The first episode of “FTR with Dax Harwood” is up now at AdFreeShows.com. Dax talked about CM Punk and some of the misconceptions about him.
On how his relationship started with Punk in AEW:
“We had a match with Proud and Powerful, Santana and Ortiz, and he loved the match. He told me he had been waiting to see us work live, because he had seen us before. We just kind of started talking about that, and obviously, the love of Bret Hart came into play. We’re both enamored with him. We both think he’s the greatest. He knew coming in that he was going to eventually work with Max in an angle, so he called all the guys in The Pinnacle in his locker room. Again, I said this before, 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 into his locker room and he sat everybody down. He 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 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 for Starbucks with like $500 on each gift card and he gave it to myself, Cash, Shawn, Wardlow, and Max. He said, ‘I know this isn’t much, but this is to show my appreciation for you guys allowing me to work with you.’ That’s kind of how things started rolling then.”
Dax said Punk is the one who wanted to wrestle as many matches as he did for AEW:
“It was his idea to wrestle that much. He wasn’t supposed to. He had a limited number of matches, but he just became enthralled in wrestling again and he loved it so much. It was his idea. It was his idea that night, he wasn’t supposed to wrestle, to wrestle me but yeah, he wanted to do it. He loved it. He still does.”
Dax realized that FTR should be babyfaces after his singles match with Punk:
“I knew that the story I was going to tell, I could make the people feel a certain way for me, and that at that time, I felt the winds of change with FTR. I felt that people started to feel a different way about us. There was a time where I talked to Cash, and I was like, ‘Hey, what do you think about maybe turning babyface?’ He’s like, ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’ I said, ‘Well, I think these people respect us so much that they don’t want to boo us, but they know as heels, they’re not really supposed to cheer us. So our matches are kind of at a lull. Even though they love the matches, and they come up for the spots that we want them to, our matches are at a lull, especially like when we come out. So I knew at that match from then on, that was the origin of us turning babyface.”
Dax said Punk didn’t want the AEW Championship:
“To be honest, he told me when they were going to put the belt on him, he didn’t want the belt. He said I just want to have fun. But he understood that Tony putting the belt on him would put AEW in a new and better light. So he took it, but grudgingly a little bit, but he took it, he took the belt. At the time, he was taking me, Cash, Max, Wardlow, man, it’s so many other guys, I’m missing so many other guys, Hobbs, taking us out to eat, taking us out to dinner, always paying for it, inviting my wife to come along. She came along and my daughter. He would always take us to nice restaurants. He was paying for it, not just me, but to all the people.”
“He might not want me to tell you this, but I’ll take the heat if he doesn’t. He bought all the girls in the locker room Starbucks gift cards and had one of the girls hand them out anonymously. It didn’t say who they were from, but it was from him, just because he loved the atmosphere and he loved being there. He also loved the work the girls were putting in. He thought they were busting their ass to try to get the attention that WWE’s women division was getting.”
Dax on what he believes happened with Punk and The Elite during the media scrum following the All Out PPV
“So obviously I wasn’t there, right? So who I perceived to be God is the only person who really, really, really knows the truth, because everyone’s going to have their own version in their head, because we’ve all done it before. We’ve made up what we perceive to be the truth. What I’ve heard that is reported, there are elements of truth in it. But then there are also some things that raise a red flag to me, like, man, it seems like we’re only getting a portion of the story or what this journalist wants to put out. Whether he has a bias or whether he has a grudge against one of the other parties, that’s just how I felt.”
“But I also knew that I didn’t know the whole story. But I also felt that the stories that I’d heard from a few people, I don’t feel like they would blatantly lie to me. So, you know, I do think there are bits of truth, but I also believe some of the fans have read too much into it, and I think that they should let what happened, let it happen, and let it die down. Because you know, when it’s all said and done, I can’t tell you that I know 100% of the truth. So I can’t tell you if the journalists that are reporting it is 100% of the truth. I know what I perceive to be the truth, and from the things that I’ve read and heard, there’s partial truth and there’s partial things that are a bit exaggerated.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit AdFreeShows.com with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
