preferred to wait until they could have fans in attendance, knowing the finish years ago, and just why Tony Khan decided to do the “dream match” so early in FTR’s run. Check out the highlights:

Note: excerpts are from a three-hour podcast. Best efforts have been made to retain context.

On neither FTR nor the Young Bucks wanting the match so soon: “None of the four wanted to do it right now. But Tony said, he really needed it for the pay-per-view, for a selling point. We had begged and begged, please, let’s just try to wait it out and see when we get fans back in, because we felt that we owed it to the fans to give them this match live. I understand Tony’s point, he wanted his perennial babyface tag team to have the belts. Also, I’m not 100% sure that Tony was sold on us yet, y’know? I could be wrong.”

Dax on why Tony Khan felt Bucks vs FTR was needed for Full Gear 2020: “I think that him also saying that he needed it for the PPV as a selling point, I don’t think that is just lip service. I really think that he thought that. And I can see that. The main event of that show was Moxley and Eddie Kingston. Eddie had *just* been introduced to the company. He’d just been introduced to national television. He’d been this indie standout forever. I was a huge fan of his. I would text him before he even came to AEW and tell him how much I loved his work, and his promos, and his believability. I said dude, I really think I’m gonna see you here soon.”

On the card featuring relatively unheralded performers: “Anyway, in saying that, Eddie was still brand-new to a national television audience. And he was in the main event with Jon Moxley, who’s obviously a huge superstar. And then we had Jericho as well, working with MJF. Jericho, future Hall-of-Famer, first ballot hall of famer. Max? Someone who is still brand new to a national audience. So I can see why [Tony] felt that he needed FTR versus Young Bucks in that position. When he said he needed it, it’s his company. Obviously, I’m going to do whatever the boss says.”

On if the Bucks seeming to ‘turn heel’ in the build was needed: “I don’t know if it was needed, per se. In their opinion, it was needed. I can kind of understand where they were coming from. They felt that the Young Bucks needed that edge from 2016. Because that’s where the story started with the Revival and the Young Bucks. In 2016, they were looked at as the anti-authority. I think that they were trying to recreate that with us, to just show they had an edge to them. Because so far in AEW, they had been white-meat babyfaces, right? And now they’re having their possibly final opportunity at the AEW world tag team championship with their biggest rivals that they’ve never touched before. And they felt that they needed that edge to go along with it, so that’s where all the superkicks and fines and stuff started.”

On the planning and story of the match: “The planning was probably not as structured as they would have liked, and probably more structured than I would have liked, but that’s being a professional and meeting in the middle. I watched the match back today, for the first time in years, and I was blown away by how much I loved it. I loved the match. It was two different styles. I love the fact that we started off the match slow. Because people and Young Bucks fans, and AEW fans, were probably used to their matches which are a little more fast-paced. But I felt this was the opportunity to show the people they could be gritty, could outwrestle us or keep us with wrestling. Everyone knew they could outquick us, but could they outwrestle us? So I loved the fact that we used holds, and we put the high spots in the perfect opportunity, but when we get to the crescendo of the high spot, we brought it right back down and held it in a hold and slowed it right down.”

On finally having some fans in Daily’s Place during the pandemic era: “Finally, we got to have people. We had a thousand people in the audience. Coming from having nobody in the audience, to having a thousand people in a ten thousand seat amphitheatre or whatever? It was like having a sold out Madison Square Garden. It was so emotional.”

On the finish of Cash trying and missing a 450 splash: “I’d thought about this finish since 2016. I knew come 2018, we weren’t going to stay with WWE after our contracts were over. So I’d been fantasizing about the match. In my mind, it was just… we were going to lose. We were the heels, and we were going to lose, and my idea was we were going to hit them with some of our signature things. It wasn’t gonna work. And then it was like, fuck it. We’ve tried everything, and they’re still beating us to the punch. We’ve gotta get on their level and that’s how we’re gonna beat them. So Cash tries this beautiful 450, which I’ve seen him hit before on the indies; missed it, boom, right into just one single superkick. Bam. Cover, one, two, three.”

On the lack of follow-up to the match: “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 going to play by our rules.’ So that was my thinking going forward; just never materialized that way. We didn’t have a rematch for what, another year and a half? That’s where I thought it was going but things just didn’t work out that way.”

On how good the Young Bucks are: “There’s a certain section of the fans that say ‘they don’t know how to sell.’ I dare you to go back and watch this match and say that, because those two are incredible. The way Matt sold through the whole match? That’s, to me, it gets overused and I hate even saying it, but that’s art to me. How much he sold and how well he sold. No one, myself, Cash, or the Bucks, never forgot the most important part of the match is the selling. My pride probably doesn’t want to admit it? My ego definitely doesn’t want to admit it. But those boys are fucking good, dude.”

If using any of the above quotations, please credit FTR h/t 411mania for the transcription.