AEW star Dax Harwood recently sat-down with Sean Ross Sapp from Fightful, where the current reigning AAA, IWGP, and ROH tag team champion discussed FTR’s departure from WWE back in 2020, and how he knew that the duo would have been stuck in a rut if they remained with the company under Vince McMahon.
Hardwood makes note that it’s totally okay that McMahon did not appreciate tag team wrestling the same way others do, but feels vindicated with how over FTR has gotten since joining AEW and working all over the world. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
On FTR asking for their release and how he knows they would have been stuck in a rut if they stayed:
Again, that’s my downfall, our downfall. So yeah we went into the building that night with the idea that we were gonna ask for our release. We had our match. We asked for Hunter and Vince all day, and they were very busy, which is typical of a TV day, so I’m not upset at all. But we had our match with Lucha House Party, we came back to the back, dripping sweat, and we said, ‘Hunter, we need to talk to you now.’ He’s said, ‘Can you give me five minutes?’ We said, ‘Absolutely.’ He came in the back. This is gonna sound very egotistical, I don’t mean for it to. But we knew that we could do better than what we were doing, and we knew tag team wrestling could be presented better than it was being presented. If we were gonna stay there, we would have been stuck in a rut, in that previous regime. We should have been stuck in a rut and never amounted to anything. Now we’ve been able to go out, and we’ve been able to make a name for ourselves.
Says he holds no ill-will towards Vince McMahon for not enjoying tag team wrestling:
I can’t be mad at Vince, you know what I’m saying? Just like I said, if he doesn’t like tag team wrestling, that’s okay. One, it’s his company, but two, that’s okay. It’s his opinion to not like it. If he doesn’t like specifically me and Cash, that’s okay, too. It just sucks that he was the only billionaire boss at the time that was paying us that much money. But that’s totally okay, and I harbor no ill feelings towards him or towards the company or anything like that.