No Flips, Just Fists: A Tribute to Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler

By Mark O’Brien (@WrestleMobs)

There is a car park outside the Curtis Culwell ntre in Garland, Texas, that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

I sat there for an hour after Supercard of Honor XV on Friday, 1 April 2022. I had just watched FTR beat The Briscoes in twenty-seven minutes and twenty-five seconds to win the ROH World Tag Team Championship. And something inside me, something I had been dragging around for five years, had just broken open.

I want to write about FTR — Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler — because they are, without qualification or hedging, the greatest tag team of their generation, and one of the greatest tag teams ever to lace boots. That is the tribute I owe them as a fan and writer. But I cannot write that piece honestly without telling you what they did for me personally one night in Garland, because it is the reason I am here to write anything at all.

This is a piece about craft. It is also a piece about being met at the right moment by the right thing.

Case on Its Merits

Before anything personal, the case on its own terms.

FTR’s claim to tag team greatness is not a vibe or a marketing line. It is quantified and qualified in a ledger. In WWE as The Revival, Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler — then Scott Dawson and Dash Wilder — became the first team in company history to hold the NXT, Raw, and SmackDown tag titles. First ever Triple Crown tag team champions. They did that while the company was actively trying to bury the division, while creative kept workshopping gimmicks nobody wanted, while a main roster run that should have been a coronation became an exercise in institutional indifference. They won anyway. They won because they were better than what they were being asked to do.

They left. They spent two months on Dynamite in the summer of 2020 wrestling without a contract, because Tony Khan asked them to and they believed him. When they eventually signed, they were babyfaces because they had saved The Young Bucks from an attack — a bit of writing that is almost too neat when you consider how long those two teams would go on to define each other. They won the AEW World Tag Team Championships at All Out 2020 from Hangman Page and Kenny Omega. They lost them. They got them back. They got them back again. They are now three-time AEW World Tag Team Champions, tied for the record.

They won the IWGP Tag Team Championships at Forbidden Door. They won the AAA World Tag Team Championships. They won the ROH World Tag Team Championships — twice — and the first of those reigns is the one I am going to come back to, because it happened in Garland.

They did all of this while wrestling a style that, on paper, was a commercial suicide pact. “No flips, just fists.” A throwback to an era most of their audience was not alive for. Southern tag wrestling. Brainbusters. Midnight Express. Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard. In an era where tag matches were increasingly sprints — dive festivals, four-way tornado spot-fests, every sequence trying to outdo the last — FTR went the other way. They slowed it down. They sold limbs. They built heat. They made you care about an arm bar in the year 2023.

That is the craft argument. You can find a dozen versions of it written by better-credentialed people than me. What I want to add, because I am one of those who can, is what happens on the other side of the camera when two men are that good at what they do. What happens to the people who watch.

Backstory

Garland does not make sense without this section, so here it is, briefly.

My mother died in 2017 after a long illness. In 2021 I broke my neck playing rugby, which ended a career I had been building since 2010 at various levels.

So by the early months of 2022 I was grieving, without a sport, and without the particular outlet that a decade in rugby gives you for managing what is happening inside you. I had a professional career. I had the apparatus of a functional adult life. I had plenty to be getting on with.

I flew to the United States that March with a friend to complete a bucket list activity, attending WrestleMania. However that weekend in Dallas had a separate card I could not look away from. FTR versus The Briscoes had been teased since Final Battle 2021, when Dax and Cash had shown up after The Briscoes’ twelfth ROH tag title win and sparked a pull-apart brawl. For anyone who had grown up on this stuff, this was the match.

The show was on 1 April 2022. My mother’s anniversary was 4 days later. I did not plan it that way, purely coincidental.

Garland

The Curtis Culwell Center is not a cathedral. It is a multi-purpose arena in a Dallas suburb, the kind of building that hosts high school graduations and regional volleyball tournaments. Nine thousand seats. Low ceiling. It did not need to be a cathedral.

The match itself is a twenty-seven-minute argument for professional wrestling as a serious art form. Two teams who had spent years being told they were the best of what was left of a dying form, finally in the same ring, with a belt on the line, on the first show of ROH’s new Tony Khan era. If you have not watched it, stop reading this and go watch it. I will wait.

Back? Good.

What FTR and The Briscoes did in Garland is the thing that, when it is done this well, cannot be done anywhere else. It is not film. It is not theatre. It is not sport. It is its own thing, and when it works, there is nothing else like it. They built the crowd from the first lockup. They told a story with bodies. The split crowd that became a unanimous one. The near falls that made grown men shriek. The moment in the final third when it stopped feeling like a match and started feeling like a vigil for a form of wrestling everyone in the room had been told was dead. FTR hit the Big Rig, Cash dove onto Jay, and Dax covered Mark for the pin. The referee’s hand came down. New champions.

Something afterwards came loose in me.

I do not fully understand, even now, the mechanism. I know there is a whole literature about catharsis, and I know that wrestling has always been a place where people who do not know how to process things go to process them by proxy. I know that watching two people do something with absolute competence and absolute love for the thing they are doing can reach parts of you that the conventional tools cannot. I know the timing mattered. I walked into that building 4 days before an anniversary I had been carrying quietly for years, and the building was ready for me in a way I had not been ready for it.

I made it to the car park to call for an Uber. I sat there for an hour. And for the first time in a long time, I could breathe.

I went to WrestleMania the next two nights. I could not tell you much about it, not a huge amount registered or landed in comparison with what I had seen the night prior. I was still in Garland.

What Followed

I want to be careful here, because stories about wrestling saving lives are stories wrestling tells itself, and some of them are true and some of them are nice myths, and the honest version of this one has to include the part the myth leaves out.

Attending SuperCard of Honor, and seeing FTR vs Briscoes did not directly save my life, but it certainly opened a door. What I did after walking through it is what saved my life. That work was mine and most of it is not for a wrestling essay, but it was real and it took years and it is the reason the rest of this paragraph exists.

I started writing about wrestling. I had never written about wrestling before. By the end of 2022 I had bylines at Bodyslam, then Wrestling Inc, Wrestlezone, Wrestle Inn, PW Musings and Voices of Wrestling. I started the WrestleMobs interview series with friends from the Irish Wrestling scene (Irish Wrestling Entertainment). I trained in a number of schools across Ireland and the UK. I wrestled on a handful of shows. I got invited to events and media junkets by WWE and AEW as credentialed media.

In early 2023 I met Dax and Cash for the first time at a For the Love of Wrestling event in Manchester. I met them again the night before All In 2023 at Wembley — they invited me to spend time with them and colleagues, the night before the biggest wrestling show of all time. Same again the night before All In 2024. Same again before Forbidden Door 2025. Four separate occasions now where two men who owe me absolutely nothing have given me their time. I have not, in any of those meetings, told them the full version of the story in this essay, but I have certainly expressed parts of it, largely because there is no need. Men like Dax and Cash have met enough of us with similar stories to my night in Garland to understand the impact they have had on people’s lives, directly and indirectly.

I applied to an MBA programme. I got into the top-ranked course in Europe, on a scholarship, which I still cannot quite believe when I write it out. I completed it. I graduated. I got consulting job I could only dream of, while coaching rugby at a semi professional level. I have a new relationship. There is a new life.

I have bought, at last count, every piece of merchandise FTR have released since their WWE days. Every one. I have nearly every action figure. I scour eBay, Pro Wrestling Tees and the AEW shop at weekends looking for old drops. This is not a flex. This is how fans like me say thank you when we do not know how else to say it.

What They Do, and Why It Matters

I want to circle back to the craft, because I have buried the lead on purpose and now I want to dig it up.

The thing FTR do, at their best, is the oldest thing in professional wrestling. They make you believe. Not in them — anyone charismatic can do that — but in the match. In the stakes. In the idea that an arm bar applied by a man who genuinely wants to hurt the other man is the most interesting thing in the world for the eight seconds it is happening.

In a form that increasingly prizes the exceptional — the dive, the flip, the table spot, the shock — FTR prize the connective tissue. The transitions. The reason one thing leads to another. There is a structural intelligence to their work that I think is going to be studied by wrestlers fifty years from now the way good tag teams now study The Midnight Express tapes. They are teaching a style that was, on all reasonable forecasts, going to die with the men who invented it. It is not going to die. They have students now, whether they asked for them or not. The floor of tag team wrestling in AEW, ROH, and on the independent scene is higher because of them.

And there is something else, which is harder to articulate and I will try anyway. There is a moral quality to what FTR do. Not moral in the puritan sense. Moral in the sense that there is a philosophy of labour underneath it. They show up. They do the work. They sell. They make the other team look good because the other team looking good is how the match looks good. They are pros in a sense that has been getting quietly vandalised in our culture for about thirty years. Watching them is, among other things, a reminder that there is dignity in being very, very good at a thing and caring about it more than you care about being seen caring about it.

This is what was underneath my night of clarity in that Garland car park, I think. I had spent a decade in rugby, a sport that teaches you a particular relationship with your body and with effort, and I had lost that sport, and I had not replaced what it gave me. FTR, in Garland, for twenty-seven minutes, reminded me what it looks like when people love a craft enough to suffer for it in public. That is not nothing. In the right moment, on the right weekend, it is everything.

What I Believe

I have said versions of this to other fans in other rooms, and I believe it: there are people walking around alive today who would not be, if not for Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler.

I do not say it as hyperbole and I do not say it for effect. I have been in rooms with fans who have told me variations of similar stories. Wrestling as a form has a peculiar power to reach people who cannot be reached by the conventional apparatus of help. It finds men who will not go to therapy and women who have tried everything else, and it sneaks up on them through a form they were told as adults they were too smart to love, and it does its quiet work. FTR, because of the specific style they wrestle and the specific story they tell with their bodies, do this as well as anyone in the business right now.

What FTR gave me, in the end, was not a distraction, cure or escape – it was a door — a specific door, opened on a specific night, at a specific moment, in a specific car park, far away from home — and a glimpse through it of what the next version of my life might look like. That glimpse was enough. The rest of it I managed with an awful lot of help, But I managed it because, for one night in Garland, Texas, two men who had once been told their style of wrestling was obsolete reminded me that sometimes the old forms are the ones that still work.

I do not know how to end a piece like this, because the truth is that it has not ended. I will be at more FTR matches this year at AEW All In at Wembley Stadium on August 30th,  and RevPro 14th Anniversary show the night prior in Wembley Arena, and the year after, for however long Dax and Cash choose to keep doing this. I will buy the next t-shirt. I will chase down the next figure. I will write the next thing.

But if you have read this far, and you have ever wondered what any of this is for — the wrestling, the fandom, the absurd devotion some of us bring to a form that much of the culture does not take seriously — I would offer, as my one piece of evidence, a car park in Garland, Texas, on a Friday night in April 2022. A person who had living in a dense fog for too long, sat on a kerb, finally able to breathe.

That is what FTR did for me. That is the craft of Professional Wrestling.

People walking around and thriving in life today is their legacy, and this is my tribute.

No flips. Just fists. Thank you, Dax. Thank you, Cash.