FTR On Begging WWE For Their Release

During an appearance on AEW Unrestricted, FTR spoke about how they had been requesting their WWE release once a month before it ever happened.

"I think it's something we thought about for a very long time. In January 2019, that was the beginning of us asking for a release. We had asked to speak with Vince. TV is a very busy day, so we kept putting it off and putting it off. And finally, we had a match on RAW and we came back sweaty in our trunks, and we walked right through the curtain, right up to Vince and Hunter, and said, 'can we talk to you guys for five minutes?' Vince couldn't leave because he was producing a show.

"Hunter said, 'I'll be there in five minutes.' So we waited outside. He comes and talks to us, and we politely asked for our release. Initially, I think he felt we were bluffing. He said, 'yeah, OK, well, go talk to Mark Carano. We can get everything set up.' So we did that. The next day, we got a phone call that said it's not happening. So anyway, what I'm getting at is from January 2019, we had an idea of what we wanted to do.

"I would sit at my kitchen table, and I had my laptop and I would write up ideas for us and how we would-- at the time, there was no AEW. There were talks of it, but there was no AEW. But how we would transition from Monday Night RAW to either the indies or whatever was next, I had so many ideas."

Then they spoke about when AEW came into the equation.

"Before AEW was announced-- they announced it at midnight on January 1. We had already applied for the 'FTR' trademark because we knew that we weren't gonna be able to have The Revival. We knew we wouldn't be able to Dash, Dawson, and all that stuff, and we had talked about it. We had tons of five-hour car rides going from show to show. We were like, what do we do? Do we use FTR as the name if we ask for a release, because we weren't sure at this point.

"This was probably November-December [2018]. So we went out and buy all the trademarks because we decided that's the way to go, because we can have different acronyms for different things. And there's a lot of different ways we can run with that, and it's creative and gives us leeway. So we filed for that, and then AEW is announced. We're like, 'we're not getting out of here'. We asked anyway because we didn't know what we wanted to do.

"We just knew we wanted to go out and bet on ourselves, but as soon as we heard that was announced, we're like, 'oh yeah, they're not letting anybody go anytime soon'. We asked anyway, like I said, they initially said yes. Then there was a change of heart and it was another 15 months."

FTR also spoke about when they rebelled against a written promo that was given to them.

"We were very persistent. We asked once a month maybe. We tried to get producers and writers to fight us. I remember one time, I was going over this promo, and I had the mic, and we were cutting it for everyone to do a run-through or whatever. And Hunter's standing there, and Michael Hayes is there, and Johnny Ace is there.

"I'm surprised he wasn't on Vince, but he was actually there. So I'm standing there, I'm cutting my promo, and the promo they wrote for us and the angle that we were going into was so bad. And I finished, and I said, 'who in the f--k wrote this, Martin Scorsese?' And I put the mic down, and then we got called to the office with Bruce Prichard and Triple H."