Jay Briscoe Was the Foundation Ring of Honor Was Built On
By Oliver Lee Bateman, TheRinger.com
Jay Briscoe—real name Jamin Pugh—died on Tuesday in a car accident on a two-lane road in rural Delaware. As is all too often the case on these narrow country roads, a truck swerved across the center line and smashed head-on into Jay’s vehicle. His daughters, Gracie and Jayleigh, were in the truck with him and suffered serious injuries. Jay, who wasn’t “properly restrained” per the Delaware State Police, was pronounced dead on the scene at the age of 38.
With Jay’s passing, the career of arguably the greatest sibling tag team to never formally compete in the WWE in the modern era—perhaps the greatest sibling tag team of this era, period—came to a close. Together, Jay and his brother, Mark, the slightly younger and less voluble of the pair, assembled a sterling collection of tag title belts: 13 Ring of Honor World Tag Team Championships, one IWGP Tag Team Championship in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, and one Impact World Tag Team Championship. Jay, the leaner, more athletic, and—in his words—the “year more superior” sibling, also held the ROH World Championship on two separate occasions, in 2013 and 2014. That they did all of this while living, working, and sometimes even wrestling on a farm in Delaware was part of what made them, in podcaster and former ROH executive producer and on-screen authority figure Jim Cornette’s informed opinion, “the two best personalities in wrestling today, just completely truthful to who they are and what they are.”
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