Vincent and Jay Lethal were going to go one-on-one at Final Battle.
Ring of Honor presented their Final Battle pay-per-view on December 11th and headlining the show was Jonathan Gresham versus Jay Lethal for the ROH World Championship. Gresham was victorious and Ring of Honor is going into their hiatus with Gresham as the last holder of the ROH World Title.
Prior to Jay Lethal signing with AEW, he was marked down to go one-on-one with The Righteous’ Vincent at Final Battle. Vincent appeared on The Shining Wizards Wrestling Podcast and said the next chapter of The Righteous and Jay Lethal’s story was going to be a singles match.
As it got close to the show [ROH Final Battle], I was kind of like, you know, like, ‘Wow. This could be potentially it right here,’ as far as Final Battle goes and this era, this is it. You know, once my music comes on, this is it so, ‘I think I’m gonna really enjoy this one and dance on the barricade and stuff’ and I did. But it was, you know — it was bittersweet man and the first-ever Ring of Honor Six-Man Tag Team Champion and then the last ever for this era is just kind of a cool thing and I’m really — and I’ll kind of let this cat out of the bag. It doesn’t really matter now but it was supposed to be me versus Jay Lethal at Final Battle and that’s kind of where that was headed. You know, unfortunately with everything happening, you know, it didn’t really go that way which is, you know, I think Lethal and [Jonathan] Gresham for the world title was very — made the most sense and I thought that was a good move as far as I’m concerned but, doing the six-man thing with — I really liked it because now it’s almost like when I did it with The Kingdom, it was like [Matt] Taven at the forefront and then me and TK [O’Ryan] and this time it was me with my crew now winning the Six-Man Tag Titles. It was just kind of like a cool full-circle kind of thing but like, now, Dutch and BATEMAN being able to hold these things for the first time ever for those guys, it was kind of a cool thing for me, you know what I mean? Because they’re my buddies and you know, it was cool, it was great.
The Righteous (Vincent, BATEMAN, Dutch & Vita VonStarr) had several exchanges with Lethal on ROH TV. On one occasion, the group came to the ring and applauded the former ROH World Champion. Vincent confirmed that there was a point in their storyline when Lethal would join The Righteous.
Yeah [story with Jay Lethal was leading to him joining The Righteous] and it’s a bummer man because I really — I put some thought into that and we did the purity, the white [clothing] and stuff and it was kind of — it was gonna be really fun. There was actually a promo that we did that actually never saw the light of day that’s still out there. Maybe I could eventually get it and just put it up there for fun or something as a memory. But, it was good man and that was the promo that I felt like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be fun. This has something to it. This is different,’ you know what I mean? It was just different and I was looking forward to it but you know, who knows? You know what I mean? Maybe eventually down the road, you never know. Like I said, wrestling’s crazy like that.
POST Wrestling has audio and written coverage of Final Battle. Click on the highlighted text to check out those respective pieces of Final Battle-related content.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Shining Wizards Wrestling Podcast with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
