AEW Stars Upset After Stokely Outshines Them

One AEW star has admitted that they’re responsible for Stokely Hathaway’s job in AEW, despite initial plans having to be shelved.

Stokely Hathaway is short, bald and can get precisely zero hoes. But despite that, he’s made a success of himself in AEW, mainly by leeching onto successful in-ring stars such as his current clients, FTR.

In April 2025, Stokely joined up with Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler to try and catapult them back to the top of AEW’s tag team division. Hathaway had joined the company three years earlier, and it seems, it was always the plan for him to join up with the Top Guys.

FTR Got Stokely Hired By AEW

Speaking on the Beyond The Bell podcast, Dax Harwood revealed that he and Cash Wheeler were responsible for getting Stokely Hathaway his job with AEW, although plans to put them together on-screen ended up having to wait:

The crazy thing is, when we were with the other company — the story is all out there — we were asking for our release, we wanted to leave, we wanted to quit. I had a meeting with the head of creative, and he asked me what I wanted to do… I said Stokeley’s name. I said, ‘I’d love to have him as our manager.’ And the head of the company said, “Okay, that’s not a bad idea, but he’s going into something else.’

Fast forward — we knew that we were wrapping things up with Tully Blanchard. I talked to Tony, and I said, ‘Hey, I think there’s this guy in NXT who’s an incredible mouthpiece. He can bump his ass off, and he’s very entertaining. I think he’d be a great gift 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. But as luck and fate had it, fans just all of a sudden started connecting with us on a different level than they’d ever connected before. They started liking us, and we got adored by the fans. So we didn’t want to bring in Stokeley to be with us at that time, but we had already gotten him the job.

And so he went on to do a few things, be with a few people — it didn’t work out. I think it didn’t work out because some of the people that he was with were a little upset that he was outshining them because he’s a small guy, bald, short, gets no hoes… we allow him to do most of the speaking because we know what he brings to the table as far as being a whole other tool for FTR. We’re lucky to have him, man, and I think he’s the best in the world at what he does right now.

Prior to being aligned with FTR on-screen in AEW, Stokely Hathaway had been partnered with Jade Cargill, The Firm, and Kris Statlander.