Dax Harwood reveals that FTR have wanted to work with Stokely Hathaway for years, long before any of them were in AEW.
All Elite Wrestling‘s Dax Harwood was a recent guest on the Beyond The Bell/5-Star Podcast. During the interview, Harwood revealed that he pitched an idea to the head of WWE creative several years ago to put Malcolm Bivens (Big Stoke) together with The Revival and explained why it didn’t happen.
“I had a meeting with the head of creative and he asked me what I wanted to do,” Dax Harwood recalled. “I can’t remember his name in NXT. But I said Stokely’s name. I said I’d love to have him as our manager, and the head of creative of the company said, ‘Okay, that’s not a bad idea, but he’s going into something else.’ Stokely was going into something else, so we couldn’t do it.”
FTR was initially going to be paired with Stokely in 2022
After making the jump to AEW, Harwood pitched the idea to Tony Khan to sign Hathaway and pair him with FTR in 2022. However, their natural babyface turn delayed the two sides coming together.
“Fast forward until 2021, we were starting to wrap things up with Tully Blanchard,” Dax Harwood continued. “I talked to Tony and I said, ‘Hey, I think there’s this guy in NXT who is an incredible mouthpiece, he can bump his ass off, and he’s very entertaining. I think he’d be a great get for us, and I think we could benefit from him being our manager.’
“So Tony hired him at my request, and we were supposed to immediately start teaming up together in ’22. But, as luck and fate had it, fans just all of the sudden started connecting with us on a different level than they’d ever connected. They started liking us. So we didn’t want to bring in Stokely to be with us at that time. But we had still already got him the job.” [H/T: Fightful]
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What do you make of Dax Harwood’s comments? Are you surprised that plans have been in place for FTR and Stokely Hathaway to be together this long? Let us know your overall thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
