FTR On Tag Team Wrestling, The Art Of Being A Heel
Photo Credit: All Elite Wrestling
All Elite Wrestling World Tag Team Champions Cash Wheeler and Dax Harwood, also known as FTR, recently appeared on Excuse Me: The Vickie Guerrero Show. They discussed various topics, including their views on tag team wrestling, the art of being a heel, and more. Here are some highlights:
On Eddie Guerrero’s influence:
Hardwood: “You don’t understand how much Eddie has influenced the two of us, honest to God, like when we were talking about how we wanted to debut, we talked about Eddie and we talked about Stone Cold as influences because they were two guys who regularly drove some sort of vehicle to the ring. And Eddie always has a bad a– classic car everywhere he went and that was one of the things, that we can find the text if we scroll back far enough, where we were saying, man Eddie like had these cool entrances, maybe we could do something like that.”
On modern wrestling:
Hardwood: “The wrestling part, I think so many guys are not confident in their abilities and the crazy thing is, if they knew how good they were, then they wouldn’t do a million things and they wouldn’t do some of the things they do. For us, we want to be completely different than everybody else, and we know that the days of people jumping the barricades and stabbing us are probably over. We get that.”
“But we had a trilogy of matches with American Alpha, Chad Gable and Jason Jordan, in NXT in 2016, and I’m so proud of that trilogy because both teams were virtually unknown teams. But we knew that we couldn’t get the fans to hate us, but we knew that if we worked hard enough and we told the right story, we could make the fans care enough about them, the babyfaces, that they would want to see the babyfaces beat us. And somewhere along the way it got lost that heels have to, they think they have to do just as many cool moves as the babyface. As a heel, you have to sacrifice. You have to sacrifice and you have to put your pride to the side. Like Cash can do a million things, he can do 450s and all these flips and stuff. But he doesn’t because he doesn’t want to jeopardize that babyface that we’re working with.”
Wheeler: “We have always prided ourselves on the details, like the devil’s in the details is something we’ve always lived and died by. We don’t care about, when we’re talking about a match, we don’t have a set moveset that’s gonna be, we have this combo we have to get in, we have this move we have to get in. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work and we’re not gonna do it. If the story we’re telling goes off a different path, then we’ll go that way and we’ll get something that makes sense.”
“Everybody got lost and they get scared if the crowd’s not making constant noise, they think they’re losing them but that’s not the case. For the most part, wrestling fans, they’re invested in you. Yelling constantly isn’t realistic…. People should know that more. There’s so many talented guys that, if there’s not a crowd making noise constantly so they freak out and they start doing just spot after spot after spot.”
The full interview is available here:
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