Mark Briscoe shares his thoughts on his emotional match at ROH Supercard of Honor.
At the pay-per-view on March 31, Mark challenged Samoa Joe for the ROH World Television Championship. The show marked the time time ROH held a pay-per-view since Mark’s brother, Jamin Pugh (Jay Briscoe), lost his life in a car accident on January 17. Mark and Jay were the reigning ROH World Tag Team Champions at the time; the duo were 13-time champions together. In an emotional moment after his match with Joe, the crowd gave Mark a standing ovation, and he hugged his family at ringside.
Speaking at the ROH Supercard of Honor post-show media scrum, Mark was asked to discuss how he felt about wrestling at the show, which marked the first ROH pay-per-view since Jay passed away.
“May 20, it’ll be 23 years that me and my brother have been professional wrestlers, and it was the first time after we had the Dog Collar match with FTR at Final Battle in December, we had an indie show in Queens against a team called Mane Event at House of Glory later in December,” Mark said. “After that, it was the first time in so long that we didn’t have a match booked. We didn’t knew Supercard was coming, and we knew that we was gonna be on Supercard, but we didn’t have anything on the indies. It was a strange moment of, as weird as it sounds, peace because my brother, when we had a match coming up, he didn’t have peace because he was always so ready to go. He’s call me like, ‘Yo, we gotta cut this promo. What do you want to do for this promo?’
“Whatever it may be, but this was a weird little season where we didn’t have, we knew Supercard was coming a few months away, but we didn’t have a match yet, so he was chilling, and Jay Briscoe, this is no knock, because of his passion, he was rarely chilling. He was always focused on the next match. He was always focused on the next opponent. Focused on the next promo we gonna cut, focused on what’s next. But what was next was Supercard, and it was yet to know what Supercard was going to entail for the Briscoe brothers. So now here we are, Supercard just wrapped up, and… we about winning. We about championships, we about making the family proud. We about the legacy.”
Mark continued by describing how he feels Jay with him, even more so than before, and his brother’s presence is especially apparent when he wrestles because that’s something they always shared together.
“One thing that I’m not gonna do is sit here and pout. Samoa Joe is a hell of a fighter. But if you think that I’m done with Samoa Joe because he beat me tonight, you can forget about that, man. I know, I can feel him, my brother. It’s not like I wonder about him because I can feel him. I wonder where he is and what he’s doing. I can feel him. It’s like even more so than before, where you always hear the commentary, ‘Oh, The Briscoe brothers, they don’t even have to speak words. They grunt and snarl and they know what each other is talking about.'”
“But now, it’s like, more than ever, Jay’s in me. It’s the god’s honest truth, man. I can feel him, and I felt him out there tonight, just like I do every day of my life, but especially when I’m between then ropes. That’s something that we shared since we was three, four, five years old. It didn’t start when we became professionals at 15 and 16, but it started way before that. Now it’s like, where do we go from here? That’s where he’s like, ‘Pick yourself up. Let’s go.’ It’s strange, and I’m just starting to learn how this new thing works, but he’s right here with me.”
Mark subsequently detailed his mindset surrounding how he has coped with Jay’s passing, and he noted that his brother is doing “better” than him.
“He’s doing better than me,” Mark said. “I wrestled Samoa Joe tonight, he wrestled Eddie Guerrero.”
Catch up on our coverage of ROH Supercard of Honor here.
