FTR Handed Over Trademarks to Get Out of WWE Deal Early

Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler worked hard to establish themselves as one of the top tag teams in pro wrestling. They already proved their worth in AEW by winning the AEW Tag Team Titles once. The two also don’t care what their critics have to say about their matches.

FTR was known as The Revival in WWE and had tremendous success in NXT as the NXT Tag Team Champions as they competed against several great teams. It was clear that the two were not happy in the company anymore.

After being underutilized to a great extent on the main roster, they were finally granted their release by WWE back in 2020 and eventually made their way to AEW.

While speaking on The Sessions with Renée Paquette, Dax Harwood revealed that he and Cash Wheeler signed over trademarks worth thousands of dollars so that they could get their WWE releases sooner.

“Money is incredible, but I talked to my grandma and I was telling her my issues, ‘I’m not happy, but the money is great.’ Her exact words to me were, ‘How much money do you really need?’ That was such an eye-opening experience to me. I’m college educated, two degrees, ‘yeah, you’re exactly right.’ It sounds like I’m bitter, but I’m not at all, we just weren’t happy. Not just us, but they weren’t giving any of the tag teams the opportunity that we thought it deserved. We knew we would be stuck at a certain position if we stayed there.

For years and years, I have prayed every night to be a professional wrestler and I take it very seriously. Knowing they weren’t going to give us the opportunities that we thought we deserved, we had to get out of there. We talked about it and they kept throwing more money at us and more money, I called my wife and told her, ‘This is the amount of money they offered us, I don’t think we’re going to take it.’ She said, ‘No money is worth your happiness, do what you want.’ We want back and told them no. My wife was having health problems, so I told them that not only do I not want to stay, I want to be home more with my wife, this is before the pandemic, the pandemic hit, they called us, they said, ‘we know you want out, your contracts are up in two months.

They were going to extend your contract because of you injury until August, but the out is, all these trademarks you have, sign them over to us and we will let you have your release, no 90 days, and we’ll give it to you today.’ We spent like $10-20,000 on trademarks. Stuff that we came up with, not them, but we wanted out so bad and were unhappy, just let them have it. It’s just money. We called back and said, ‘you can have all the trademarks, just please give us our release,’ and they did,”

FTR also consider themselves the best tag team in the world and it is not difficult to understand why. We will have to wait and see whether FTR will get to win the AEW Tag Team Titles again in the future as fans feel they deserve another run with the titles.

h/t to Fightful for the quotes

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