AEW wrestler Dax Harwood looked back on the infamous ‘Ucey Hot’ and back-shaving segments while feuding with the Usos in WWE.
Speaking on the latest episode of his FTR podcast, the tag team specialist remarked that the segments were meant to embarrass the team, but they had more fun with it than the creative team thought they would.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
How FTR laughed off some of the goofier parts of the material: “I remember they had given us the scripts for what was going to happen, like the back shaving stuff, the ‘Ucey Hot’ and stuff. The writers were so worried handing us this, that when we got it, we started laughing at it because it was funny. They were like, ‘Whew, we thought you guys were gonna be upset about this.’ We were like, no! This is the stuff we’ve been asking to do. We’ve been TRYING to show, asking to show, more character development, more charisma, more personality. In Vince and company trying to make us look ‘less than’ and quote-unquote buried is… it made us happy because we were able to go out and have the fun that we had been wanting to have.”
If he felt FTR were being punished for not renewing their contracts: “We were told that. We were told that, that’s why. We know going into saying ‘no’ to the contracts, we know one of two things: one, they were either going to keep us off television and keep us out of the house shows, that way they would either starve us and we couldn’t make our money, completely make the people forget about us. OR they were going to bring us to TV and make us do embarrassing, silly stuff, or make us lose every single week — which we had been doing anyway — to try to devalue us as characters. We knew one of those were going to happen, and then when they were told us they were worried about giving us these scripts because we were going to be made, we were told point blank: because we weren’t going to sign, their course of action was to make sure us as characters weren’t any more valuable than the little bit of value we had then.”
How portraying it well on TV got them in Vince’s good graces: “Paul Heyman, who I don’t trust anymore than I trust my f****** dog to read the Bible when I go upstairs. He came up to us, and he gave us this hug, and he said ‘oh, you always thought you were gonna get over by being a great wrestler, huh? You thought you’re gonna get over by being a great wrestler. NOW you’re over with the man
,’ and he pointed at Vince. I was like, oh God dude, f*** off.“To be fair, that’s the entire office. Whenever you’re high on Vince’s list, everybody is your best friend. Everybody loves you. Everybody thinks you’re the greatest thing in the world. When Vince doesn’t care about you? That’s when they forget about you, and that’s when they don’t have time for you.”