FTR wanted to get out of WWE as quickly as possible.
On May 1, 2020, Fightful Select reported that WWE had planned on extending Dax Harwood's (formerly Scott Dawson) contract from April until possibly the end of summer, while Cash Wheeler (formerly Dash Wilder) would see his run out in June. Instead, WWE and the team went back and forth for weeks negotiating a release. Ultimately to get the release in April, Wheeler and Harwood had to agree to turn over several trademarks including “No Flips, Just Fists,” “#FTRKO” and “Say Yeah.
Fightful learned that the former Revival had actually spent thousands of dollars acquiring the trademarks themselves, but WWE wanted them in order to prevent them from using them outside the auspices of the company.
During a recent appearance on The Sessions with Renée Paquette, Dax confirmed the report, saying that no amount of money is worth your happiness.
"Money is incredible, but I talked to my grandma and I was telling her my issues, 'I'm not happy, but the money is great.' Her exact words to me were, 'How much money do you really need?' That was such an eye-opening experience to me. I'm college educated, two degrees, 'yeah, you're exactly right.' 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 of the tag teams the opportunity that we thought it deserved. We knew we would be stuck at a certain position if we stayed there. For years and years, I have prayed every night to be a professional wrestler and I take it very seriously. Knowing they weren't going to give us the opportunities that we thought we deserved, we had to get out of there. We talked about it and they kept throwing more money at us and more money, I called my wife and told her, 'This is the amount of money they offered us, I don't think we're going to take it.' She said, 'No money is worth your happiness, do what you want.' We want back and told them no. My wife was having health problems, so I told them that not only do I not want to stay, I want to be home more with my wife, this is before the pandemic, the pandemic hit, they called us, they said, 'we know you want out, your contracts are up in two months. They were going to extend your contract because of you injury until August, but the out is, all these trademarks you have, sign them over to us and we will let you have your release, no 90 days, and we'll give it to you today.' We spent like $10-20,000 on trademarks. Stuff that we came up with, not them, but we wanted out so bad and were 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," he said.
Revival had first asked for their releases in 2019 and would go on to make that request about a half dozen times before ultimately being granted it. We'd also reported that they were taken off the road in February 2020, and payment subsequently stopped.
FTR joined AEW in May 2020 and are one-time AEW Tag Team Champions. They also currently hold the AAA Tag Team Titles.
Elsewhere during the interview, Harwood recalled Shawn Michaels making fun of him at Raw 25 after a bonding moment. Read his comments here.
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