Sean Waltman and Nick Hausman welcomed former UFC World Heavyweight Champion Josh Barnett as their guest on the “Pro Wrestling 4 Life” podcast. Barnett talked about the UFC, Bloodsport, The Young Bucks, New Japan Pro Wrestling and more.
Barnett talked about his student, WWE Raw star Shayna Baszler:
“She’s excellent right now. RAW, it doesn’t matter where they put her, she will shine. She’s another person who got pro wrestling essentially from the beginning. I had to work with her on some things. There’s a lot of, I would say, bad influences in the business at the moment that people don’t even realize that they’re bad influences. That’s how long they’ve been around. I don’t mean bad as in malicious. I don’t think that there’s anybody out there trying to give people bad instruction, per say, it’s just that they’ve screwed it up. Shayna is out there working. Now she has this thing with Alexa Bliss. It’s cooky and it’s weird, it’s whatever, but she will make it work.”
Barnett talking about The Young Bucks and why he commented the way he did during their matches:
“I don’t know what they’re deal is. I don’t know who riled them up into thinking that me and JR were burying them all the time, because we weren’t. One of the things that I think was a problem is they wanted to be cool. I’m like – you’re heels. Sorry, you cheat constantly. You’re constantly cheating, breaking the rules, and doing heel stuff, so we’re going to say you’re despicable. We’re going to say you’re terrible, horrible and you’re bad people. We didn’t say, ‘You sucked.’ We just said that you’re bad guys because that was your job. Your job was to be bad guys, but it seems like no one wants to be an actual heel anymore. Everyone wants to be the cool anti-hero, or the cool bad guy heel, or whatever. They want to sell all their merch. It’s like, no, I’m sorry. If you’re a heel, be a heel. Stop trying to worry about whether the fans like you or not. You have a role to fill here, and if you want to run around telling people to suck it, then people should want to see you get your teeth kicked in. That’s just the way it is.
Nobody wants to be a heel, and that’s a problem. Somebody riled up The Bucks. I don’t know how. They used to get in Twitter fights constantly anyway. I’ve never actually had a discussion with them, nothing, ever. I don’t know, and yet, I would constantly cover for them in their matches. They would go to hit their Meltzer Driver. Sometimes they do all this crazy stuff, and it only gets them a two count. My thoughts are, well I don’t want this to seem like it was s**t, or it’s weak, or whatever. It’s just a hope spot, or getting their s**t in. I don’t want people to view that. I want to say, ‘Well, ok, you can see’, and I don’t know which Jackson does what in that scenario, ‘but you can see that Matt, when he came off the ropes, he didn’t get the feet all the way to help on that piledriver.’
I don’t want to belittle what they’re doing. I want them to feel like, ‘Ok, if they had hit it perfectly, that match was over, but they’re tired. It’s tough. People are sweaty. Things are happening. This dudes in the air flipping to land to give the assisted tombstone. Ok, a lot of things can happen that can be missed.’ You get guys who always have to knock a dude out of the ring. You always have to flip over it. Ok, fine. Regardless, if this is happening, every match leading up to this, even then ‘You can see in the slow-mo, he only caught a piece of him. Maybe that even caused him some injury too.’ I’m always trying to find a way to say here that nobody is weak. Nobody sucks. This is just what happens when you go to war. When you’re going into combat, things don’t always work out how you want them too. Yea, you hit a 450 and boom, but you don’t get the three count. Maybe he just didn’t have the leg hooked enough. It’s not that you aren’t capable, it’s just one little thing, and that’s how close the margins should be between these competitors.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit “Pro Wrestling 4 Life w/ Sean “X-Pac” Waltman” with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
