Found this great column over at 411Mania guys its really also. It documents the progression of Jimmy Jacobs since hes debut in ROH to present day, Read it and you will know how and why I'm such a mark for Jimmy and The Fall. Its really great read guys and hopefully you will enjoy it as much as i did.
Jimmy Jacobs: Life in Progress
Retrospect is important. It gives us the chance to see life through a better perspective—the lens of what has happened. When we see and understand our past, it can help us to understand what is happening in the present and perhaps what will happen to us in the uncertain future.
Looking back on the last four years of Jimmy Jacobs' career in Ring of Honor, one thing I am continually impressed by is that I can see the evolution of his character. If you see a picture of Jacobs in 2004 and compared it with the present day, you'd be looking at two totally different personas, down to the hairstyle, the costuming and attitude. Yet it is the same man underneath the eyeliner—just older, more experienced, and even more hardened by the events of life.
At times he has been a fun loving do-gooder, a lovesick Cyrano, a jealous third wheel and a rebel figure taking aim at the world around him. If it sounds and feels like childhood, high school and twenty-something adulthood, then I think you're starting to get what "Jimmy Jacobs" is all about. Jacobs is portraying a human whose life is continually changing based on the context of his situation. He is a living metaphor for everything we as humans experience in this modern life.
To be honest, I think that's exactly the point that Jacobs has been trying to deliver with the portrayal of his character over the years. The fans who have stuck around for the long haul are able to see the different stages in his life take shape, molding him from a young and idealistic child into the embittered and disillusioned young adult he is today. That is the genius to the character he plays in ROH—a life developing even to this very moment.
Jacobs has shown us a diversity of emotional range throughout the years—the whole spate of human emotion. He has expressed anger, determination, envy, hopefulness, hopelessness and so much more in his feuds against the likes of Alex Shelley, BJ Whitmer, Colt Cabana and The Briscoes. What he feels in those situations, we have all felt at one time or another. He is the ultimate sympathetic character in Ring of Honor.
Jacobs' character is a lens through which we can see the development of human life. We all lead our lives day by day and don't get to see the larger picture until one day we stop to look at old photographs and videos and writings. Then we start to get the idea about how our life has developed. The key thing to remember is that our lives are still very much a work in progress. So is Jacobs' character in Ring of Honor.
The following is a look through the changes in Jacobs' character and my attempt to connect the various stages of his character with that of the development stages of human beings.
Jacobs began his ROH run as a sort of wide-eyed innocent boy. He wore Bruiser Brody inspired furry boots and yelled "Huss" a lot. Mostly he was just about having a good time with the crowd and doing his best in the ring. He really didn't know about all the pain and hardship ahead of him. That's us as children, playing with our toys and going about our day without a care, without ever really thinking about the outside world and the magnitude of the events that occur around us. History is taking place and leaving its mark on the world, but we're all hussing along, playing with our action figures or games.
We go to school, and we start to learn about the world around us, about how much more serious the world is than we thought. For Jacobs, his early school days would be his wars against traveling buddy and oftentimes in ring rival Alex Shelley. Jacobs would come out on the losing end of the bargain much more often than the winning end, thus learning a valuable lesson—not everyone walks out of life a winner. It was a painful lesson to learn, both mentally and physically.
Yet with all the harsh times in our life, we do experience joy and happiness as well. We revel in the victories large and small. Sometimes we even have backup, in the form of friends. We learn at an early age to socialize and find people who we can appreciate and trust. Jimmy Jacobs found a friend in BJ Whitmer and together they took on the difficult task of winning the ROH tag team titles. Together they accomplished that task on multiple occasions, happier more each time than the last that the power of their teamwork had done what many doubters thought they couldn't do—dominate the tag division.
Ultimately, we grow apart from many of our junior high school and high school friends. Sometimes betrayals of confidence occur and smash a friendship to pieces. Such an event happened in Jacobs' life. You see, Jacobs had developed a high school crush on the lovely Lacey. The crush had almost turned into obsession as it seemed his only concern was to impress her and thus win her love. While Lacey kept saying he needed wins in the ring to really win her over, he was losing matches because his feelings for her got in the way. BJ Whitmer had about enough of Jacobs being distracted and in essence tried to serve a wake up call to his friend. He hit him with an exploder suplex, thus blowing up their tag team and causing more change in Jacobs. He had learned that people do betray you no matter how much trust you put in them, no matter how far up and down the road you've traveled. He learned that some people put themselves selfishly ahead of their friends.
Jacobs was now a hurt teenager, struggling to find his identity, but determined to win the love of the girl of his dreams. He must have considered for days on end what it would take to win the love of Lacey, and his mind turned to the music movement of the time, emo. Jacobs began to dress emo, began to talk emo and even began to sing emo. He not only wrote love songs but he made large scale video productions dedicated to his love for the girl. This was a huge amount of effort going into the wooing process, and it didn't really seem to have much of an effect on Lacey. In fact, her attentions were diverted elsewhere…
The jock. He got in the way. He corrupted her, twisted her, and made her into something he knew she was not. It was always the jock. The bigger man, the more muscular man, the guy who didn't have the brains, but could make up for it with cool looks and a who-could-care-less attitude. He was the envy of the nerds and the geeks because he could get the girl with a snap of his fingers. Meanwhile, they had to scrape and crawl and work so hard to ultimately come up with nothing. Jimmy Jacobs' mind was torn apart when he caught Lacey in the showers with Colt Cabana that fateful day in August of 2006. He was crestfallen and heartbroken. He ran away from the site of the desecration of the girl on the pedestal. It was another betrayal of life to learn from, another scar left in his mind, changing the way he thought about the world.
Jacobs became even more obsessed with showing Lacey he could be the man for her. Meanwhile Colt Cabana was just using her for her body, hell, he was practically admitting to it in his interviews! Lacey didn't seem to mind either, because she had plans of her own. She wanted to bring Colt Cabana into the fold, become his manager and guide his wrestling career to untold heights. Yet, Cabana wanted no part of that, preferring to keep his business separate from his personal life. When Lacey wouldn't let up, he dumped her in a very rude and brusque manner. This angered Jacobs even more, because he would never do that to Lacey! In that anger, he saw opportunity. This was his chance—impress the girl, win her love and in doing so he could have that happy ending from all high school teenage movies. It's the happy ending all of us are looking for—to find that someone that makes us happy, to succeed in spite of all the stresses and all of our flaws. Jacobs was about to try to grab that brass ring.
Colt Cabana tried to tell him "the truth" about Lacey being no good for him, but Jacobs wasn't hearing it. He had made up his mind and crotched Cabana on the ropes as he was leaving. Just a bit of revenge, but it wasn't enough. Lacey wanted more and so he gave it to her. He would give it all to her. He would launch a thousand ships if necessary to prove his love for her. Ultimately he sacrificed his body for her against Cabana and BJ Whitmer, his former friend now turned fierce and hated enemy. In his fantastic promo hyping the match, Jacobs called the steel cage encounter at Supercard of Honor II his "prom night". He would fight for his love and he fought with everything he had to win the steel cage match. It cost him six months out of action due to a knee injury, but it brought him back something invaluable. He won Lacey over that night.
Those who saw the "Jimmy Loves Lacey" vignettes last year that led to Jacobs successfully winning her heart saw that young but tortured kid try to go back to his days of innocence. The emo kid finally had the prom queen for his own. He wooed her with gifts and tried his best to date his way into her heart. It seemed like he wasn't really getting anywhere when a terrible slip of the mouth almost lost him the girl. However, when all was said and done, Lacey had come around to Jacobs.
A funny thing happened on the way to high school graduation. All that hard work, all that effort to win Lacey over for some reason did not have the effect it was supposed to have. All the adults that say that you work hard to achieve and with that come rewards and validation—well, Jacobs felt none of it. He was still the miserable kid who had been awakened to how awful life could be. All the betrayals and all of the pain and hardship—winning someone's love wasn't enough to fill the hole in his life. He was looking for something else to do it—and in that moment, he came upon the answer many teenagers about as they get older and hit their early twenties.
Revolution.
What would our society be today without protests, social upheavals and rebellion? For one thing, life would boring. The same thing happening over and over again, until you fell into the routine that would be whatever semblance of a life you called your life. That was adulthood and Jacobs was most definitely not ready for that, not yet. Sometimes the adolescents of America think that when you're an adult and have accepted that you have become an adult, then there are no causes left to fight for and no wars left to wage.
Jacobs wanted a cause to believe in and he wanted to wage a war. What cause could be greater than changing the world around him? What war would be more imperative than the one he could wage against the status quo? He wouldn't fit into the world's structure, so he was going to bring it down instead.
What teenager or college kid hasn't felt like they wanted to rebel against the world? The hippies in the late 60's and 70's were the counter culture to the world they saw around them—in a never ending and useless war against an enemy who seemingly couldn't be contained. The sexual liberation of that time and again seen in the early 90's was another response to the conservatism of middle class America's standards of morality and ethics. Jacobs tapped into that pathos, that knowledge that those who feel like they don't fit in eventually either conform or rebel against the system.
Jacobs formulated a master plan, to start his own revolution dubbed Project 161. He would fight the war within the framework of Ring of Honor in order to change the world at large. He would become the Che Guevara of Ring of Honor's disaffected roster—the inspiring leader to guide those who needed a boost to their wrestling career. He would be the David Koresh of the internet wrestling community, inspiring the fans with his message of change and social revolution. He would be the personal Jesus for those who rebel from the world and those who need to find an answer to all of their problems.
The Age of the Fall launched with a bombshell of chaos and blood. The insurgency leveled The Briscoes in one fell swoop. It's had it peaks and valleys since then, sometimes slow in effecting change and sometimes having to deal with setbacks in and out of the ring. However, it continues to exist and continues to expand in membership, with their following fighting what they consider to be their good fight. Jacobs has become the leader he has always wanted to be.
But wouldn't you know it? Somehow…it still isn't enough.
After all this time, it still goes back to the girl.
Those who were in attendance in Orlando, Florida two weeks ago and those who saw the video wire saw the evidence. Lacey convinced Austin Aries finally after months of recruitment to join their cause. Lacey claimed that Aries wasn't a man of words, but a man of action. She was going to "show him" what Age of the Fall could do for his career. The innuendo and the consequences of what this meant were immense and undeniable. You could see in Jacobs the doubt in the eyes, the moment's hesitation as Lacey went to Austin Aries' side. You could definitely notice his move to try to hold back Lacey from leaving with Austin Aries. She said a few words to him in his ears and he let her go, still quite unsure what to make of the entirety of this situation.
Even though he claims his love for Lacey meant nothing and could not save him, maybe he needs Lacey and her love more than he has ever let on. I think her love is still the most important part of his life and when she left with Aries, it was another stab in his heart. His girl walked out with another man. Now no one knows where they are or what they are doing. Not even Jacobs.
Jacobs seems to think The Age of the Fall is his purpose in life—but what if that isn't the truth? What is this is one more stop to the end of the line? Right now, in terms of social development, Jacobs is in the twenty-something age. He thinks he's found the answers to the questions, but in reality, he still has a long life ahead of him. Who knows what could happen to change his life in ways he isn't prepared to deal with? Who knows—maybe Lacey leaving with Aries is just the first symptom of this development.
Maybe Jacobs isn't the revolutionary he claims to be. Maybe he is just playing at it. Maybe this Age of the Fall is "just a phase" (as parents often love to say). Maybe Jimmy Jacobs isn't quite done with the scars of his past. Maybe he isn't quite done evolving from one shade of his character to another.
Maybe the character of Jimmy Jacobs still has a lot of searching to do to figure out exactly who he is supposed to be and who he is supposed to become.
That IS life, after all. That is the all of it.
credit. Ari Berenstein of 411mania.com
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