Dax Harwood Wanted To Impress Bret Hart In CM Punk Match

Dax Harwood has made no secret of his love for Bret Hart, with Harwood and FTR partner Cash Wheeler attempting to recruit the former WWF and WCW World Heavyweight Champion to be their manager.

Harwood recently wrestled CM Punk in an excellent singles match on AEW: Dynamite - with Punk also being a self-confessed fan of The Hitman - and Harwood admitted to PWInsider’s Mike Johnson that he wanted to impress Bret during the bout:

"I take professional wrestling way too seriously. That's because it is my livelihood and how I feed my family. It has saved my life many times over. That's a shoot, that's real,” began Harwood. “Ultimately, I want to give back to professional wrestling. As a tag team, Cash and myself have done that time and time again. That's a little bat on the back to us. Wednesday night was something… I don't like giving the magic away too much, but it was something I was extremely proud of for a lot of different reasons. The match, ooff, just talking about it gets me a little emotional because of how much it meant to me. I wanted to impress Bret and I wanted him to say, 'this is the kind of wrestling I look forward to and I want to put out.' I also want fans today to say, 'holy s***, that was a different kind of match than I'm used to and I liked it.' On top of that, I wanted the boys and girls in the back to watch the match and say, 'this is a different approach to what I thought I knew and maybe we can implore some of those tactics in our matches as well.’

“The match, sentimentally, meant a lot to me. When I got to the back, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, a future Hall of Famer, came up to me and said, 'you are the perfect professional wrestler and, I've never said this before in my career, but that was the perfect professional wrestling match.' That's all the validation I needed. Bret Hart texted me before the match and said, 'I cannot wait to watch this match.' That was pretty cool too.”

Cash Wheeler gave his thoughts on the match, saying:

"I just want to say, the match was incredible and I hope that, not just aspiring wrestlers, but anyone in wrestling that wants to get better and learn, I hope they watch that match because it was that good. [William] Regal gave the advice the other day, 'the best wrestling matches are when the two or four wrestlers are trying to outsell the other.' Both guys sold their asses off the whole match and made everything mean something. Even the superplex, they built for that for over two minutes instead of doing 13 things off the top rope and getting up from all of them to move on to the next. They tried to outsell each other and the match was better because of it. That's why people should go back, watch, and understand that it's not about just getting your s*** in.”

H/T: Fightful