Dax Harwood has revealed that he and Cash Wheeler exchanged trademarks they owned for early WWE releases.
FTR (fka The Revival) were granted their WWE releases back in April 2020 after not being featured on television for over six months. During their hiatus from WWE television, many speculated on reports that they wanted to leave the company and move onto something new.
When a wrestler is released from WWE, they are usually met with a non-compete clause, 90 days for main roster Superstars and 30 days for NXT Superstars. However FTR didn’t have non-compete clauses attached to them, and made their AEW debut just a little over a month following the announcement of their WWE exit.
One half of FTR, Dax Harwood, recently spoke to Renee Paquette on her ‘The Sessions‘ podcast, where he discussed their unhappiness towards the end of their WWE runs, and how they were able to bypass the non-compete clauses.
“Money is incredible, but I talked to my grandma and I was telling her about my issues, I was like, ‘I’m just unhappy but money is great, blah blah blah’, and her exact words to me were, ‘How much money do you really need?’. I was like, ‘Oh my god’. That was such an eye-opening experience for me. I’m college educated, two degrees, and stuff like that, so I was like ‘Yeah you’re exactly right’.
“We just… 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 other tag teams the opportunities we thought that they deserved. And we knew we would be stuck at a certain position if we stayed there. For years and years and years and years, since I can remember, I have trained every single day to be a professional wrestler, and I take it very very seriously, and knowing that they weren’t gonna give us the opportunities that we thought we deserved, I knew that we just had to get out of there and make a name for ourselves.”
Harwood revealed that they gave WWE between $10,000 and $20,000 in trademarks to secure their early WWE releases.
“So we talked about it, and they kept throwing more money at us, more and more money, I called my wife and I told her, I said, ‘Hey, this is the amount of money they offered us, I don’t think we’re gonna take it’. And she said, ‘No money is worth your happiness, do what you want’. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, okay’. So we went back and told them no.”
“And my wife was having health problems, so I told them, ‘Not only do I not wanna stay, I wanna be home more with my wife – this is obviously before the pandemic. And then the pandemic hit, they called us, and they said, ‘Look, we know you want out, your contracts are up in two months or whatever, but Dave (Dax) we’re going to extend your contract because of your injury until August. But the out is, all these trademarks you have, if you sign them over to us, we will let you have your release, no 90 days, and we’ll give it to you today. We had spent like $10,000-$20,000 on trademarks. Like ‘FTR’, ‘Shatter Machine’, ‘No Flips Just Fists’, all this stuff. Stuff that we came up with, not them.
“But we were like, you know what, we want out so bad, we’re just 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.”
h/t WrestleTalk.
