AEW Star Threatens to Quit the Company

Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler of FTR haven’t been back in the AEW World Tag Team Championship picture since they dropped the titles to The Young Bucks at Full Gear last November. The Bucks have since offered title shots to The Acclaimed, The Inner Circle (twice), Death Triangle, SCU and The Varsity Blonds, then last week pitched defending the titles against the makeshift team of Jon Moxley and Eddie Kingston. Harwood made the bold claim on Wednesday that if the two got a tag title match before FTR, he’d quit the business.

Well, the first part of that statement wound up happening. AEW officially confirmed that Mox and Kingston would challenge for the titles at Double or Nothing on May 30, then closed out the show with the pair knocking out the Bucks and stealing their Air Jordan 1 Diors. Harwood didn’t take the news well.

Obviously, Harwood isn’t really quitting. He, Wheeler and the rest of The Pinnacle were already booked for Double or Nothing, taking on The Inner Circle in a Stadium Stampede match. If MJF’s faction can repeat their success from the recent Blood & Guts Match, Chris Jericho’s group will have to disband.

FTR (with their manager Tully Blanchard) joined forces with MJF, Wardlow and Shawn Spears back on March 10 to form the new faction, which hearkens back to the classic Four Horsemen stable Blanchard was a prominent member of. Months before the group officially arrived, Wheeler and Harwood talked in interviews about how they didn’t want to outright copy the Horsemen.

“What they had, everything they did, was organic and magic,” Wheeler said in an interview with Pro Wrestling Illustrated. “That’s why it worked so well. It wasn’t forced or brought up in a creative room by a bunch of guys who had no wrestling experience. It was four guys, plus JJ [Dillon] who all had something special separate, and it worked well together. Tully has given us the details on how it started. Seeing how little the plan was going in, and what it became, is unreal. I don’t think we’ll be ever to truly copy that and do it justice, but it is very flattering,”

“As a team and unit, for what we want to accomplish, it would be a huge disservice to us both. People have asked Flair, Arn, and Tully and they’ve given us their blessing. If we were better wrestlers or talkers, it doesn’t matter because that was a once in a lifetime group that can never be replicated,” Harwood added. “To try and replicate it, you’re going backward. That’s one thing we don’t want to do. That’s why we left our former employer because we don’t want to go backward, we want to go forward.”