FTR reveals how they ended up with Tully Blanchard.
FTR loves tag team wrestling. In their arsenal, you see shades of some of the best tag teams in the history of wrestling and even some of the teams that went underappreciated.
Currently, they are managed by one of the greatest tag team wrestlers ever, Tully Blanchard. That is not just by happenstance.
Speaking with The Wrestling Classic, they reveal how Tully Blanchard became a fan of theirs after Arn Anderson, who worked with them in WWE when they were The Revival, showed Tully some of their matches on an iPad. Dax Harwood noted that once Tully Blanchard was a fan, he formulated the idea for Tully to be their manager, revealing it was his idea for FTR to turn on Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson of The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express.
“[Tully Blanchard] had never seen any of our work before because when he was out of wrestling for 30 years, he stopped watching wrestling. He hadn’t watched in years. So Arn made him sit down with him and watch our matches on Arn’s iPad. So they [watched some Revival matches including some of the ones with American Alpha] and he became a huge fan of ours. You know, I pitched to Tony, ‘Hey, why don't we have this guy as our manager?’ When we came in, we came as quasi-babyface at first? I laid out this whole thing, the Tag Team Appreciation Night. I said, 'Let's not turn heel on The Young Bucks. We’ll save us touching for later.' I said, ‘Let us turn heel on Ricky and Robert and get real sympathy for them, but get real heat for us.’ Then that transitions into Tully being our manager, he set up the whole thing. Tully was completely on board. Tony loved the idea. You know, it gave us a little credibility as a tag team to have one of the greatest tag team wrestlers of all time in our corner.”
Cash Wheeler carried on, “We got to work with Arn for a few years before in WWE. But, we never got to work with Arn without being under the restrictions that he had before because yeah, he’ll tell you, like he’s said it on his podcast, it was just different. Not like it's a bad thing. But now he just gets to be Arn and if he has some knowledge to add to take up to somebody. He can go up to it and say without anything holding him back. He's got so much knowledge and he would help us all the time on live events. Because we took a lot of pride in working really hard on live events and changing it up a lot. Not just doing the same thing because it's easy, and we know what works.
"Arn would always come up — and he would watch every night and he would come up and tell us what he liked, what he didn't like, what he thought worked. He’s just one of those guys that always made the time for people that wanted the time. Like that was always cool. Now getting to work with him over there is even better and like Dax said, getting to work with Tully when he's been out of the business so long, and he has so much untapped knowledge because he hasn't been going around to share it. He hasn't watched anything in 30 years like [Dax] was saying, and that's mind-blowing. But he still has all these things that worked when he was active when he was on top. We said all the time, he was one of the most underrated heels, probably ever, because he was so good at making his opponents look good. But he knew when to turn the seriousness up, and when to be on the backpedal, when to be on his ass, and he brings a different promo aspect to us, too. He'll look at it from a different perspective and things that we don't always think of, he'll say, ‘Hey, make sure you mention this and get this in there. It reminds us, yeah, we do need to drive that home. So those guys, it's stupid how smart they are, and how helpful they are. So it's been a blessing to work with those guys every time.”
Recently, Ricky Morton spoke about his disappointment in the lack of follow-through with FTR turning on The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express. Now, the two teams will face off at a Big Time Wrestling event in January. Learn more here.
If you use any of the above quotes, please credit the original source and link back to this article crediting Fightful with the transcription.
