FTR, the podcast, has been the gift that keeps on giving for fans of AEW, WWE, and professional wrestling, period. Though the show only began during the penultimate week of 2022, with Dax Harwood taking over The Gentleman Villian podcast when William Regal jumped ship from AEW to WWE, the balder half of FTR the tag team has talked CM Punk, Bobby Fish, Jim Cornette, and plenty more, which is a pretty impressive list of viral stories in less than a fortnight.
Surely if you're a fan of professional wrestling, you need to give the show a listen, as it really is jampacked with interesting insight into the world of professional wrestling, but one party who reportedly isn't particularly stoked on the schtick Harwood is hawking is the AEW locker room, as, according to Dave Meltzer, plenty of people within Tony Khan's company aren't particularly enthralled with what the “7-star” performer is putting down.
“From what I heard from different people, not the people who you probably heard from, they were not particularly happy at all about this,” Meltzer said via Wrestling News. Bryan Alvarez followed up with some reporting of his own, saying “all I heard the other day was how unhappy people were about that podcast.” Meltzer chimed in once more, telling Alvarez, “This is what they need, I've said this before and they've done it. They need a team meeting on Wednesday in Seattle. They need to get this stuff cleared up and get everyone on the same page because they're not…”
Wow, now that is interesting indeed. While Harwood has been a bit more telling on his podcast than most “active” wrestlers are, with the truly salacious discussions usually coming from former workers like Booker T and Ric Flair, but he hasn't exactly cursed out any of his current co-workers or trashed anyone save maybe Bobby Fish, who isn't part of the company anymore. Still, trying to paint Punk in a positive light, including discussions of his Starbucks-based charity, does show a bias one way and may make some performers less than enthralled. Needless to say, the next edition of the FTR podcast is going to be incredibly interesting both for what will be said and what won't be.
Dax Harwood provides even more insight into CM Punk's charity in AEW.
Oh hey, speaking of Punk's generosity, there was another story making the rounds today about “The Best in the World” giving out gift cards to his friends in The Pinnacle before their feud.
“He knew coming in that he was eventually going to work with Max in an angle, so he called all the guys in the Pinnacle into his locker room,” Harwood recalled via Fightful. “His locker room door, always open, you could walk in and walk out without knocking and say hello. He was incredible at that. He brought us in his locker room and sat everyone down and said, ‘we're all going to be working together soon. I can't wait to work with you guys. I'm a fan of every single one of you and I hope we can make a ton of money together and I hope we can make a ton of money for this company. Just to show you my appreciation, I have these for you.' He knew that most of us were coffee connoisseurs or we loved coffee and he had these gift cards from Starbucks with like $500 on each gift card. He gave it to myself, Cash, Shawn, Wardlow, and Max. He said, ‘I know this isn't much, but it's to show my appreciation for you guys allowing me to work with you.'”
You know, when you read that story, it's really hard to consider Punk some sort of monster capable of calling out “Hangman” Adam Page out of the blue, throwing down the proverbial gauntlet during a media availability session after All Out, or throwing down the literal gauntlet in a physical altercation in the locker room alongside Ace Steele versus The Elite in an altercation forever known as the “Brawl Out.” Which one is it? Is Punk a nice guy who would teach eager youngsters and give out hundreds of dollars worth of gift cards to other performers just for allowing him to work an angle with them – which would be a dream come true for darn near every single member of the locker room? Or is Punk the sort of ungrateful performer who goes into business for himself and physically fights his co-workers after calling them out? Frankly, it probably falls somewhere in between, and that's what makes the situation so tricky.
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