Jimmy Jacobs and the barbed wire bat shot.  That is what I got asked about more than anything else when it  Jimmy himself came up with the diea thtat came to my 12 years in IWA Mid-South.  Even though I feuded with Ian Rotten a lot longer, it is the feud with Jimmy Jacobs that people will think of first if someone for some unknown reason were to ever ask them about me.  The feuds with Ian over control and direction of the company never had the intensity or believability that the feud with Jimmy had.  The whole reason for that intensity and believability stems from the night I hit him with the barbed wire baseball bat.  It was Edge of Insanity in Plainfield, Indiana at a show that had very little attendance.  So hardly anyone saw it live but thanks to Smart Mark Video and word of mouth, a lot of people have ended up seeing and/or hearing about that incident.

Jimmy Jacobs was the IWA Mid-South champion at the time.  There were a couple of shows that had gotten cancelled around Thanksgiving of 2005 and Jimmy got upset.  The shows were cancelled because Ian’s wife at the time, Patti, was pregnant and having issues with the pregnancy as she neared the due date.  She had previously had a miscarriage and it was feared that something could happen again.  The decision was made to cancel the shows so Ian could remain home in case something happened.  Patti ended up having James Christopher a couple of weeks later and he ended up needing heart surgery in his first week of living.  Jimmy needed the money from those shows to pay rent and bills and was upset at the cancellation.  He went to work for another company that weekend that ran in the same Chicago area that we did.  Depending on who you believe, either that promoter or Jimmy himself came up with the idea of extra money being involved if Jimmy would throw our title into a trash can on the show.  This would give a lot of notoriety to the upstart group that had some wrestlers with a beef with Ian to begin with.  It would also make it seem as though our champion was saying that the new company was far superior to the “garbage” that we were.  I had no problem at all with Jimmy working the other show.  Guys work for multiple groups in the same area all the time.  They have to eat.  They have to pay rent.  I had a HUGE problem with him offering or agreeing to (again depending on who you listen to) throw the title in the trash and in essence, trash us.  I had put way too much time, money, blood, sweat and tears into that company to see someone that we trusted and loved do that to us…especially because he didn’t think we should put family first and should have run the shows.  There are a lot of things more important than a professional wrestling show in this world…especially when there are hundreds of them to choose from.

Ian Rotten forgave Jimmy Jacobs.  He was heartbroken but he liked Jimmy.  He thought Jimmy was a great talent and he had pushed him to the moon when no other promoters in the business took Jimmy Jacobs seriously.  He didn’t care that Jimmy wasn’t tall and an adonis.  He just cared that Jimmy had a ton of talent and potential and he let him develop it and then everyone took notice.  It had worked for CM Punk before him and it was working for Jimmy.  I loved Jimmy too.  I had managed him right before I retired from managing earlier in 2005.  I had him in the limo for the Fannin Family promo before War Games instead of JC Bailey.  I didn’t want to work with JC.  I couldn’t stand JC.  It made ZERO sense for JC to be on my team because EVERYONE knew how I felt about him.  I begged and pleaded for Jimmy to be put into JC’s spot because I liked him and thought he deserved to be in the War Games match.  I loved that Jimmy wore a suit and took the title seriously (so I thought at the time.)  So it really hurt me when he did what he did and I did not forgive him.  It is not in my nature to forgive.  So I came out of retirement (which again pissed me off to no end.  I had one foot out of the door.  I wasn’t having fun anymore.  I didn’t want to do it anymore.  I was tired of losing money.  I was tired of grind.  It was just too hard for me to break all ties and leave for good.)  I had to deliver a message to Jimmy that what he did wasn’t ok and that he needed to be punished for it.  I also had to deliver a message to the rest of the locker room that while Ian Rotten may be a pushover and easily forgive you, if you went the route of Jimmy Jacobs and decided to stick around and still get money from IWA, you were going to pay dearly for it.  Deep down in his heart, Ian knew that the message had to be delivered as well.  He also knew that I would have no problem with being the “bad cop.”  So he gave me another guy he knew would have no problems with being the messenger, Bull Pain.  We had a trial run match in Streamwood, Illinois at the end of December to set up the cage match for Plainfield.  The message was delivered in a stiff, severe BUT SAFE way.  Jimmy left the company in an agreed upon hiatus and I took some time off as well to make the incident in Plainfield look even more treacherous to the outside eyes that had only HEARD about it and not seen it.  Well here are the messages being delivered:

We wouldn’t see each other again until 2006 TPI where the feud would carry on for 3 more years and there would be more beatdowns including taking his light heavyweight title away from him at King of the Death Matches:

No matter how many beatdowns came after, you always remember the first.