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Dax Harwood on The Revival Turning Down Big Money Offer From WWE, Signing Over Their Trademarks

February 24, 2022 | Posted by Jeffrey Harris
The Revival WWE Raw 6-10-19 Scott Dawson, The Revolt, Dax Harwood Image Credit: WWE

– AEW wrestler and FTR member Dax Harwood was Renee Paquette’s guest on this week’s episode of The Sessions podcast. Dax Harwood discussed he and tag team partner Cash Wheeler leaving WWE and turning down a big money contract offer and signing over their trademarks to get released sooner. Below are some highlights (via Fightful):

Dax Harwood on The Revival turning down a big-money offer from WWE: “Money is incredible, but I talked to my grandma and I was telling her my issues, ‘I’m not happy, but the money is great.’ Her exact words to me were, ‘How much money do you really need?’ That was such an eye-opening experience for me. I’m college educated, two degrees, ‘yeah, you’re exactly right.’ It sounds like I’m bitter, but I’m not at all, we just weren’t happy. Not just us, but they weren’t giving any of the tag teams the opportunity that we thought it deserved. We knew we would be stuck in a certain position if we stayed there. For years and years, I have prayed every night to be a professional wrestler and I take it very seriously. Knowing they weren’t going to give us the opportunities that we thought we deserved, we had to get out of there. We talked about it and they kept throwing more money at us and more money, I called my wife and told her, ‘This is the amount of money they offered us, I don’t think we’re going to take it.’ She said, ‘No money is worth your happiness, do what you want.'”

On signing over The Revival trademarks to get released sooner from their contracts: We want back and told them no. My wife was having health problems, so I told them that not only do I not want to stay, I want to be home more with my wife, this is before the pandemic, the pandemic hit, they called us, they said, ‘we know you want out, your contracts are up in two months. They were going to extend your contract because of your injury until August, but the out is, all these trademarks you have, sign them over to us and we will let you have your release, no 90 days, and we’ll give it to you today.’ We spent like $10-20,000 on trademarks. Stuff that we came up with, not them, but we wanted out so bad and were unhappy, just let them have it. It’s just money. We called back and said, ‘you can have all the trademarks, just please give us our release,’ and they did.”

Ultimately, The Revival were granted their releases from WWE in April 2020. They signed with AEW later that same year and were re-dubbed as FTR.