Josh Barnett Looks Back at First Bloodsport Event In 2018, Thought It Was Terrible

Josh Barnett has been running Bloodsport events since 2019, and he recently looked back at the “terrible” first event under the name back in 2018. The first event was Matt Riddle’s Bloodsport featured matches like Riddle vs. Minoru Suzuki and Gunther (then WALTER) vs.

Filthy Tom Lawlor. Barnett appeared on Ringsiders Wrestling and during the conversation he talked about how he took the brand over after Riddle left for WWE. “I couldn’t make the initial show,” Barnett recalled ( per Fightful ).



“I paid attention and followed it. [Brett Lauderdale] reached out to me after Matt Riddle got picked up by WWE and said, ‘We got this thing. Would you be interested in being the title guy for the event?’ For me, I said, ‘Sure, but it’s gotta be my show.

I have to be booking it, agenting it, producing it.'” He continued, “I flat out said, ‘That initial show, I thought, was terrible. Nobody really knew what they were doing.

It didn’t actually embody the thing they were going for, which I didn’t hold it against anyone because nobody in America was training for this kind of thing. Nobody had this background. They could have a combat sports background, but it wasn’t put in this parameter under this concept of shoot-style wrestling.

It made sense to me that this would be this way because this is foreign territory, especially in this day and age. My belief was, unless you had somebody like myself, it wasn’t going to work out right. To do that, I had to have the ability to control the product in a way that would allow it to flourish to what we have today.

” Barnett’s Bloodsport XIII takes place on April 17th and airs live on Triller TV+..