As noted, FTR spoke with Inside The Ropes, where they discussed getting heat from AEW locker room for appearing on Jim Cornette’s podcast.
Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler also mentioned what went into them leaving WWE and why they decided to come to AEW after leaving the company they spent 6 years at.
“We knew for a while,” Harwood said. “We didn’t know if AEW was going to be our home and we’re still not 100% sure if this is going to be our forever home, but we knew for a while that we had to get out of WWE. They treated us very well monetarily. I got to take care of my family through everything WWE gave us. But I think that myself and Cash knew that if we wanted to leave the legacy that we had in mind, we needed to get out of the WWE.
“We haven’t officially signed anything long term yet because we’re just excited to have these opportunities,” Wheeler said. “We have these choices and these options that we weren’t always sure we were going to have. We had 6 great years [in WWE]. For a while now we knew AEW had a tag division that we had to be a part of at some point. There’s too many good teams and talent there for us to not want to be there.”
Cash Wheeler also mentioned the differences between WWE and AEW. He compared AEW to being just a baby, a company just learning the ins and outs of the business, and how it is constantly improving each week.
“Every week I see it getting better and finding its groove and people getting established,” Wheeler said. “Seeing what works and what doesn’t and not being afraid to switch it when something doesn’t. There’s no ego there, there’s no stubbornness there, there’s no ‘This is what I want it, so this is how it is’, it’s more of ‘Hey, what do you think’.
“We get texts from guys in charge there or Tony [Khan] himself saying ‘What are you guys thinking for this week?’ cause they want the input cause they know the talent knows better than anybody else.”
Dax and Cash are two of a limited number of talents to have worked for both Vince McMahon and Tony Khan. Harwood mentioned the key differences between working for Khan and working for McMahon. Harwood noted how working for Vince can be tough compared to Khan because instead of having a conversation directly with him, you are talking to over 30 writers that don’t relay the information back to him, whereas Khan is easy to reach.
“I don’t want to come off as bitter toward WWE cause we are not bitter,” Harwood said. “But, it’s honestly night and day. The biggest difference is Tony and AEW are not afraid of being pro wrestling, they embrace it. They embrace the qualities that pro wrestling brings, they embrace that phrase and they love pro wrestling.
“I think Vince loves pro wrestling too, but I think he wants it to be bigger and grander than his perception of pro wrestling. With Tony and AEW, they’re not afraid of that. It’s very busy on the television days, but it’s easier to get in contact with Tony than it is with Vince. With Vince, they have 30 writers that don’t belong [in WWE], they get paid a ton of money and get first class seats while we’re sitting coach. They’re afraid to talk to Vince, they’re afraid to see him face to face. They don’t even want to be known that they work there so they can keep collecting a paycheck. It’s such a broken system there.
Finally, Harwood mentioned how FTR spoke to Vince before they left the company. Dax said that during the conversation, Vince apologized because their pitches for ideas weren’t reaching him and he wasn’t able to see how unhappy they were.
“We talked with Vince,” he said. “Our last meeting with Vince he apologized because we had been sending all these pitches in and he had never seen them because the writers were too afraid to approach him with different ideas and he apologized for the system being broken.”
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