It’s noon on the day after one of AEW’s biggest television shows of the year, Dynamite Grand Slam in Queens, New York City. The ROH world champion, Mark Briscoe, who competed in a wild trios match sometime around 11:00 the previous night, sits on his open porch at home in Delaware, in a red, vintage Nicktoons T-shirt. There’s some noise as he pans his phone’s camera over to the house’s screen door, where a couple of Briscoe’s eight kids are standing.
“Go inside, and when I’m done, I’ll make you chicken soup!” Briscoe promises.
Briscoe himself wasn’t yet an adult when he began wrestling in the year 2000, at the age of 15. His first ROH match, against his brother Jay in 2002, didn’t occur until the promotion traveled beyond its Pennsylvania homebase, because he was still too young to legally wrestle there. That match, on the Honor Invades Boston show, was a fast-paced, technical clinic that epitomized the burgeoning American indie style, that in many ways prefaced the rise of AEW almost two decades later. Briscoe says he’d be “blown up” (a wrestling term for “winded”) almost immediately if he tried that today.
Back then (once Mark hit age 18), he and his brother Jay would spend 11-hour days on their lawn care business during the week, and then try to have the best tag team match they could every weekend, wherever they were. A weekly national television program works differently, though.
“It’s more of a team sport,” Briscoe says. “You’ve gotta do your role.” The change of format in AEW is one he welcomes, getting to work with some of the greats he grew up admiring, like Chris Jericho in front of the camera, and Dean Malenko behind it. “I was tickled to death,” Briscoe volunteers about his inclusion in the “Blood & Guts” double steel cage match in July, and he beams when talking about the time Jeff Jarrett, Jay Lethal, and their crew visited the Briscoe family chicken farm on an episode of Rampage.
“That’s some free labor,” he says.
If Briscoe had ended up working for WWE though, which almost happened twice, it wouldn’t have been possible. Many people know the story of the Briscoe brothers receiving an offer from NXT in 2015, only for them to be offered more money to stay in ROH. Mark confirms that wasn’t the first time WWE had tried to bring them in, however.
“We were going to debut with the Wyatt Family,” Briscoe says of the July 8, 2013 episode of Monday Night Raw from Baltimore, Maryland. An unfortunate tweet from his brother Jay scuttled that, though.
Mark says Jay learned and grew after that experience, which makes Jay’s sudden death in 2023 all the more tragic. Jay was always the talker of the pair — “I was perfectly content just going off of him,” Mark says. So some people were surprised when Mark became the hyper-energized mouthpiece of his new AEW faction, the Conglomeration.
“There was not a real plan,” Briscoe says of his group with Kyle O’Reilly, Orange Cassidy, and others. The three were thrown together for a trios match once, and during a preceding promo, Briscoe said “the word of the day is ‘conglomeration,'” to describe the odd combination of personalities and styles.
“It just kind of stuck,” Briscoe says. Things evolved organically from there, and now the Conglomeration is one of the most popular acts in AEW.
In addition to his work in AEW, Briscoe still flies the flag for ROH, too, having defeated Eddie Kingston to win that company’s world championship on April 5. Kingston had actually asked for the match, as he realized that date would be the five-year anniversary of Jay Briscoe winning the ROH title. “He was the one who went to Tony,” Briscoe says. “He’s such a good dude.”
