This is Part 2 of the Jimmy Jacobs retrospective. For Part 1, running 2003-2006, click here.
Jimmy Jacobs returned from his ACL injury in August 2007, pummeling a couple of students. They were simple tests to see how his leg felt. His first true challenge was at September’s Motor City Madness 2007, against Chris Hero. While playing a goofball at the time, Hero was one of the biggest men on the roster and one of the most proficient technical wrestlers. Jacobs wore a heavy leg brace and, despite his aggressive wrestling style, was even more limited in terms of the agility wrestlers of his size normally used. When Hero bullied him and attacked his leg, Jacobs visibly tried to keep his cool, while Lacey looked more upset for him. In Jacobs’s time away their roles had flipped: Jacobs was trying to think his way through matches, while Lacey cared more for her client.
Jacobs beat Hero with a new finishing hold, a Guillotine Choke he called “The End Times.†It was the same finisher that another little man of enormous heart, James Gibson, had used. It was even more suitable to Jacobs, as all it required was the tenacity to hold on with the body grapevine as he tried to choke out his opponent. No one thought of Jacobs as a submission wrestler, but everyone could recognize how he could use it. It was the best indicator of his newly cerebral approach to matches, no longer requiring him to dive out of the ring or even struggle on a bad leg.
With that victory Jacobs proved what he need to prove to himself. He was ready.
Ready for what? For the next night, Ring of Honor’s 161st show.
For months plants in audiences had distributed flyers and posters for something called “Project 161.†An ominous blog foretold a grim change coming to ROH. Fans speculated on a stable of outsiders or Adam Pearce preparing a cult. No one predicted that Jimmy Jacobs, Necro Butcher and Tyler Black were all behind it.
They arrived after the Ladder War and battered the tag team champion Briscoe Brothers, stringing Jay Briscoe up by the same device that had suspended his belt. Jacobs stood underneath the bleeding champion in a white jacket and lectured the audience on the shallowness of love, corruption in society, and how these men would represent change. He wore the unwashed bloody jacket for many shows afterwards.
It was a disturbing visual, but Jacobs’s words made little sense. They were vague, attacking ideas like apathy or sin. Everything was apparently vile and we had things to learn. He gave no sense of how to fix things or exactly what he stood for other than disliking things as they were. Like so much counter-culture, his Age of the Fall group was simply Anti-Fill-in-the-Blank. He was an aspiring revolutionary whose revolution was inexplicable.
This was the new vision of Jimmy Jacobs, possibly nonsensical, but something for which he would destroy himself and others to preserve. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone who watched him pursue Generation Next or fall in love with Lacey. The Age of the Fall was his newest idea, embraced with full passion and forced onto the world, whether the world could understand it or not. It was just like two years prior, when he’d insisted Lacey would fall in love with him with music videos she detested and unrequited affections.
Except she was hanging on his arm now. If anything, winning the girl had validated his other desires and visions.
The attack at Man Up began a long war with the Briscoes. That was September of 2007, and now in September of 2008, with dozens of bent chairs, broken tables and bloodied weapons later, there is no real sign of an end to hostilities. The Briscoes beat Jacobs and Butcher in a decisive main event to Glory By Honor 6 Night 2, but the Age of the Fall didn’t blink. Jacobs and Black beat them for the tag titles at Final Battle 2007, lost them in early 2008 and watched as the Briscoes regained them – like cartoon cats, the two teams got sucked right back into the dust cloud and continued brawling. Except there was nothing cartoonish to what they did to each other: they abducted Mark Briscoe and jumped his brother in the halls. It became obvious that the tag titles were secondary to the hatred between the men. It looked like the feud would culminate at Supercard of Honor 3 in a wild match that saw Mark Briscoe leap off a balcony onto a new Age of the Fall recruit he’d never even seen before. That was in March. They will wrestle yet again in Japan this weekend, marking the one-year anniversary of a bloody grudge.
In that year Jacobs has still yet to properly explain his issue with the Briscoes. He did instantly make his outsiders named stars, and brought up his own stock considerably. But his biggest arguments against them was that they carried themselves poorly, getting drunk in public. Was that really a problem to a group that employed the half-crazy Necro Butcher? That would kidnap a man and wrap him in barbed wire in front of his family?
There is another theory, perverse as it is, that Jacobs picked the Briscoes because he knew they’d never stop fighting. They waged a year-long war against Steen and Generico in 2007; so long as Kevin Steen refused to let go of the issue, they’d fight him. So if Jacobs’s new vision meant needing antagonism, who better to fight than the brothers who never stopped fighting?
That was the Age of the Fall: capable of stirring great hatred, passionate enough to never let go of an issue, and acting on incomprehensible motivations. Like so many counter-culture movements they defined themselves by what they weren’t rather than being for something, and sometimes straddling hypocrisy.
But shouldn’t the other people in the revolution have worried? Looking at their ranks reveals why there was so little dissent.
Necro Butcher was the enforcer. He fought against ROH in the CZW war and effectively blackballed himself from the company. Jacobs’s stunt and Lacey’s managerial abilities might have been the only opportunities the crazy brawler had to get in. In 2008 when Butcher finally began to split from Jacobs he admitted his primary motivation here was to earn money to feed his family. Even if he cared for Jacobs or thought Jacobs cared for him, simple employment was a motive.
The other top recruit was Tyler Black, an undeniable blue chipper. He was conditioned, tall, fast and innovative. He’d secretly been writing all those charismatic and bitter blogs for Project 161. Jacobs might have looked at him and seen Alex Shelley five years ago.
Black looked at Jacobs and saw an opportunity to break into ROH. He’d been knocking at the door for a long time without getting so much as a student match. But he also saw commiseration. At Reckless Abandon in late 2007, Jacobs and Black opened the DVD by criticizing society and taking slights at their fathers. Family issues had never been brought up before.
Also at Reckless Abandon Black introduced Jacobs to Alison Wonderland, a fresh recruit with a hilarious pun name. For several shows afterwards he seemed to show more affection for Wonderland than Lacey.
In any case, both of Jacobs’s supporting wrestlers were guys on the outside of ROH, and the Age of the Fall was a way in. Later members like Joey Matthews and Zach Gowen were similarly guys who couldn’t get in or didn’t have even semi-steady appearances before Jacobs opened fire. When Matthews returned to ROH in January he was thankful to Jacobs, but his speech was mostly about himself, and how he would make this his year.
No one on the actual roster ran to join the Age of the Fall. Larry Sweeney, a master agent who was trying to sign anyone to his stable, never tapped the group. Cameras never caught a minute of ROH wrestlers trying discuss matters with Jacobs. In fact, Jacobs’s great attempt to recruit an ROH star blew up in his face.
Austin Aries was in a slump in early 2008. He disbanded his struggling stable in order to pursue the ROH World Title, but lost in both challenges. When he wrestled former protégé and former stable-mate Erick Stevens for the FIP title at Proving Ground the younger man won. Even teaming with the last remaining ROH founding father Bryan Danielson, Aries failed to win the tag team titles. He was frustrated to the point of no longer shaking hands and angrily disrespecting wrestlers who one-upped him in the ring. Jacobs saw a frustrated soul and reached out.
Aries wouldn’t respond. He snubbed everyone in the Age of the Fall for weeks, no matter how many speeches or promises they plied him with. Even when Jacobs promised to help Aries win the World Title at Supercard of Honor 3, Aries refused and went into the match alone. When he lost, the Age of the Fall hit the ring and demanded an answer: was he in or not? But Aries was in no mood to listen to them, at least not until Lacey took him by the hand and promised to “convince†him in private. Jacobs grabbed Lacey’s other hand and looked at her with more emotion than he’d done since the feud with Whitmer. For a moment, surrounded by his revolutionaries, he was the Heart Broken Kid again.
The disdain Aries had shown for the group grew over the ensuing shows. No, he wasn’t joining, but Lacey was leaving. They became a couple and shamelessly made out in front of Jacobs, reducing him to tears in the ring. Whatever rambling vision he had for the Age of the Fall disintegrated as he used them for revenge, to attack Aries and make a point. But when he finally caught the former World champ and had his men hold him down, Jacobs couldn’t find satisfaction in stabbing him. He wanted to make him hurt the way Jacobs himself was hurting.
It seemed a stunningly anti-climactic point until a video appeared on youtube. Fellow Age of the Fall members watched as Jacobs stalked Lacey to her favorite gym. They spoke briefly before Jacobs pulled a spike out of his cane. The camera went off before we could see what happened, but Lacey has never been seen again since. Did he stab her? Is she in a hospital, or in hiding? Has she quit the business out of fear of something she never imagined managers would experience, back when she began as a manipulator of contracts?
Aries threw himself at the Age of the Fall, and again the group was entangled in a feud with no end in sight. A match with Jimmy Jacobs at Vendetta 2 and a decisive victory didn’t quiet him. They couldn’t even get an ending to their tag match at Respect is Earned 2 on pay per view, where the two brawled out of the ring and left Tyler Black and Bryan Danielson alone. Unsurprisingly Aries aligned with the Briscoes, forming a crude unit that fought tooth and nail, chair and fist on show after show. Aries is scheduled to wrestle an unannounced Age of the Fall member at the next PPV taping, and one can hardly expect that to end it.
Perhaps Aries’s greatest revenge was driving doubt into the Necro Butcher. Almost like what Colt Cabana had done for Jimmy Jacobs two years prior, Aries asked him if he was really happy and tried to coerce him into accepting a more respectable life. But unlike Cabana’s real sympathy, Aries was driven by bitterness, wanting to take apart Jacobs’s proud group. Aries used the Vendetta 2 match as a setup, using the winning stipulation to force Jacobs and Butcher to wrestle each other. He pushed and goaded until Jacobs made a few mistakes, and a confused Necro Butcher turned on him at New Horizons. Ironically, Butcher turned on Aries, too, shoving both men off a ladder. He claimed he didn’t need anybody. In true Age of the Fall style, he was just rebelling.
Most recently Jacobs made his only ROH roster recruit: Delirious. He was the perfect candidate, already mentally unhinged, often abused by bigger wrestlers, and heartbroken. Delirious had been pursuing Daizee Haze with doe eyes, but she turned him down. After Rhett Titus showed him a highly suggestive video about his girl, the lizard man went despondent. In a match against Titus, Delirious threw knee after knee into his head until the referee had to stop the match. It was the first ref stoppage Delirious had ever earned in a five-year tenure with the company.
Jacobs descended right after the match, ranting about the true lies of love. He reached out to a purposeless, love-hurt Delirious and caught him. Even Haze couldn’t talk him out of it.
Perhaps the whole counter-culture angle of the Age of the Fall was a marketing ploy by Jacobs and friends to get into the company and make themselves stars. Counter-culture has made a lot of musicians a lot of cash. It could have been their own Generation Next, with eyeliner.
The revolution still could have been real to Jacobs, but that might have made him the biggest opportunist of all. Sending Necro Butcher to endless hardcore matches against people who annoyed him, trying to pick up Aries and Delirious when they were weak, teaming himself with the brightest star who wasn’t in the company to win the tag titles twice, trying to build a cult of personality around himself to stabilize a dream. One could say he was using all these people to the ends of his personal revolution, born when successful love didn’t satisfy him.
Or it could be that Jacobs was the biggest opportunist of the lot because he used all those people for all those things to perpetuate his newest vision. There had been a time when he could just fight for the sake of fighting, hussing and being an underdog. But maybe he needed this now, needed to be needed by others, and see them do what he wanted, just as he’d once been manipulated. Maybe the thoughts going through his head when he frowning with the girl in his arms was realizing he didn’t have to settle for being someone’s equal. But the manipulator needed a grand design, and Jacobs was the sort who could convince himself he had one, even if the next year pelted him with evidence that his design could never be realized.
And think of how awful that would be. To fight so many battles, to hurt himself so often and to make permanent enemies of so many incredibly resilient men, all for nothing. If it was true and Jacobs began to recognize it, would he admit it? Or would he have to deny it, just as he’d denied the pain Alex Shelley had inflicted in 2004, and Lacey’s ambivalence in 2006?
Most ironic was that his insane rhetoric and politicking clouded the best run of his ROH career. At Unscripted 3 Jimmy Jacobs choked out Bryan Danielson in singles competition, where Danielson had dismantled him years before. He won the tag titles twice more with Tyler Black at Final Battle 2007 and Up For Grabs. And in the defining moment of Jacobs’s career, he walked into Tag Wars 2008 with his upstart partner Tyler Black, and beat the Murder City Machine Guns of Chris Sabin and Alex Shelley. Alex Shelley, visiting hero from TNA, the bright star on national TV who visited Zero-1 and Mexico, who had tied up, caned and tossed away a little man all those years ago – and Jimmy Jacobs beat him. This whole second column could have been about his development in the ring, but his emphasis was obviously outside it.
Even now, a week away from a World Title shot, yet another potential climax with the Briscoes, two weeks away from Steel Cage Warfare and with Aries still hunting him, Jimmy Jacobs is lost. It would almost be better if he couldn’t bring the World Title to the Age of the Fall, and if his team lost in the cage match. Maybe in defeat Jimmy Jacobs can realize what he really wants before he destroys himself for another vision.
That does it for me. Did you like the last two weeks of my Kayfabe Apologist act? Please let me know in comments section or by e-mail at baskadrariren@aim.com. Also around the internet this week:
-There’s always my blog of monologues and microfiction at www.johnwiswell.blogspot.com. We’ve got Mechagodzilla melodrama and naked Olympians over there.
-Vinny Truncellito looks at the legacies of wrestling families
-Mark Buckeldee surveys Japan
-And apparently The Wrestler rules
