That Was Then, Is This Too? 10.13.09: The Ballad of Lacey

Posted by Jasper Gerretsen on 10.13.2009

Join us for another edition of That Was Then, Is This Too?, as I take a look back at one of the most tragic characters in ROH history.

Welcome to yet another installment of That Was Then, Is This Too?, the column that looks for parallel lines in all the right places. As usual, we have comments:

What about Iron Sheik in the Pan Am games??
Ken Patera, Mark Henry, Angle

Posted By: FUZEY (Guest) on October 06, 2009 at 01:43 PM

I was talking about wrestlers with Olympic wrestlers, and I did actually mention the first three in one of my opening paragraphs.

Great article!

You are awesome!

Not as awesome as Small or Dunn. But I consider you the "Wonder Woman" of the Big 3.

Keep it up Diana...

Posted By: The Fuj (Guest) on October 06, 2009 at 07:57 PM

While I won't hesitate to put my flowing locks up against any of the 411 writers, I really don't look good in a corset. I do know a few rope tricks though.

I'm da real deal, all american mean machine AAU champwun. I put you in the camel clutch and make you humble. I could break your back but I won't, but I could. NINETY TREE TOWSAND!!!!

Posted By: Iron Sheik (Guest) on October 06, 2009 at 08:21 PM

Don't you have some threatening twitter posts to make? Or a Brian Blair to harass?

He was never a wrestler, but as special guest referee of the main event of Wrestlemania, Muhammad Ali deserves a mention as well. Certainly a part of professional wrestling history.

Posted By: The Second Greatest (Guest) on October 06, 2009 at 08:34 PM

To be honest I hadn't even thought of Ali, and I suppose his worked shoot with Antonio Inoki kind of qualifies him as a professional wrestler in the very loosest sense of the world.

I was going to bring up Bad News Allen aka Brown too.

There's also former AWA wrestler Brad Rheingans, who was on the 1976 and 1980 US Olympic wrestling teams (though the US boycotted the 1980 games). He went on to train a ton of pros who started out in the later days of the AWA.

Rheingans was alos the trainer for the early 90's all-women promotion the LPWA.

Posted By: Trashy (Guest) on October 08, 2009 at 08:25 AM

Bad News Brown is probably the biggest name I didn't list on that opening paragraph. I had to google Brad Rheingans, I had never even heard of him. His name does sound a bit European though, possibly German or Dutch.

That leads us to banner! 2.0!



Poor Jimmy Jacobs just can't catch a break. The man just wanted his own movement, his own revolution, a small group of misguided youth that would call him his leader. Unfortunately leading a revolution is tricky, as Jacobs found out the hard way at Violent Tendencies on July 26th, 2009, when, after a bloody cage match against former protégé Tyler Black, he was forcibly carried out of the building by a masked group of members of his own Age of the Fall movement.

It was the culmination of almost two years of guerilla warfare from the Age of the Fall against various opponents. It all started at the Man Up PPV taping in Chicago Ridge, when, after one of the wildest ladder matches I have ever seen, in which the Briscoe Brothers retained their titles against long time rivals Kevin Steen and El Generico, the person responsible for the cryptic websites and blogs threatening the Briscoe Brothers was revealed. While many (including myself) expected the person behind it all to be Adam Pearce, mostly thanks to the man's cryptic promos from earlier ROH PPVs, it turned out that the person behind it all was none other than Jimmy Jacobs, who, after a long and bloody feud with BJ Whitmer that left him seriously injured, had made his return to the company just a few weeks earlier.

Of course starting a revolution is hard work, and Jacobs certainly wasn't going to go at it alone. He was joined in his attack by insane deathmatch wrestler Necro Butcher and young upstart Tyler Black. Necro Butcher hadn't been seen in the company since the failed CZW invasion of 2006, and Jacobs claimed that he had brought Necro Butcher back because the fans wouldn't accept him because of his unorthodox look and violent style. Tyler Black meanwhile was a rising star of the midwest indy scene who had tagged with Jacobs in several different promotions, most noticeably for the short-lived Wrestling Society X promotion, but who, despite his many impressive performances in promotions like IWA-MS and FIP, had never been given a chance in ROH.

If anything can be said for Jimmy Jacobs, it's that the man knows how to make an impact. After Necro Butcher took out Mark Briscoe with a fist wrapped in barbed wire, the newly formed Age of the Fall picked up Jay Briscoe, strung him up by his ankles from the rig that the title belts had hung from for the ladder match, and hoisted him up to the rafters. With Jay Briscoe's blood pouring down on him, Jacobs announced that his revolution was here to stay. While ROH officials initially claimed that the scene was too violent to show in PPV, it ended up being part of a Video Wire as part of the promotional activities for the upcoming PPV.

The war with the Briscoes was on, with the Age of the Fall gaining victories over most of the ROH roster in both in singles, tag team and trios matches. The biggest win came on the company's return to Chicago Ridge, when Jimmy Jacobs beat former ROH champion Bryan Danielson by submission with his new End Time finisher at Unscripted III. While they initially had mixed success against the Briscoes, one shot at the tag team titles was all the pairing of Jimmy Jacobs and Tyler Black needed to capture the gold at the annual Final Battle supercard.

With the tag team titles firmly in their grip, it seemed like 2008 would be the year of the Age of the Fall. Their momentum came to a screeching halt however, when they were the first team eliminated in a four team Ultimate Endurance match at the Without Remorse show on January 26th, 2008. Jacobs only considered this to be a minor setback however, blaming ROH officials for setting up a series of unfair title defences. This accusation wasn't entirely baseless, as the team had only defended the titles in Ultimate Endurance matches.

As 2008 rolled on, Jacobs began bringing in more part-time members. The first he brought in was Joey Matthews, formerly known as Joey Mercury, the former WWE tag team champion that had been given his big break after years on the independent scene but lost it all to personal demons. Appearing with cut hair but familiar MNM tights, Matthews claimed that it was Jacobs who offered him a chance to redeem himself for his personal failures. Almost a month later Zach Gowen joined the stable too. The one-legged wrestler seemed to have a similar story, fulfilling his dream of becoming a professional wrestler despite his handicap and even wrestling for the two biggest wrestling companies in North America before, like Matthews, succumbing to a drug addiction.

Still riding high on his successful recruitment drive, Jacobs extended an open invitation to former ROH world champion Austin Aries, reaching out to him not only during ROH shows but also through their website and Youtube. Legendary diva Tammy Sytch got involved, offering Aries both money and her 'services' if Aries joined her in stead. This led to a feud between Lacey and Sytch, and while Aries rejected the advances of both parties Sytch was eventually driven from ROH by Lacey.

The recruitment drive for Aries didn't end there however, with Jacobs continuing to try to get Aries to join his group. The whole scheme backfired on him in a spectacular way however, when Aries turned the tables on him and tried to pull various Age of the Fall members out from under Jacobs' control. His first target was Lacey, the girl that Jacobs had spent the last three years fighting for, and in her efforts to seduce Aries for Jacobs she actually ended up being seduced by Aries in turn, declaring her intentions to leave Age of the Fall.

Jacobs took it about as well as could be expected of him. As he broke down in the ring the fans covered him in streamers and chanted "Cry, Jimmy, cry!" at him, and Jacobs ended the night with a therapeutic maiming of his own face with his trademark railroad spike. Eventually Lacey was ambushed outside of a gym, with a video of the altrication, cutting away as Jacobs drew his spike.

Aries, enraged at this, continued to feud with Jacobs and the Age of the Fall, with the feud growing more and more personal, eventually reaching the point where other members of the movement began to suspect that Jacobs had lost sight of what was really important. Aries successfully drove Necro Butcher away from the stable, and was indirectly responsible for Jacobs and Black losing the tag team titles they had regained when, following a match against Age of the Fall member Delirious at the 2008 Driven PPV, Jacobs brawled with Aries and ended up crashing through a table despite Black's pleas to focus on their title match in the main event of the show. They lost the titles to Kevin Steen and El Generico, and would not regain them again.

Jacobs and Aries continued to feud, with the rest of the Age of the Fall unable to do anything but follow their leader. Aries and Jacobs would face each other in a Steel Cage Warfare and Anything Goes match, before finally concluding their feud when Aries beat Jacobs in an I Quit match on the Rising Above 2008 PPV. The match saw the return of Lacey, who stole the towel Black was supposed to throw into the ring to save Jacobs from saying "I Quit", therefor making Jacobs' loss even more humiliating.

The Age of the Fall would never recover from the loss, even though Jacobs desperately scrambeled to find more members. The biggest blow to the stable would come at Final Battle 2008 when Jacobs decided to give Black his walking papers after Black failed to defeat Aries to become the new number one contender for the ROH world championship. Of course since this is the wrestling business, the walking papers came in the form of being kicked in the crotch and choked out.

With yet another disgruntled ex-member to feud with, the Age of the Fall quickly broke down. Jacobs now focused on punishing Black, but it was Black who ended up winning their bloody series of matches, with Jacobs being physically removed from Ring of Honor by his own followers. It seemed that the revolution was over, and soon after Jacobs' profile page was removed from the ROH website.

That Was Then...

In the end, the collapse of the Age of the Fall can be traced back to one woman: Lacey, the love of Jacobs' life. However, this wasn't the first time that she was responsible for a tag team that Jacobs was part of breaking up violently.

The impromptu team of Jimmy Jacobs and BJ Whitmer came about after ROH regular Dan Maff had a falling out with his mentor Homicide. The details of this falling out are sketchy at best, but it led Homicide to propose a simple ultimatum to all promotions that he and Maff appeared on: he would not appear in any promotion that continued to employ Maff. ROH, like most other promotions, chose Homicide over Maff, but this left BJ Whitmer without a tag team partner.

This is where Jimmy Jacobs came in. He had come into the company in 2003 under a semi-serious Berserker gimmick, wearing furry boots and shouting "huss" a lot. He hadn't really accomplished anything during his time in ROH however, but his big brother/little brother tag team with Whitmer seemed to change all that. Lacey meanwhile was looking for a dominant tag team to manage. She had split up the Special K stable to form Lacey's Angels, but she wasn't satisfied with the performances of her team of Izzy and Deranged.

When the team of Whitmer and Jacobs beat the two, she immediately ditched her old team to sign them. While she was able to lead them to two tag team title reigns, she was continuously frustrated by Jacobs' light-hearted attitude and desperately tried to turn him into a more serious wrestler, giving him a fancy ring robe and banning him from using his furry boots. Unfortunately Jacobs misunderstood Lacey's attention for genuine affection, and he ended up falling madly in love with her, becoming more concerned with impressing her than with securing victories for the team.

Whitmer began to notice this too, and it wasn't long before he became fed up with Jacobs' infatuation with their manager. On January 28th, 2006, the team received a title shot against the Generation Next team of Austin Aries and Roderick Strong, but once again came up short thanks to Jacobs being distracted. The two former team mates would start a feud, but it was put off several months as Whitmer became involved with the ROH vs. CZW feud that would dominate most of the company's shows during the first half of 2006. In stead, Jacobs would mostly feud with Colt Cabana, who was having a relationship with Lacey and constantly taunting Jacobs about this fact.

Eventually the war between Jacobs and Whitmer truly broke out, with both men out for each other's blood. Jimmy still felt betrayed by Whitmer, and the fact that Lacey demanded that he put Whitmer out of wrestling for good certainly didn't help. A perfect example of the absolute brutality of this feud was their 'match' at Dethroned, where both men just started wailing on each other before the bell even rang, and where referee Paul Turner was first dumped over the top rope by both men, then spiked in the face. To this day I can't think of any other example of a referee blading.

The feud was to be settled in a steel cage, and it was everything that the fans had come to expect from these two men, involving chairs, tables, barbed wire baseball bats and of course Jacobs' signature railroad spike. Even though he tore his MCL and lost both teeth, Jacobs won the match, and the night of ecstasy that Lacey had promised him.

That was not what Jacobs was interested in though. He genuinely loved Lacey, and wanted to do things properly. Although Lacey was reluctant at first, she agreed to go on four dates with him. Although he was clumsy and awkward, his puppy-dog affection eventually grew on her, and by the fourth date they ended up in a hotel room together, but when the camera took a peek afterwards, Jimmy didn't exactly looked like a man who had finally gotten what he wanted...





...Is This Too?

It seems that at this point it's fair to say that poor Jimmy Jacobs lost everything he ever loved to Lacey. First she robbed him of his furry boots and his rallying cry. Then she split him from his tag team partner, who was like a big brother to him. When she got truly fed up with his infatuation, she hooked up with Colt Cabana, and the pair seemingly did everything they could to crush Jacobs' heart. When she was done with Cabana, she pretty much turned Jacobs into a monster, just to get rid of Whitmer.

And yet, Jacobs still loved her. He had bled buckets and broke his body for her, and it wasn't until he almost killed himself (and Whitmer) that she was willing to take his advances seriously. As they lay in bed together, Jacobs reached a startling realisation, one that he based his entire revolution around: Love doesn't save, nothing saves.

With Lacey now loyally at his side, Jimmy was ready to save the world from itself, spreading his revolution through his newly formed Age of the Fall stable, bringing in a ragtag group of rejects that would take ROH by storm and give him the platform he needed to spread his message. Yet once again he was betrayed by Lacey, who jumped on another man pretty much the first chance she got.

Yet Lacey made one fatal mistake: the man she left this time around wasn't the lovesick puppy she had kicked around for the last two years. She had turned Jacobs into a monster, and when she once again stabbed him in the back he reacted like one. This time he didn't just lash out at his rival, but also at her, pretty much taking her out of ROH and its associated promotions for good.

But ridding himself from Lacey didn't save his revolution. He once again had allowed himself to become distracted, and it once again cost him his team mates. Thanks to Aries' interference, Necro Butcher realized that Jacobs would never consider him more than his dumb muscle, and he turned on Jacobs with a vengeance. Delirious proved Jacobs wrong about love not saving when he reconciled with Daizee Haze, and he personally kicked Tyler Black to the curb because he had cost him his pride in the I Quit match with Aries.

And once again, a bloody feud with his former partner followed, that once again ended in a steel cage. This time around however, Jacobs was on the losing end, and at that point even the anonymous masses of masked followers that had remained loyal up to that point turned on him, saving him from himself by literally carrying him out of Ring of Honor. Jacobs appears to be done with the company for now, but I can't wait to see which Jimmy Jacobs we'll see when he returns to Ring of Honor.