FTR on How They Kept Their AEW Debut a Secret, Their Team Rebranding to ‘FTR’

– During the latest AEW Unrestricted, Tony Schiavone and Aubrey Edwards interviewed AEW tag team champions FTR (Cash Wheeler and Dax Harwood), who discussed keeping the team’s debut in AEW a secret and how they went about rebranding and renaming themselves from The Revival to FTR. Below are some highlights.

Cash Wheeler on keeping the AEW debut for FTR a secret: “For us, I think it was fairly easy because there wasn’t any leaks in the office *laughs*, putting something out there every time there was a disagreement or a contract offer turned down or something along those lines because we can be as tight-lipped as we need to be. Especially when it’s going to be something that’s going to affect us…There’s nothing in it for us to spoil our own surprise. My mom was very upset with me for [not telling her].”

Dax Harwood: “My wife was the only one that knew. I didn’t tell anybody.”

Wheeler on why this is the way it should be: “That’s how it should be, though, because there aren’t many surprises left in wrestling. And people assumed because of the history with us and the [Young] Bucks, there was the FTR stuff on BTE. But no one really had any idea, and we weren’t 100 percent sure until we were 100 percent sure.”

Harwood on rebranding and renaming The Revival to ‘FTR’: “In January 2019, that was the beginning of us asking for our release. We had just come back from a match. We had asked to speak with Vince [McMahon], and TV is a very busy day. So, he kept putting it off and putting it off. Finally, we had a match on Raw, and we came back, sweaty and in our trunks. And we walked right through the curtain, walked right up to Vince and Hunter [Triple H] and said, ‘Can we talk to you guys for five minutes?’ Vince couldn’t leave because he was producing a show. Hunter said, ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’ So, we waited outside. He comes out and talks to us, and we politely asked for our release. Initially, I think he thought we were bluffing. He said, ‘You know, well, you can have it. I’ll go talk to Mark Carrano. We can get everything set up.’ We did that. The next day, we got a phone that said it’s not happening.”

“So anyway, what I’m getting at is from January 2019, we had an idea what we wanted to do. I’m always thinking about wrestling. It’s almost disgusting how much I think about it, and how I care about it, and how much I love it. So, I would sit at my kitchen table, and I had my laptop, and I would write up ideas for us and how we would — at the time there was no AEW. There were talks, but there was no AEW — but how we would transition from Monday Night Raw to the indies or whatever was next. I had so many ideas. So, I always thought about it.”

Wheeler on applying for the FTR trademark the night AEW was first announced: “Before AEW was announced, they announced it on January 1, we had already applied for the FTR trademark because we knew were weren’t going to be able to have The Revival. We knew that we weren’t going to be able to have Dash and Dawson and all that stuff. And we had talked about it. We had tons of five-hour car rides going from show-to-show going, ‘Well, what do we do? Do we use FTR as the name if we ask for our release?’ Because we weren’t sure at this point. This was probably November-December 2018. And so, we went ahead and we filed the trademark because we decided that’s the way to go because we can have different acronyms for different things. There’s a lot of different ways we can run with that. And it’s creative and gives us leeway. So, we filed for that, and then AEW was announced, and we’re like, ‘Oh. We’re not getting out of here.’ Because we didn’t know what we wanted to do. We just wanted to go out and bet on ourselves. But as soon as we heard that, we were like, ‘They’re not going to let anybody go anytime soon.’ We asked anyway. Like I said, they initially said, and then there was a change of heart and there was another 15 months before [we left].”

If using the above quotes, please credit FTR on AEW Unrestricted, with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.