The Independent Mid-Card 10.16.07: Briscoe vs. Shelley

Mark Briscoe vs. Alex Shelley
Survival of the Fittest Qualifier
Ring of Honor – Survival of the Fittest – Philadelphia, PA – June 24, 2004

The Wrestlers:
Mark Briscoe – After an early period in Ring of Honor that saw him go toe-to-toe with his older brother Jay, Mark Briscoe buried the hatchet with his sibling. The duo immediately set their sights on the ROH Tag Team Titles, eventually defeating the duo of Izzy & Dixie to win the belts in late 2003. Though the duo brought stability to the ROH tag team ranks with a nearly six-month title reign, they would eventually lose the straps to the Second City Saints of CM Punk & Colt Cabana at the company’s debut in Chicago. Though the pair would briefly regain the belts during Ring of Honor’s third Round Robin Challenge, they would again lose the titles to Punk & Cabana and eventually transition into a feud with Homicide, Low Ki and the rest of the Rottweilers. Heading into the Survival of the Fittest event, the Briscoes also had begun to make rumblings that they wanted to make an impact in the singles ranks as well as continuing to challenge for the ROH Tag Team Titles.

Alex Shelley – An up-and-coming player on the Independent scene before his debut for Ring of Honor in mid-2003, Alex Shelley spent the better part of his first year in ROH taking part in Four Corner Survivals and tag team contests. Though Shelley would be involved in a feud with Jimmy Jacobs after turning on his fellow Michigan talent after a tag team loss, he would really begin to pick up steam at ROH’s Generation Next event, where Shelley would spearhead a group of young go-getters to hijack the show’s moniker and band together to take the top spots in the company. Now the recognized leader of a group that featured Austin Aries, Jack Evans and Roderick Strong, Shelley was poised to be a key player for ROH, a fact made all the more clear with Generation Next’s series of impressive tag team wins over ROH mainstays like the Briscoes and John Walters. Shelley was positioned to gain more than most from a good showing in the inaugural Survival of the Fittest Tournament.

The Match:
Mark Briscoe comes through the curtain first, as always accompanied by the familiar tones of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Back My Bullets. Mark weighs in at what I believe is 190 pounds, though the sound is muffled during the announcement. We hard cut to Generation Next leader Alex Shelley’s introduction, set to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Six Barrel Shotgun. Shelley, by way of comparison is announced at 199 pounds, a fighting weight he maintains to this day if memory serves. We then hard cut again to Shelley in the ring getting checked by the referee. For a heel, Shelley sure does garner a loud face reaction from the Philadelphia crowd. The ref calls for the Code of Honor to be followed, and both competitors shake hands in advance of the bell ringing to start the match off properly.

Both men circle and lock up in the middle of the ring. Shelley grabs a headlock and takes Mark over and down to the mat. Mark gets a headscissors to counter, but Shelley is able to headstand his way out and reapplies the headlock. Mark works his way to his feet (irritatingly whispering a spot to Shelley on camera) and then rolls onto his back with the momentum forcing Alex to break the hold. Shelley comes running, so this time Mark gets a headlock takedown of his own and holds the move on the mat. It should be noted that there has been a loud dueling chant for both guys almost since the beginning of the match. Shelley is the one to use the headscissors counter this time, but Mark is able to roll backwards and then leverage his way out of it before grabbing a leglock. Shelley transitions out of the leglock and grabs a cross armbreaker, but Mark clasps his hands for a bit to block. Shelley keeps on the move, but can’t seem to get it locked in and Mark eventually transitions back into a headlock until Shelley twists him around into a standing front facelock. That was a really nice looking transition by Shelley. Shelley switches to a wristlock, but Mark counters to one of his own, only to grab a headlock and have Shelley counter that to one of his own. Mark sends Shelley off the ropes, but takes the worst of a shoulderblock and they go into a leapfrog sequence. Shelley stops short and hits a trio of hard chops to Mark’s chest before sending him off the ropes, but this time Mark is able to counter and chops away at Shelley’s chest. Mark goes for another Irish whip, but Shelley counters, only to have Mark duck under a clothesline and get an O’Connor Roll for two. Mark gets a legsweep takedown and covers again, this time for a one count. Shelley then gets a legsweep takedown of his own, but misses on an elbowdrop and we have a stalemate. I cannot express how well that entire tit-for-tat opening sequence was executed. The crowd appropriately applauds.

We get another dueling chant as the two men circle and lock up again. Mark trips Shelley down to the mat and grabs a hold of his leg. Mark locks in a standing anklelock, but Shelley uses a nice counter to flip out of it while grabbing an armlock in the process. Shelley transitions into an armbar from a different position, but Mark sends him off the ropes and leapfrogs over him on the rebound. Shelley puts on the brakes, however, and Mark turns around into a beautiful spinning heel kick. Mark reverses a cross-corner whip, but Shelley hops up to the second turnbuckle and springs out of the corner with a flying lariat. Shelley goes for a clothesline, but Mark ducks it and gets in position for a Northern Lights Suplex, taking a moment to land a cross-legged inverted shinbreaker before hitting the suplex. Mark grabs Shelley’s leg and hits a pair of elbow drops to it before kicking away at his thigh and locking in a side leglock. Shelley, who normally has a counter for everything, struggles in the move for a moment before simply maneuvering his way over to the ropes to force the break. That’s an interesting change in approach for him.

Mark releases the submission attempt, but holds on to Shelley’s leg and drags him away from the ropes. He does a sort of dragon screw legwhip to send Shelley’s leg into the canvas and then follows up with a kick to the chest and a kneedrop to Shelley’s leg. Mark hits another kneedrop to the leg and then picks Shelley up off of the mat, only to have Shelley hit a pair of right hands. Mark calmly responds by hitting a basement dropkick to Shelley’s knee, putting him right back down on the mat. Mark stays on Shelley’s leg with another standing anklelock before transitioning into a spinning toehold (and when is the last time you saw that move?). Shelley is able to grab Mark on one of the rotations and roll him into an inside cradle for two, but Mark just goes back to work after the kick out and gets a hard kick to Shelley’s leg. Mark goes in for the kill with Shelley in the corner, but when Mark grabs his leg, Shelley kicks him off and then catches him coming in again with a superkick. Shelley, to his credit, sells the leg after the kick, and was attentive enough to land the strike with his good leg and not the one that Mark had been working over for the last few minutes.

Shelley limps over to Mark and picks him up off of the mat. Shelley grabs a wristlock and then turns it into what amounts to a cutthroat neckbreaker. Shelley continues to sell the leg, but pounds away at Mark’s back before hitting him with a neckbreaker over his good knee. Even so, Shelley sells his bad knee as taking punishment from the impact after hitting the move. Shelley chokes Mark on the second ropes and then climbs out to the apron. Shelley hits a jumping guillotine legdrop on Mark while he’s still laying on the second rope, but gets met with a dropkick to the knee when he climbs back into the ring to capitalize. Shelley gets in a chop to Mark’s chest, but Mark hits a running forearm out of the corner to respond to a cross-corner whip. Mark goes for a German Suplex, but Shelley shifts his weight to block and tries to elbow out of the waistlock. Mark settles for a fisherman’s buster instead, but is too hurt to make the cover.

The referee’s count reaches seven before both guys make it to their feet. Mark comes charging, but Shelley climbs out to the apron to avoid it. Shelley tries to climb back in, but Mark catches his leg and hits a cool dragon screw legwhip into the ropes. Mark ties Shelley’s leg up in the ropes and kicks away at it before releasing it and just dumping Shelley into the ring. Mark climbs out to the apron himself and times a springboard missile dropkick to the knee perfectly with Shelley doing a front somersault sell to really hammer the point home. Mark locks in a Texas Cloverleaf, but Shelley struggles his way to the ropes to break. Mark goes to pick Shelley up by his leg again, but this time Shelley hits an enziguiri that absolutely puts Mark out on his feet. Mark does a beautiful glassy-eyed sell and lands in a heap in a seated position. Shelley picks up Mark and hits a beautiful cross-legged suplex into an ace crusher (not sure if there’s a name for that move, but the setup is similar to Shelley’s old 2K1 Bomb), but the cover only gets two. Shelley tries for the Shellshock (swinging reverse STO), but Mark is able to avoid it and hit another basement dropkick to the knee.

Mark hits a pair of elbowdrops to Shelley’s knee and picks him up again, but this time when Shelley goes for the enziguiri, Mark is smart enough to duck and let Shelley splat himself on the mat. Mark then pulls Shelley back up off the mat and hits him with a vicious looking low-angle German Suplex. Mark crawls over and makes the cover, but only gets two. Mark goes to pick up Shelley again, but is visibly favoring his neck. He settles for a couple of kicks to the leg and then goes to pick up Shelley again, only to have Shelley hit an Alabama Slam (overhead swinging spinebuster) to counter and then follow up with a vertical suplex. Shelley looks as if he’s going to string together a series of suplexes, but instead takes Mark down into the Border City Stretch (over-the-shoulder arm capture crossface). Mark is able to power out of it and tries to transition right into the Texas Cloverleaf. Shelley avoids getting turned over into the hold, but Mark decides instead to flip over into a pinning figure-four cradle and gets the three count at 10:12 to advance to the Survival of the Fittest Finals. Gimme Back My Bullets hits and Mark catches his breath in the corner, being sure to continue to sell the neck. Shelley makes his way back to his feet and the two men shake hands as the crowd applauds. Both guys really go out of their way to sell their injuries convincingly after the match.

The Analysis:
This match contained a lot of really stellar work by both Briscoe and Shelley. The opening sequence, which is neither particularly long nor particularly complicated, was one of the more effective and efficient tit-for-tat pieces I’ve seen in a wrestling ring in some time. Both guys were smart enough to keep things straight forward, not going out of their comfort zones to establish parity.

Immediately after doing so, both guys got down to business on fleshing out their story, with Mark going to work on Shelley’s leg and Shelley responding in kind with neck work. Though both were diligent throughout the match in terms of staying focused, at no point did the work seem perfunctory, rather coming off as strategically sound throughout. Mark continued to look to work on Shelley’s knee because he saw it as not only an injury he could exploit, but furthermore as a way to slow down Shelley’s own offense. Shelley worked the neck in an attempt to set up Shellshock and the Border City Stretch. The result was that when Shelley was finally able to lock in the hold, Mark had weakened him enough to counter out of it and was able to apply a pinning combination that took advantage of Shelley’s weakened leg to win the fall.

Though not an all-time classic, this match epitomized what SOTF Qualifiers should be in my opinion: competitive back-and-forth matchups that either competitor could realistically win. I say kudos to Shelley and Briscoe for putting together such an interesting and nuanced match to start the first Survival of the Fittest off on the right foot. Now if only they could have gotten five or ten more minutes.

The Aftermath:
Alex Shelley, who would continue to serve as Generation Next’s leader, would begin to be shown up by stablemate Austin Aries in the coming months. In the wake of Aries’ star-making turn in the Survival of the Fittest Finals, Shelley began to feel more and more pressure to hold the reigns of his group tightly, almost constantly arguing with Aries by mid-Fall over who was the dominant player in the group. At Final Battle 2004, mere hours before he would go on to upset Samoa Joe to win the ROH World Title, Aries would turn on Shelley, sending his former leader into a tailspin. Shelley would build his way back up to challenge Aries for the title, but would come up short in that bid, eventually joining up with Prince Nana’s Embassy faction in an effort to get back at Aries, Strong & Evans. The Embassy’s feud with Generation Next wound up being one of the top feuds for Ring of Honor in 2005, and after its conclusion, Shelley and new stablemate Jimmy Rave set their sights on then-ROH World Champion “American Dragon” Bryan Danielson. Shelley would be unsuccessful in his attempt to win the belt from Danielson and would eventually leave Ring of Honor in mid-2006 to focus on his work for Total Nonstop Action, a company he still works for to this day. Notably, Shelley would return to Ring of Honor for one night only along with tag team partner Chris Sabin to challenge Jay & Mark Briscoe for the ROH World Tag Team Titles in April of 2007, a match hailed by many (myself included) as the prohibitive favorite for Match of the Year.

Mark Briscoe, along with his brother Jay, would continue to be a force in the Ring of Honor tag ranks until unexpected real life issues forced the duo from the wrestling business for the better part of a year-and-a-half. When the pair returned to ROH competition early in 2006, they immediately focused on regaining the ROH Tag Team Titles. A number of attempts at winning the belts from Austin Aries & Roderick Strong would not go the Briscoes’ way, and in fact a pair of other teams would hold the belts before the Briscoes would finally win them in early 2007 (by that point the belts had become the ROH World Tag Team Titles). Though they would briefly lose the titles to the Dragon Gate team of Naruki Doi & Shingo, the rematch would be won by the Briscoes despite a devastating injury to Mark when a Shooting Star Press attempt to the floor would go horribly awry. Strangely, the injury would on some level go on to be something of a blessing in disguise, as it became one of the cornerstones of the Briscoes’ feud with ROH newcomers Kevin Steen & El Generico, an issue that is being seriously discussed as the best in professional wrestling in 2007. As of this writing, Jay & Mark Briscoe still hold the ROH World Tag Team Titles, though they are currently under fire from the new Age of the Fall faction, led by Jimmy Jacobs. Mark Briscoe also recently suffered an injury in a motorcycle accident, but he is expected to return to action for Ring of Honor’s West Coast debut this weekend in Las Vegas and San Francisco.

The Final Word:
This year’s Survival of the Fittest has an extra element that previous editions have lacked, namely that it coincides with Ring of Honor’s debut on the West Coast. As a result, a pair of talented competitors will be appearing in the tournament who are not members of the regular ROH roster: Karl “Machine Gun” Anderson and TJ Perkins (who was featured here in the IMC last week). The pair is going to be given the opportunity to impress ROH’s fans and brass with solid performances, and as a big fan of both, I hope they are able to rise to the challenge. Also, I would like to say here for all to see that I’m picking Perkins’ qualifying match with Rocky Romero as the sleeper match of the weekend, as the duo are old training buddies from the New Japan Dojo and have routinely put on show-stealing contests in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla.

To see this week’s match, Survival of the Fittest is available from rohwrestling.com. Though the later editions are also solid, the original article remains the best of the series, with the 2004 Survival of the Fittest Finals being one of the top matches in that entire year. If you’re a fan of Austin Aries and have never seen that match, be sure to pick it up during one of ROH’s many sales, as it’s the match widely credited with making Aries the star he is today. An easy recommendation for casual and hardcore fans alike. And by the way, in watching the 2004 SOTF Finals again, it occurs to me how star-studded that original group was, with each man holding ROH gold at one point or another and a combined four World Title, two Pure Title, and seven Tag Team Title reigns amongst them.

While you’re here at 411 this week, be sure to check out some other great columns and reviews. Ari has Part I and Part II of Column of Honor, Bayani’s got Truth B Told and Barcham’s got Hitting Below The Beltway. There’s a double dose of Puro with Short’s Navigation Log and Adamson’s Destiny. Brad & Byers go toe-to-toe on SHIMMER and some other big Independent topics in the most recent Buy or Sell, and Brad teams up with Jake for a review or ROH’s United We Stand. Other reviews by Brad include FIP International Impact Phase One, FIP International Impact Phase Two, and PWG Battle of Los Angeles 2005, while Jake’s also got a review up of ROH’s original Round Robin Challenge. JD takes a look at The Battle of St. Paul, an ROH show from earlier this year, and rounding out this week’s plugs are Magnus’ review of PWG Hollywood Globetrotters and John Gregory’s take on IWA Mid South Bad Blood Rising in Death by Midwest.

The new Buy or Sell previewing ROH’s upcoming shows will be up later this week, as will the next ROH Roundtable, so please be on the lookout for both of those.

By way of a short form prediction, I’m not going to give away my picks until the Roundtable, but suffice to say that I’m not going to jump on the ‘oh, now is when they’ll elevate Chris Hero’ bandwagon, because I think if they were serious about putting Hero over, they’d have done it by now. Not that I wouldn’t like to see it, just that I don’t think it’s going to happen.

In terms of a television update, let’s just say that I continue to think that both Grey’s Anatomy and The Office are awesome and the fact that I work Thursday nights is starting to really irritate me. Weeds & Californication continue to be an excellent doubleshot on Mondays and I wonder what will replace them on my DVR once their respective seasons end. Private Practice remains on life support, but is acceptable enough to continue to be watched. There’s some other stuff (including 30 Rock just generally being great), but those are the highlights. And no, I’m not watching Pushing Daisies, so don’t ask.

I’m checking out for this week, but for final quick hits, let me say the following: buy The Cocksmiths’ new album Trouble Pill (you can check out their stuff on their myspace), and Friday cemented me as a Maker of Moves (as opposed to simply a Doer of Moves). Note to certain people: yep, you read that right… Have a good one everybody.