ROH on Sinclair – Episode 092 – 22nd June 2013

It’s an ippv weekend, and with the Briscoe Brothers headlining Best In The World 2013 in a World Title showdown, the TV show takes a break from regularly scheduled programming to air a ‘Briscoe Special’, focusing on the life and times of Jay and Mark and spotlighting their ROH career to date. It’ll make a nice change of pace from the usual show, and one I’m really looking forward to – even though it poses a conundrum on a personal level as I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to review this as yet. Lets see how we go. We’re in Sandy Fork, DE…on the Briscoe farm.

We open with Jay and Mark talking about their duties on the chicken farm, which they still maintain despite their active wrestling schedule. The ‘staged reality’ scenes with Papa Briscoe are hilariously dorky and a lot of fun. He orders them into the chicken shed, with Jay complaining about not getting enough respect for being multi-time Tag Champions…and Mark desperately trying to silence him before they get ‘whooped by the big man’.

Much of this is standard ‘tales from when we were kids’ stuff…but there are some interesting little morsels – like Mark keeping pitbulls and quite rightly saying it’s the owners rather than the dogs who are responsible for a dog’s aggression. Jay talks about going to watch an ECW show, getting Kronus’ blood on him and loving it. Mark estimates he’s gone through a ‘triple digit’ number of tables and takes the crew on a guided tour of various building he’s jumped off of.

Highlights from the Briscoe/Briscoe match at Honor Invades Boston are shown. Jay and Mark are completely unrecognisable from how they look today but it remains a great little match from the early days of Ring Of Honor. It’s also noticeable that Steve Corino is MILES better on commentary now.

The story of how Mark’s teeth got knocked out is finally revealed in ROH for the first time (particularly during the Gabe era, there were lots of amusing stories flying around about how he did it – from a bar room brawl to jumping off a production truck and landing on his face etc), with Jay and Mark giving their sides of the story of how Jay accidentally knocked his teeth out with a chair during a match in the ECW Arena. They were teaming with each other by the way.

Next it’s more old school highlights, with the Briscoes (led by Jim Cornette) defeating Special K to win the ROH Tag Titles for the first time. The days of Gabe on commentary and the likes of Special K and Carnage Crew wrestling feels like a hundred years ago now. Jay Lethal (as Hydro) can be seen running around at ringside too.

‘There you see some slut at ringside’ – Gabe describing one of the Special K girls. 

The brothers talk about their feud with Steen and Generico in 2007 – leading to the Man Up ppv and their iconic Ladder War in Chicago. Jay admits that the stuff they did during their epic title reign that year (for my money the Briscoes run as champions in ’07 is still the best Tag Title reign to date) was unsustainably crazy. ‘If I wasn’t so damn banged up I’d still be doing that sh*t though’ – Jay. Since it was five years ago and the company has grown in a vastly different direction since then, it’s entirely plausible there are ROH fans who have never seen Ladder War 1. You guys need to track it down at all costs as it truly is one of Ring Of Honor’s all-time great matches. In highlight form, cut down for TV, it’s still utterly spectacular.

Papa Briscoe reminisces about his ROH debut at Final Battle 2010, and has a huge smile on his face so clearly he had a great time. Sinclair even air footage from HDNet, showing him running into the ring to attack the Kings Of Wrestling. And this goes seamlessly into Jay rolling around a wrestling ring with his own son, which is a touching (if slightly disturbing) visual.

Tape Rating - *** - This was a really fun change of gears from the usual show. A lot of it was fairly standard for a wrestling biopic, and of course they couldn’t really break kayfabe on TV which limited how much detail they could go into - but this was still an interesting hour of television. It was great to see some old school clips see the light of day (I really think the current product should be selling itself as the ‘proving ground’ for today’s biggest stars – considering the likes of Aries, Joe, Danielson, Punk, Daniels, Claudio, Tyler, Sydal and more are all on television for major promotions now, but all have routes going back to their time in Ring Of Honor). If Jay and Mark don’t wind up coming back to ROH after their hiatus during the summer of 2013 then this was a nice way to bookend their career here.
 

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