This is Jimmy Jacobs’ farewell match before he goes to WWE to become a writer, and it’s the effective end of his in-ring career as anything of note.
Would I be reviewing this if it wasn’t his final match in ROH and thus the end of the company’s all time greatest character arc? No. Absolutely not. I don’t seek out BJ Whitmer matches to write about.
But it is.
So I am.
It’s a perfect end for Jimmy’s story in ROH, both during the match and especially after it.
For anyone not aware of the entire Jimmy Jacobs storyline, it’s one of my favorite stories in the history of wrestling, and one of the all-time great character arcs. It helps of course that as someone who saw a lot of my own life in certain storylines in the larger arc (girl stuff minus the kidnapping and stabbing, the drug abuse aspect of the Moxley storyline) and appreciated a short non-athlete from Grand Rapids, MI doing things, Jimmy Jacobs is one of my favorite wrestlers ever, but it’s just so well done in general. Even this second ROH run, where Jimmy is less of a booking priority, but still ties everything together so well with his own history.
This weird undersized goof came into ROH and got beat up a lot and had a lot of confidence issues after his first partner, Alex Shelley, turned on him. He spent the next five years clearly striving for some sense of belonging and had these real tangible confidence issues. He initially turned on Whitmer when Lacey showed him attention, and finally won her over through some combination of bloodlust, guts, and destroying her enemies. Still lacking that confidence though, Jimmy tried to become a revolutionary but clearly never believed any of it, eventually losing Lacey and going insane. He spiraled, dropped out, fought the worst possible fun house mirror version of himself with Moxley (in which Moxley briefly brought Lacey back to taunt him, before attacking her), and eventually came back to ROH. Good intentions turned bad when the company itself was bad, and SCUM happened. Jacobs later had a moment of doubt when Corino went too far in Steel Cage Warfare and tried to do things right before growing disillusioned with rude younger talent like Adam Cole and Mike Bennett. He formed The Decade with fellow veterans Roderick Strong and BJ Whitmer, before once again becoming alienated with a group as a result of the fanaticism that Strong and Whitmer seemed to go after the young guys with.
This is a perfect full circle ending to all of that, spending the last several months slowly giving up on all of that. He shook hands with Jay Briscoe after a great little television World Title challenge, saw the light with The Decade and shortly followed Roderick Strong’s departure with his own, and as a character, finally just decided to leave. BJ Whitmer now took issue with his partner abandoning him while he was getting too insane, a perfect reversal of their first split, with Lacey being replaced by Whitmer’s evil young boys, Adam Page and Colby Corino. It’s not the first time he’s suddenly grown a conscience, he sponsored Steve Corino in 2011 and then tried to curb his worst impulses two years later when they both had fallen from grace together. It is, however, progression. Instead of sticking around and repeating the same pattern for the millionth time, he’s finally just taking himself out of a situation that’s just bad for him. This arc has never been about titles or wrestling things, it’s about confidence and growth and the idea that personal happiness has to, at least to some extent, come from within. The perfect ending to that is finally displaying all of these things and simply leaving.
The match itself is fine. It’s good. I like it a lot, and admittedly, so much of that is driven by a sense of finality and the love for the story and this one character, but you can never separate the way some things are intertwined, so whatever, it is what it is.
On its own, the match is a really fun undercard brawl. Nobody is getting as crazy as they did in 2006 and 2007. There’s a few really great callbacks, particularly Whitmer trying the Superbomb again, and the classic Jimmy Jacobs back senton — second only to Dick Togo’s if we’re all being honest — through a table, performed twice until the table finally breaks. Nobody gets stabbed in the face with a railroad spike (or two), nobody gets stabbed in the hog with one either, and in general, it’s not the sort of manic and deranged effort that made those matches in 2006 through 2008 so special.
All the same, it’s still a fairly deranged performance by Jacobs given how little he probably could have done. It isn’t as though he’s going to WWE to wrestle, there’s no impetus to protect his body to make a ton of money with it later, but it’s still something he absolutely didn’t have to do. The table bumps, the chair shots, even just the way he hurls his body around when reacting to everything Whitmer does. You roll the dice with Jimmy Jacobs in this 2010s ROH run a lot of the times, but along with the Adam Cole matches and some of his wilder early 2013 efforts, this is one of the time when he really comes up big.
The finish is as gross as they deserve, an Exploder through two back-to-back steel chairs Necro style, finally putting Jimmy down to end the match. Not big and bombastic, but gross and nasty enough that it doesn’t feel like a letdown at all.
Bell to bell it’s probably a *** match, a classic three boy just on the border, but this is not one that’s just about bell to bell.
Way more importantly than any of that is what happens after the match.
BJ Whitmer fakes Our Hero out on a hug, and says he doesn’t shake hands with people who don’t belong here anymore, before dropping the classic “I love you, little brother” as a sign for Colby Corino to attack. It’s then that the dam breaks and we finally get the payoff all these years later.
Lacey returns from the crowd and she saves Jimmy for once. BJ Whitmer finally leaves in disgust, having accomplished nothing here once again, and Jimmy and Lacey leave ROH together. “The Victory of Love” returns for the night. Cell phone flashlights in the air.
It’s an overwhelmingly beautiful thing.
It’s especially welcome after the absolute mess that was made of it in the 2008 Age of the Fall storyline with Austin Aries in which Gabe realized too late that nobody normal would side with Aries, so they then tried to do a kidnapping angle but left it too ambiguous so nobody ever actually knew what happened, and it just made everyone in the feud into a heel. This is the resolution the entire long running story always needed, especially when Gabe later opened it back up during the Jacobs/Moxley feud in 2010. It’s a story that I never ever thought would get anything close to a satisfying resolution, no matter what said resolution actually was. Giving it one is one of the best things to happen in ROH in the last thirteen years and counting.
Given ROH’s seeming disdain for things like emotional payoffs and investment at points, it’s hardly a shocker that this is the most uplifting thing they’ll do all decade. It’s one of the best moments in ROH all decade, one of the highlights of the year, and a perfect ending both to the entire Jimmy Jacobs character and a storybook farewell for him, Lacey, and this entire storyline.
It’s prom night.
The villain gets what’s coming to him and the hero gets the girl.
HANDWERK 