During a recent appearance on “Busted Open Radio”, FTR’s Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler commented on their qualifying match for the Owen Hart Tournament that took place on last week’s episode of AEW Dynamite, the story they were trying to tell during the match, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
Cash Wheeler on how FTR have pride in their work: “We take a lot of pride in what we do. Sometimes we might take too much pride in that, and it gets us into a little bit of hot water here and there. When we were thinking about this match, there was never a point in time when we thought about we just got to hit all these cool moves. And if you watch it back, the only move I ever hit is a Piledriver. The only move he [Dax] ever hits is a Rebound Powerbomb. So we’re not just out there spamming moves. We’re not out there getting the cheap reaction.”
Wheeler on the story FTR wanted to tell: “I think a lot of the time, moves are cool, but they’re cheap sometimes. Anybody can learn those. You can’t learn how to make somebody emotionally invest. We had a special story to tell here, that we could tell, if we did it right.”
Wheeler on not wanting to overdo Owen Hart moves: “That’s one thing we wanted to do also, was not overdo it. So if you look back at it, the only two things we really did was, I teased the foot scrape, like Owen did to Bret [Hart]. That was directly an homage to that match [Owen vs. Bret at WrestleMania 10]. And then the Victory Roll Reversal where he almost won. Everything after that, he missed the Diving Headbutt, we didn’t want to spam it again with taking stuff from them, but we did want to pay respects to the fact that it’s the Owen Hart Tournament. We took a lot of pride in that.”
Dax Harwood on how they didn’t want to hug or shake hands after the match: “We talked before, and I said, ‘look, let’s don’t shake hands immediately,’ because if we can take one thing the fans are going to expect without us even touching, if we can take that away from them, that puts the doubt in their mind. ‘Oh man, this isn’t exactly what we’re getting.’ So, for example, the shaking the hand thing, we didn’t want to shake hands or hug right before the match, because fans are expecting that.”
Harwood on wanting the smaller holds to mean something: “So we took it away, and we wanted to make the lock-up mean something. We wanted to make a Wristlock or a Headlock mean something, because ultimately when you get down to it, that’s the fundamentals of professional wrestling. That’s what draws them in, because if they can get lost for just one second, if they can get lost, ‘oh my god, that Headlock looked like it kind of hurt!’ It’s fake. Whatever. But if we can make them get lost for one second, in our match, man, there’s nothing better than that to me.”
(h/t – Wrestling Inc)
