WWE women’s tag champion Shayna Baszler was the latest guest on Renee Paquette’s Oral Sessions podcast to discuss her training with MMA legend Josh Barnett, and on the similarities between Raw Underground and Barnett’s Bloodsport series. Highlights are below.
On training with Josh Barnett:
He didn’t baby anyone. He’s a guy — and you, having met him, will laugh at this — he doesn’t give his compliments easily. He’s not a guy who’s going to tell you, ‘good job’ every day but when he tells you, ‘good job,’ man, you feel good about it. He’s a hard-ass, for sure. I think just having someone as experienced as him at a time — and it’s still this way, where the sport is very Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu-heavy, he’s the one that opened my eyes to the fact that catch wrestling, pro wrestling, and MMA all had the same shared history. Obviously, with what I’m doing now, it opened an entirely different world to me than the way I had been looking at it before.
How Raw Underground and Bloodsport worked similarly:
Obviously with my [MMA] upbringing and everything with Josh and Billy Robinson, all that is kind of threw that UWFi style. That’s what Bloodsport and Raw Underground [were]. I think the difficult part is, and I’m just speculating I’m not speaking for anyone, but just knowing how I trained for that style of professional wrestling, I don’t think you can grab just any pro wrestler nowadays and just throw them into this and they know how to do it and make it look the way it’s supposed to look. It started getting to be like what we have anyway. This isn’t like, ‘Oh let’s grab a bunch of MMA fighters and do these worked fights,’ and it’s also not, ‘Let’s grab a bunch of pro wrestlers and have them do these shoot matches, you have to find this balance of people that have been trained a certain way — it’s hard. It’s going to be slow to build up the talent pool but if you do it right, it’s better in the long run.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)
