Mike Bailey started his 2023 off with a bang.
The Speedball was the winner of the PWG Battle of Los Angeles (BOLA) tournament, one of the most prestigious and difficult pro-wrestling tournaments that are active today. Bailey made it more difficult on himself by wrestling all four of his tournament matches, including the finals, in one day. He tells Cultaholic in a new interview that the reason that happened was because of some visa issues he was dealing with.
I didn’t know until the day of. There was a situation where my Visa gets renewed periodically and it was expired…I didn’t have a visa between January 1 and January 7 of that year. BOLA happened January 7 and 8. That’s why I wasn’t able to do my first round match on the first day and I had to do it on the second day. I had to wrestle four matches to win the tournament.
Bailey recalls the moment PWG asked him if he was comfortable wrestling that many times in a single night, something he later called one of the most difficult things he has ever done in his entire life.
That’s a conversation that was had, ‘would you be okay to wrestle four matches on the second day?’ ‘I don’t see why not. That doesn’t sound incredibly difficult.’ Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen BOLA, it was truly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life.
Bailey will be competing in an Ultimate X matchup at this Saturday’s IMPACT Slammiversary pay-per-view. Elsewhere in the interview, the former X-Division Champion spoke about potentially competing in an Elevation X matchup, which he calls a bucket list item even though he knows it is a bad idea. You can read about that here.
