Dax Harwood has an issue he'd like to address. Now granted, this isn't a new or particularly rare thing, as, since the FTR member launched his FTR Podcast in place of William Regal's The Gentleman Villian when he left for WWE, the 10-time champion has made it his mission to discuss seemingly everything he has an issue with within the professional wrestling space, even if it doesn't go over super well with members of their promotion, AEW.
Fortunately, this particular gripe has nothing to do with Tony Khan or his company, so the son of a Billionaire can rest easy, especially since the shot in question goes directly across the bow of his biggest rival and how they booked Kofi Kingston's WWE Championship reign.
“I was very, very upset,” Harwood said via Fightful. “I remember that I texted Kofi. Actually it was a group text with The New Day and myself and Dan [Cash Wheeler]. I apologized to him and I said, ‘I’m so sorry this happened to you, man. We’re so upset. I can’t believe this is for real.’ Not because of anything with Brock, but how much we had worked and how he had worked to get to this point. Especially when we were working with him, with Randy, I saw him outside of Vince’s office or go into Vince’s office every single week to try to make things better, to try to make his championship run better. He worked so hard to be a great champion. I think a lot of people, maybe they think, ‘Oh, man, his championship run wasn’t successful because of whatever. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Because I saw him every week try his damndest to make something of nothing. It broke all of our hearts, the whole locker room, it broke all of our hearts that that’s where the championship was being taken. Not anything to do with Brock, but because Kofi had worked so hard, and seeing someone work so hard for so long to get this opportunity taken away from him, what would they do to us?”
For those who don't recall, Kingston won the WWE Championship off of Daniel Bryan at WrestleMania 35 and went on to defend it successfully on 10 occasions across television and house shows before controversially dropping the strap to Brock Lesnar on SmackDown in a seven-second squash. If there was ever an example of why FTR might be reluctant to go back to WWE with Vince McMahon back in charge that didn't feature The Revival, this would certainly be Exhibit A, which, considering the duo are set to become free agents in the spring, should sound like music to TK's ears.
Tony Khan would like to see FTR on AEW, not WWE, television in 2023.
Speaking with Baby Huey on The Kliq podcast, Khan was asked about FTR returning to AEW television, where they have been absent since losing a match to The Acclaimed back in December. Though Khan was typically reserved about his plans, he did compliment the duo for their efforts in his promotion and in others like Lucha Libre AAA and New Japan Pro Wrestling.
“Well, I do hope to see FTR back,” Tony said via Fightful. “They need some time to recover from what was one of the most intense years of wrestling any team has ever done. The schedule they went through, all of the different places they worked — they worked all over and won championships all over the world.”
“This is a team that competed in AEW, but also competed at the top of Ring of Honor, and New Japan Pro-Wrestling,” Tony said. “They were defending championships all over the world. The U.S., in London, Japan, and in Mexico as the AAA Lucha Libre champions, they really were globetrotters. In addition to being hard-hitting wrestling matches, they went through all kinds of stuff, including this barbaric dog collar match at Ring of Honor Final Battle against The Briscoe Brothers. That was, to me, one of the most savage, barbaric wrestling matches I've ever seen, and that was for the Ring of Honor Tag Team Championship. That was following a lot of other crazy matches for FTR. So, I think, for those guys, we want to see them back in AEW and want to see them heal up and come back at 100%. We're really looking forward to that, hopefully. I think they're a great team, and we'd love to have them back.”
Will FTR return to AEW on new, long-term contracts? Only time will tell, but it's safe to say the return of Vince McMahon makes a return to WWE a lot less likely than it appeared a few months ago during the Paul “Triple H” Levesque honeymoon phase.
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