AEW Double or Nothing: FTR never stopped believing tag-team wrestling could matter again
FTR helped revive tag-team wrestling by refusing to treat it like a stepping stone. Now, as another legacy-defining AEW title defense looms, they're calling their shots atop the game's all-time pantheon.
The year is 2016, and The Revival — Dash Wilder and Scott Dawson — are tasked with opening one of the biggest shows of the year, WWE’s NXT: TakeOver Dallas. The previous 12 months have seen Wilder and Dawson establish themselves as a tag-team to watch in a division suddenly reinvigorated with powerhouses, flashy personalities and exceptional athletes. Yet amid all the bombast, The Revival, coupled with their “No flips, just fists” slogan, withstand as the no-frills glue that keep the company’s tag-team engine running.
Standing across the ring from the ultra-over and the incredibly athletic American Alpha, fans mock the NXT tag-team champs, serenading them with “which one’s Dawson, which one’s Dash. ” But over the next 15 minutes on this night, a switch flips . By match’s end, the audience no longer cares who is who.
They’re captivated — and more importantly, they’re invested in the outcome. As American Alpha capture the tag belts, the fans erupt. And in defeat, the moment cements The Revival as foundational pieces of wrestling’s next tag-team boom.
It also becomes a catalyst for what they accomplish over the next 10 years. More than a decade later, The Revival is now known as FTR, with Dawson and Wilder now stylized as Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler in AEW. They’ve built a résumé unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern day of professional wrestling.
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