‘There’s only one Chicken’: AEW’s Mark Briscoe is finally ready to win the big one

“Slower Lower” is the slice of Delaware located below the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, considered to be more akin to the rural areas of Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. Known for its beaches, festivals, and of course, poultry farming, the Sussex County sprawl is also the home of AEW’s Mark Briscoe, the pro-wrestling lifer affectionately known as “Chicken” for his contributions to his family’s farm. Wild, passionate and never afraid to get down in the dirt, Briscoe long made up one-half of one of the top tag-teams history. In both his early life and for most of his career, everything was a family affair.

But now, having found his groove as a singles act almost 26 years in, he’s looking to put it all together and, in his words, finally win the big one this Saturday at AEW WrestleDream 2025.

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“I want AEW gold,” Briscoe tells Uncrowned. “So I’m ready. I’m focused, I’m feeling cool, calm and collected. I’m just ready to go, man. Saturday can’t get here soon enough.”

The opportunity to win his first official AEW Title comes when he challenges Kyle Fletcher for the TNT Championship this weekend in St. Louis’ Chaifetz Arena. Briscoe has been on a roll, taking down some of the roster’s best and brightest, defeating the likes of MJF, Ricochet and Claudio Castagnoli over the past few months. But in his mind, “the big one” needs to produce something tangible — and there’s nothing more tangible in pro-wrestling than a big expensive belt around your waist.

As different as the two are, it’s easy to understand what Briscoe sees in Fletcher, and why beating him in particular would mean something special. “I’m going to have to put one on him. Yes, sir,” Briscoe says. “But I remember when he first cut his hair in the ring and he was telling Will Ospreay, ‘I’m nothing like you’ — I thought to myself, ‘This dude is wild.’ He’s sitting there, shaking his head, cutting this fire, just impassioned promo. When something sticks with you — now it’s been months and months and months, if not more than a year since that promo, [and] I just remember him shaking his head: ‘I am nothing like you.’

“I’m watching this man come out of his shell right here, right now — and he ain’t done nothing but just he took the ball and he’s running with it, man.”

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On Briscoe’s end, it understandably took a little time to really get rolling. For the first 20 years of his career, he fought alongside his older brother Jay. They were the Briscoe Brothers, a tough-as-nails tandem who collected tag-team gold all over the world. Where guys like Bryan Danielson and Samoa Joe etched their names into the Ring of Honor record books as singles stars, the Briscoes became their era’s premiere tag-team, winning the ROH Tag Team Championships 13 times. They approached wrestling as if anything less than full effort would be failure, both inside and outside of the ring. They cut gritty, motivational promos with their family’s farm as the backdrop, showing not only where they came from, but also how far they’d be willing to go to preserve everything they fought for.

“When it comes to the creative and the character stuff and the promos and stuff like that, my brother handled 99. 9% of all that stuff,” Briscoe reflects. “He was the brains behind the character stuff and ‘Dem Boys’ and just the whole persona and the whole aura that we always had. He was the mad scientist behind the scenes.”

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Jay’s creation was twofold: While he had the harder edge, Mark had the hidden blade. They’d post up on that Sandy Fork farm, grab a camera and tell you exactly what they were going to do to you — and how they’d do it. But where Jay would be straightforward with the threats, Mark would crowd the camera, reflect on all the things he’d done and all the things he’d seen, and tell you just how much worse that was going to make it for everyone else. Then he’d just squint and rock slowly, having said his peace. Whatever was written or improvised, the Briscoe Brothers brought an authenticity impossible to fake.

AEW’s decision to revive Ring of Honor in 2022 gave the brothers the chance to showcase their unique combination of graps and grit, and allowed them to test their mettle throughout 2022 against another pair of east-coast tag-team savants, FTR. After some early struggles, the Briscoes finally got the best of their rivals in their third Tag Team Championship match, defeating FTR in a dog collar match at 2022’s Final Battle pay-per-view and capping off one of the best trilogies ever seen in tag-team wrestling.

Tragically, Jay passed away the following month, a day before Mark’s birthday.

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“We all wish it could be Dem Boys on the TV. Absolutely. I do my damndest to present Dem Boys, even though it’s just me there physically in the flesh,” Briscoe says three years after the car accident that took his brother’s life.

“Now people don’t have to go digging and diving and searching to try to watch me wrestle. Now they just click on the TV.”

After an emotional tribute match with former Ring of Honor World Champion Jay Lethal, Briscoe officially signed with AEW in 2023 and was thrown straight into the deep water, competing in the 2023 Continental Classic. As far as the in-ring aspect of competing as a singles act, he credits the 2024 edition of the round-robin tournament as accelerating his development. “Now, you’ve seen the first year, I didn’t fare so well — I ended up getting one win. But this past Continental Classic, I picked up multiple wins, and there was one point where I was actually the leader in my group because I was tied [with Fletcher], and I had the tiebreaker over him,” Briscoe says. “And I feel like those two tournaments … where you get to face the highest level of competition week after week after week, that really helped me.

“One year to the next, you could see the improvement of my output, my production as far as my success. So both Continental Classics have been very instrumental in helping me get my foot in as a single guy.”

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Between Classics, Briscoe won his first singles world title, defeating Eddie Kingston for the Ring of Honor World Championship at 2024’s Supercard of Honor event. In doing so, he became one of the few talents in wrestling to win the same world title as his brother, who’d won it on the same day 11 years prior. His extended family took up the majority of the front row that night, with his father Mark “Papa” Briscoe shouting “Get ‘em, Chicken!” early and often. After celebrating the win with them, he spoke at the post-show press conference about how important they’d all been in supporting each other after Jay’s passing. Even now, Briscoe says the only “proper” tag-team he’d ever form again would likely be with someone else who was in the building at night. “I don’t see myself tagging with anybody else,” he says.

“I got kids. I got a nephew — well, I got nieces and nephews as well. So I would say the best bet to see Mark Briscoe back in two-on-two tag-team action would be with another Briscoe.”

While he’s racked up wins and produced some big moments in 2025, what’s really changed is how much more Briscoe is being asked to do on a week-to-week basis. He’s the vocal frontman of the aptly-named Conglomeration, a faction with an eclectic mix of styles and personalities across AEW’s men’s and women’s rosters. With stablemates like the reserved Kyle O’Reilly and the at-times-disinterested Orange Cassidy, Briscoe’s southern drawl, wide grin and boundless energy fill in the blanks for the group’s big matches and fierce feuds. But where he used to have his big brother to lean on for that, he’s finding new ways to get the points across for himself and the people he goes to war with.

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“I tell you, as far as the creative team and the producers and the agents, my man, R.D. Evans, man, that’s my guy,” Briscoe says. “Me and him work real well together, and he always has the best suggestions and the best tweaks and just things that he brings up are things I’m like, ‘Oh wow, why didn’t I think of that?’ You know what I mean? And so that’s my guy when it comes to doing promos and backstage.”

Ultimately, Briscoe is a shining example of just how far being yourself can take you.

With decades of experience and an undying enthusiasm for his chosen career, he’s looking to become one the few wrestling talents to have a long, meaningful, championship-caliber go at the singles side after a historic tag-team run — all while carrying on his family name and the knowledge that nobody has ever done it quite like they have. “This is only my third year on big national TV wrestling, which makes it very interesting and a very unique situation because … I’m like the new kid on the block, in a way,” he says.

“And then in another way, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s the old head’. But I’m just going to … take every opportunity and do my absolute best with everything they give me. And be as helpful as I can with the locker room, with younger guys. And just like I said, there ain’t nobody else like me on the roster. There’s a lot of pro-wrestling … we got a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but there’s only one ‘Chicken.’ There’s only one ‘Chicken.’ So I’m going to just do me, man. I’m going to just do me and I just appreciate everything I get.”