Even after FTR had been long gone from WWE they influenced....The Greatest Wrestling Match Ever.
Fightful spoke to Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler recently, where their former team with Randy Orton was mentioned. Apparently, that's still continued, as they also helped Orton with one of the biggest matches of his career.
"Randy respected our work," Harwood told Fightful. "He respected our work ethic. I mean, even to the point—I don’t know he wants me to tell this, but he can’t get too mad at me ‘cause he loves us—he flew down to Ashville to work with us for his greatest match of all time or whatever at Backlash because he wanted to get ready and he wanted to get his technical wrestling down and things like that. So, we created a bond, a friendship. I wish they would have went with it, but they didn’t. Maybe I’m glad they didn’t because now we’re having the time of our lives."
Orton's opponent would be Edge, who also lives in Asheville. In a recent Edge documentary, Cash Wheeler was shown helping Edge prepare for his own return, before he joked to us, "We played both sides."
The two would go into details
"It was all us and Edge. He went down first, actually," Cash stated, before Dax followed up. "I went down a year before Edge even competed. At Tom’s school."
That wasn't the first time the two were in the ring with Edge, as they all collectively went to help out a reuniting tag team prepare for a big match.
"That was a different time, that was Beth [Phoenix] and Natalya," Cash said. "They wanted to work on tag stuff so that the WrestleMania match. But, he went down after that just him and Adam with Dr. Tom letting them in. Like, that was the first time Adam had bumped since the neck injury, basically. He’d done a spear here or there, but he was the first one to get in the ring with him."
Cash said that WWE nor Edge asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement to keep the spot a secret, and that Edge wanted to make it happen because his training was fairly limited when he was working with his Hall of Fame significant other.
Wheeler said "When I went it was just something where that was all us. I told him, “If you want to get in the ring, you need to get some work and to see how you feel, then just let me know.” He was like, “Yeah, I need to.” He’s like, “I’m lucky I have a Hall of Famer for a wife, she can do a lot with me. But, I need to get thrown around. I need to get picked up and dropped.” He’s like, “She’s my wife, I’m the father of her children. So, she’s gonna take it easy on me here and there because she doesn’t want to do this on her own. So, I need somebody that’s gonna come in and take the kiddy gloves off.” So, we went in, we called stuff on the fly. We were just wrestling around, we weren’t taking any bumps or anything yet. I put him in a sleeper, have him send me off. I come back, grab it again, slip behind him. I said, “Belly-to-back.” He goes, “Huh?” and we just go up and down, and that was the first big bump he had taken and he was like, “Oh, man. I’m glad you didn’t tell me that was coming, but I needed that.” ‘Cause he hit, {Cash stretches his neck}, “I feel great.” That was just something we wanted to do because he wanted to see how he felt and prove to himself that he could do it"
You can see our full, exclusive interview at the top of the page, and check out FTR every week on AEW Dynamite on TNT, Wednesday nights at 8 PM EST.
