FTR Talk Not Wanting To “Overdo” Owen Hart Homages During Their Match

Current ROH World Tag Team Champions and AAA World Tag Team Champions, FTR, joined SiriusXM's Busted Open Radio to discuss their Owen Hart Tournament qualifying match against one another last week.

The highly-anticipated bout, that was described by AEW Owner & President Tony Khan as a match "that will stand the test of time", took place on Dynamite on April 27. It ended with Dax Harwood picking up the victory against his partner Cash Wheeler to advance to the first round. Cash explained that the pair took a lot of pride in the match.

"We take a lot of pride in what we do," FTR's Cash Wheeler said. "Sometimes we might take too much pride in that, and it gets us into a little bit of hot water here and there. When we were thinking about this match, there was never a point in time when we thought about we just got to hit all these cool moves. And if you watch it back, the only move I ever hit is a Piledriver. The only move he [Dax] ever hits is a Rebound Powerbomb. So we're not just out there spanning moves. We're not out there getting the cheap reaction.

"I think a lot of the time, moves are cool, but they're cheap sometimes. Anybody can learn those. You can't learn how to make somebody emotionally invest. We had a special story to tell here, that we could tell, if we did it right."

A number of sequences in the match paid homage to Owen Hart, and Cash noted that they didn't want to over do it, but instead, pay their respects.

"That's one thing we wanted to do also, was not over do it," Cash said. "So if you look back at it, the only two things we really did was, I teased the foot scrape, like Owen did to Bret [Hart]. That was directly an homage to that match [Owen vs. Bret at WrestleMania 10]. And then the Victory Roll Reversal where he almost won. Everything after that, he missed the Diving Headbutt, we didn't want to span it again with taking stuff from them, but we did want to pay respects to the fact that it's the Owen Hart Tournament. We took a lot of pride in that."

Dax Harwood disclosed that FTR had agreed not to shake hands or hug before the match, because that was what the fans would have expected.

"We talked before, and I said, 'look, let's don't shake hands immediately,'" FTR's Dax Harwood said. "Because if we can take one thing the fans are going to expect without us even touching, if we can take that away from them, that puts the doubt in their mind. 'Oh man, this isn't exactly what we're getting.' So, for example, the shaking the hand thing, we didn't want to shake hands or hug right before the match, because fans are expecting that.

"So we took it away, and we wanted to make the lock-up mean something. We wanted to make a Wristlock or a Headlock mean something, because ultimately when you get down to it, that's the fundamentals of professional wrestling. That's what draws them in, because if they can get lost for just one second, if they can get lost, 'oh my god, that Headlock looked like it kind of hurt!' It's fake. Whatever. But if we can make them get lost for one second, in our match, man, there's nothing better than that to me."

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit SiriusXM's Busted Open Radio with a h/t to Wrestling Inc for the transcription.