![]() So he’s like “lets take some wrist clutch exploders” and I’m like “whatever.” I already knew how to bump from Judo, I can suplex, I can do any half throw or submission from amateur wrestling, Greco, or fighting. I told him he could throw me any way he wanted. A lot of that was him getting comfortable with what I could or couldn’t do, or did or didn’t know. I spent two days working on a match with Nagata. I had not a single day of pro wrestling training. They approached me and set up everything from there on out and became way bigger than anything I ever thought it would be.ĭid you have much pro wrestling training before your first match in New Japan? Can you get me in touch with them?” He said it was no problem and told New Japan I was interested and it just set the wheels in motion. Luckily enough, a friend of mine was working for New Japan, so I contacted him and said “Dude, I really want to get in the ring and wrestle. I thought it was awesome, but I wouldn’t have even had an idea how to get involved. I didn’t really know how one would break into that in the first place. You started in MMA first, did you have interest at that time to get involved in pro wrestling? He’s said before his inspiration is Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star, so that’s what we’re dealing with here. Oh, yeah, that’s another thing about Barnett, he’s a giant anime fan. Seeing them pull out moves the American guys weren’t at the time, I just followed the bread crumbs back to Japan, mainly via tape trading. WWF at times had a pretty decent influx of Japanese talent like the Orient Express, the Jumping Bomb Angels, Hakushi, then there’s Muta and all of this talent going to WCW in their deal with New Japan. So they did the next best thing and go out and grab all this content, re-dub it, package it and sell it on the airwaves across the U.S., so I was already in to that kind of thing anyway– anything unusual or different. All this stuff was introduced to me through all these channels that need programming but don’t have the budget or the facilities to produce their own stuff. Yeah, I was pretty interested in it because I was a big anime and Japanese fan. So you got in to Japanese wrestling fairy early? ![]() Also, it became the era of tape trading and all this Japanese professional wrestling made its way over. Then of course the wars between WWF and WCW, which was pretty cool. NWA wrestling was around, it was an awesome era to watch wrestling. The AWA was still around but there was talent that would go back and forth between the two. ![]() The start of WrestleManias, the legendary performers like Macho Man, Hulk Hogan, Honky Tonk Man, Iron Sheik, Sgt. WWF was just really coming into it’s own. ![]() I grew up in a great era of professional wrestling. When did you first become a wrestling fan?Įver since I was a little kid. ![]() In an interview with Wrestling Inc’s Raj Giri, Barnett details the beginning of his wrestling fandom: With the premier episode of NJPW coming up tonight, I figured it was appropriate to introduce Josh to the With Spandex audience to assuage any fears that he’s some random fighter with no background in pro wrestling. Back in November, the wonderful and lovely Danielle let everyone know that AXS TV will be doing a 13-episode run of New Japan pro wrestling, with Canadian punsmith Mauro Ranallo and mixed martial artist Josh “The Warmaster” Barnett providing taped commentary. ![]()
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