FTR Address The Young Bucks Making Jokes About Them Without Their Consent, How Cody Rhodes Insulted Their Work

FTR (Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler) recently appeared on Jim Cornette’s podcast, and they discussed joining AEW and their thoughts on The Young Bucks starting the “FTR” or “F*** The Revival” joke. Initially, while Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler took it as a joke, they believe Cody Rhodes made it personal by saying The Revival was not as good as The Young Bucks because The Revival practiced their matches at the WWE Performance Center. Below are some highlights and some audio from the FTR interview.

Dax Harwood on Young Bucks using the “F*** The Revival” jokes: “So, I think with those guys, I think there was maybe some kind of professional jealousy, only because for so long all the internet fans and Dave Meltzer, they always gave these guys rave reviews. ‘They’re the greatest tag team in the world,’ ‘There’s nobody that comes close to them,’ ‘They’re the best.’ And then all of the sudden, here comes two 5’10” North Carolina guys, who by the way can fight in real life, and we’ve gotten in multiple fights in real life and got in multiple troubles with the cops because of fighting. But needless to say, here come two 5’10” North Carolina guys, and the wrestling world is kind of like, ‘Wait a second. That’s how tag team wrestling is supposed to be done,’ you know. It’s not these flying around…You put it a lot more eloquently than I do because you hate him a little more. We have no professional qualms with them or jealousy towards them, but it did bother us that in 2016, they never came to us and asked us [on the FTR jokes], ‘Hey, is it OK if we do this?’ They just out of the blue started saying it.”

Wheeler on why The Bucks told the jokes without their approval: “Well, I think that’s because when you say it on an internet show without the consent of the person, there’s no fear of retaliation. You don’t have to worry about getting punched in the mouth by the person you’re saying it about because you can hide with the anonymity of hiding behind social media or the internet or your phone screen.”

Dax Harwood on how Cody Rhodes made it personal with FTR: “Real quick, just to back up a second, as far as the Bucks and the jokes and stuff like that, I think to them, honestly in the back of their minds, it was just ‘ha ha, fun,’ you know. And that’s OK to have ha ha fun. And me and Cash, we kind of took it as that, and we never responded to it because why would we want to give them attention? But there was a point where Cody Rhodes, who is a best friend of the Bucks, he went on Sam Roberts’ podcast, and Sam Roberts said, ‘Who do you honestly think is the best tag team in the world? FTR or The Young Bucks,’ and Cody said, ‘100 percent, I believe it’s the Young Bucks.’ And Sam said, ‘Why do you believe that?’ And Cody said, ‘Well The Revival, they’re a great tag team, but they go in and they practice their matches for weeks at a time at the PC before they have them. That got me — it pissed me off so much because 1) he’s trying to s*** on our legacy. And I’ve never in 15 years, not once, have I ever practiced a wrestling match. So, with him saying that, it kind of felt like he was trying to tarnish and taint what we had built up. So, that’s what really pissed me off is they took it from something that was ha ha funny to making it personal. That’s what bothered me.”

Cash Wheeler on Harwood having to go to the Performance Center to train after a knee injury: “For instance, between Brooklyn and Toronto, the two DIY matches that people like to talk about us a lot, Dax had his knee scoped out. So, he didn’t wrestle for eight weeks in-between. We didn’t do the Dusty Classic. We had to do a couple different things like storyline-wise, but excuse us, I don’t think it ever got out there that he had his knee scoped. It was just a simple clean out, but you can’t do anything on it for six-to-eight weeks. They didn’t clear him for NXT Toronto until that Thursday. We had a six-man tag at like the Madison Square Garden, the side arena, and we tagged with — I want to say Samoa Joe maybe — against like DIY and Shinsuke [Nakamura]. I believe that was the match, and that was the first match back in two months. And then we went to Toronto the next night.”

Harwood on what Cody Rhodes said: “To me, when we heard that, we felt that that’s what Nick and Matt thought. We just practice our matches and we’re not as good as them. So, whether they believe that or not, they got the residual heat from what Cody said, and that’s the thing that bothers us.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit The Jim Cornette Experience, with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.