Jump to content
DVDVR Message Board

WRESTLER OF THE DAY: JIMMY JACOBS


RIPPA

Recommended Posts

Jimmy Jacobs is a helluva worker that always manges to be involved with great gimmicks.

 

I am digging the Jimmy Jacobs run with The Decade even though I can't really see Jacobs in the role of grizzled surly veteran that demands respect from the newcomers.  Jimmy being Jimmy makes me buy into the gimmick.

 

Team DIFH and the Jimmy Loves Lacey angle were both high comedy.

 

I never really understood the whole deal with the Age Of The Fall but they delivered some great assbeatings.

 

I think that too many people pay too much attention to the emo thing and not enough attention to Jimmy being a king sized wrestler.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

First time I saw the "Ballad of Lacey" entrance live in ROH is still one of my favorite things ever. He had the Wyatts beat by almost 10 years.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That angle where he hung one of the Briscoes upside down while blood was pouring from his head was freaking disturbing even for wrestling.

 

Yeah, that was the birth of the AOTF stable.  When I saw this, I had to check the tape to make sure the handmade lable didn't say ECF: Circa 1996.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't mean this as a back handed compliment, but there was a stretch with Jacobs where he was easily the best promo on the Indies. Maybe I'm in part projecting here, but I think a lot of people tend to view Indy wrestlers as people who don't have the complete package (for if they did, they would be in developmental or on Raw every week), so when a performer excels so clearly at one thing, people naturally assume he isn't as good at another. Because of this, Jimmy has always been viewed as a great guy to have around to carry a storyline or be a mouthpiece, but not a big match wrestler. It's a shame, because he has evolved as a performer in ring and character wise, and has had great matches through basically every period. I think Jacobs had a severely underrated title run in IWA MS, and his two big Whitmer matchs for IWA are amazing. I've been to a huge number of ROH shows from the 04-09 period, and the cage match posted above still stands out to me as one of the best ROH matches (from a time during which that was a major accomplishment).

 

I think he is a person you have to see live to really appreciate, because he is one of the few wrestlers on the Indies (or on TV for that matter) that is always doing something during a match. Jacobs isn't ever going to put on a clinic like Daniel Bryan might, but Jacobs never has a moment where he isn't listening to the crowd, reacting, thinking and adjusting accordingly. His matches never feel like they are just going from spot to spot. In another life, he would have made a great improv partner.   

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

That angle where he hung one of the Briscoes upside down while blood was pouring from his head was freaking disturbing even for wrestling.

That's what I was gonna mention too.  I've never even seen the tape, but simply the idea of this dude standing there cutting a promo while another guy's blood is dripping all over his bleached-white suit... that's different, man.  Almost more like something you'd do in an e-fed as opposed to a real-world company.  That was probably Jimmy's idea, but who was booking at the time (and had to have okayed it)?  

 

I've actually never watched terribly much ROH; at least a couple dozen complete shows, three or four hundred matches easily, bu that's not THAT much compared to how much I've seen of the WWF/e.  So I've just heard about most of Jimmy's big stuff and not actually seen most of it.  I wasn't paying for tapes, most Nashville guys didn't watch a hell of a lot of other current indy shit so I couldn't see it with my friends, and I didn't discover Youtube until embarrsasingly late in life, like 2007-ish.  My overall undereducated opinion: "funny dude, hard worker, I understand why people like him, but he always kinda felt like a kid playing at being a wrestler instead of the real deal.  Some guys, I just don't buy 'em as insanely evil heels (the Fallen Angel gimmick is another one, whenever Christopher Daniels isn't playing to his strengths) because they simply don't scare me.  I don't buy that other wrestlers would follow this guy and do whatever he says (even despite the clear concrete evidence that they literally are doing exactly that, at least in terms of the usual shoot cliques you tend to get in the locker room whenever worked stables form for a long-term angle).  I buy people following Piper, Jake, Punk; but Jacobs?  Does HE belong right next to those other guys, seriously?  Nah, he's on the B-list, right next to Kevin Sullivan in the "trying too damn hard, you Grant Morrison of wrestling" category.  

 

I do remember the Barbarian match being about as good as it could've possibly been; man, it's incredibly hard to teach the younger Botchamania-trained generation of smarks to believe that certain hardcore-themed companies had tons of good matches.  If you're hyping up this one awesome old-school-throwback Tracy Smothers vs Bill Dundee match (this is hypothetical), you still lose the kids the instant you mention "...and it was promoted by Ian Rotten in 2007."  I think CZW gets it the worst, I'm not sure why, but practically all the old deathmatch feds are a punchline to the next generation of fans.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jacobs' run in ROH from 2004-2007 was absolutely outstanding and should have solidified him as one of the top top top indy guys. The way he was able to transition from childlike comedy wrestler who thought he was the Berzerker to psychotic cult leader who thought he was emo Jesus remains so incredibly impressive, each little stage in that evolution was so natural and perfectly realised. His Steel Cage match with BJ Whitmer posted above is possibly the best epic feud ender that ROH ever did, and his promos surrounding that match are the best I've ever seen in an indy promotion. Some of the comedy stuff he did was really really funny as well, particularly the 'Jimmy Loves Lacey' stuff, you wouldn't believe that was leading somewhere so dark. 

 

I get what Jingus is saying about him being too small to be believable as this leader of men, but I think that it's unfair to dismiss Jacobs even slightly because of your own personal prejudices surrounding that, he did pretty much everything right in trying to portray himself as a dangerous maniac despite being small even for ROH, and personally I thought he was by and large very convincing, especially because he never tried to be this all-powerful, magnetic leader- the group were almost always on the brink of collapse, and it was always because Jacobs was just not quite cut out to lead. He never put together a proper reason as to why the group existed, instead just spouting vague anti-corporate slogans and hoping that would be enough to legitimise them; he accidentally drove his girlfriend Lacey out the group and then had an in ring breakdown when she left him for Austin Aries; he grew jealous of Tyler Black and kicked him out despite the fact he was by far the most successful wrestler they had; he tried to brainwash both The Necro Butcher and Delirious and failed with both...  I liked The Age of the Fall angle a lot. I think in many ways people just didn't understand it properly and were expecting them to be, like. an indy version of the N.W.O, rather than just this deranged fantasy of this ultimately pathetic little guy. 

In short, I think Jacobs is just brilliant, and it's a shame he hasn't really shown that very much these last few years. He's proven before he can be one of the smartest talents out there, I hope he'll get to demonstrate that again someday.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Punk got his start in Ian Rotten's IWA-MS. Didn't Ambrose do most of his up-and-comer wrestling in CZW?

 

Jacobs was probaby ahead of his time in that he kinda peaked as a worker and talker while WWE still was hyooge on a big man fetish. If he had hit that stride today, WWE would at least sign him to a developmental deal, since they're not quite as hot on how big a guy is as long as they can go and can talk.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A very drugged up Jacobs was a huge dick to me backstage for no real reason once, but I still dig a lot of his stuff. I definitely share Jack and JRGoldman's opinions on him. But his past drug problem and backstage attitude during that time stopped him from being a bigger deal after 2007/2008. But he's been getting more shots in the past year or two, so good for him.

 

His best promos were backstage ones though. He wasn't as good with a live mic, but he was still pretty solid. 

 

Gabe Sapolsky uploaded one of the Moxley/Jacobs matches on Youtube not too long ago. I'm not sure why it was taken down. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I get what Jingus is saying about him being too small to be believable as this leader of men, but I think that it's unfair to dismiss Jacobs even slightly because of your own personal prejudices surrounding that, he did pretty much everything right in trying to portray himself as a dangerous maniac despite being small even for ROH, 

Huh?  I never mentioned his size.  No, his size didn't help buying him as being able to have competitive brawls with dudes triple his mass, and without that special Spike Dudley aspect to his gimmick to explain how he's able to do this.  But that ain't what I was talking about.  

 

Overall he just felt like someone playing at this role, rather than the old "your gimmick should be the Real You, except with the volume turned up to eleven" rule of thumb.  (For a multimedia example: compare Vince Vaughn's version of Norman Bates to Anthony Perkins's original.)  He's certainly not the only one, most guys start out like that for the first few years of their career.  I remember watching the LowKi/AmDrag tournament finals from the 2000 edition of the Super 8, and grumpily wondering who these children were trying to fool with their blatant Misawa/Kawada cosplay spots.  

 

Sometimes that feeling can last forever; even a pro as seasoned as Triple H sometimes feels like he's trying too hard to convince everybody that he's something which he's really not, ya know?  All that "Harley Race epic tribute" stuff he does in his matches, all the King Of Kings nonsense.  When he's trying to claim that he's on the same level of performer as Stone Cold and Undertaker and HBK, I don't buy it.  I'm rolling my eyes.  Same with Jimmy Jacobs as a demented cult leader.  Now obviously this is my problem since there's plenty of people who do buy it just fine; but as anyone who's ever read a single DVDVR Movie Club thread knows, I gots me some strange opinions on art and storytelling sometimes.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...