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Josh Barnett

Heavyweights, more than any other weight division, tend to be bad. It's not that heavyweight fighters are by nature bad, it's that there are a lot of factors working against the talent pool. Japan and Brazil, the birthplaces of MMA, on average produced less heavyweight-sized athletes, and in America, it's going to be far more profitable for an athlete that size to pursue non-combat sports. (The existence of combat sambo as a major sport in Russia, by contrast, is an awfully big part of their prevalence in the division.) Heavyweights get injured more easily than fighters at other weight classes, and the much smaller margins of error that come from always being one punch away from being knocked out by your competition only make things worse, particularly as competitors age. The heavyweight talent pool is shallow, and the churn of its rankings is cruel. It's hard for heavyweights to be great. It's harder for heavyweights to stay great. It's near-impossible for heavyweights to be consistently great for decades.

Josh Barnett--the Warmaster--was a top heavyweight competitor for twenty years. He is indisputably one of the best to ever lace up the gloves. His longevity and consistency as a heavyweight are nearly unheard of. Which makes it even more notable that never once, in all the four phases of his career, did he reach the top of the mountain.

He’s a martial arts movie in real life. He was an angry child who got into constant fights, turned to sports as an outlet for his aggression and found them wanting until he discovered the UFC in high school and knew, on the spot, that he wanted to be a mixed martial artist. He abandoned football, trained under grandmaster Jim Harrison, and made his debut just one year later as a 6'3" heavyweight with an eclectic combination of striking and grappling, from Harrison's traditional martial arts teaching to Barnett's high school wrestling experience to his personal fascination with the art of catch wrestling.

He was an immediate force. He dominated the United Full Contact Federation, stormed the SuperBrawl 13 tournament, entered the UFC hot off his defeat of its former champion, the 25-3-3 living legend Dan Severn, and after four fights, including the first loss of his career against the incomparably tough Pedro Rizzo, he defeated Randy Couture for the UFC heavyweight championship. He was only 24, he was 13-1, and he was the best heavyweight in the world--until, suddenly, he wasn't. In his title eliminator against Bobby Hoffman he'd been given a formal warning after testing positive for steroids; the Couture fight saw him test positive for even MORE steroids. He was immediately stripped of the belt. He claimed innocence, protested what he called a conspiracy, and left the world of American combat sports in disgust to settle in his second home of Japan.

Barnett was Antonio Inoki's dream: A big, charismatic, technically gifted gaijin with immeasurable credibility as a real fighter. He made his Japanese debut in New Japan Pro Wrestling, but he was back in mixed martial arts just months later. He won the Pancrase Openweight Championship from Yuki Kondo--he was its last champion, ending a lineage that started with Ken Shamrock in 1994--and defended the title at Inoki's experimental MMA shows. After five fights and five wins across the Japanese circuit, there was nowhere left to go but Pride. His Pride 28 debut, a co-main event against Mirko Cro Cop, was a massively hyped showdown: The lineal UFC champion, arguably the best grappler in the division, against the kickboxing superstar taking the world by storm. Everyone wanted to see what might happen.

Nobody wanted to see what actually happened. Josh Barnett tapped out in forty-six seconds after randomly dislocating his shoulder during a takedown. Pride ordered a rematch as soon as possible, and one year later he was back from injury--but looked out of shape, and flat, and was shockingly outgrappled by the kickboxer. Josh Barnett had met the mountain. Barnett would go 12-4 during his time in the world of Japanese MMA--and three of those four were Cro Cop, over and over again. (The fourth was Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, who traded a win and a loss with Barnett in two of the best grappling fights in heavyweight history.)

By 2008, the MMA boom was in full swing. Organizations had cropped up across America in an attempt to get in on the gold rush, but none carried the manic energy of Affliction. Affliction Clothing was a male fashion brand, and flush with corporate attitude and seed money from, honest to god, Donald Trump, they founded Affliction Entertainment. They brought in Pride refugees, former UFC champions and hot prospects alike, with Fedor Emelianenko, Tim Sylvia, Andrei Arlovski and Josh Barnett as their top stars. The endgame was clear: Fedor vs the most prominent UFC champions during his Pride reign, followed by Fedor vs Barnett, a heavyweight match the MMA world had wanted and been repeatedly denied in Pride. Both men won their Affliction challenges and both men signed to face each other at Affliction's third show, Trilogy. It was a supercard, featuring Takanori Gomi, Paul Daley, Vitor Belfort, Jorge Santiago, Renato Sobral, Gegard Mousasi, and the big men in the main event, realizing a dream fans had wanted for half a decade.

And it fell apart eleven days before the fight when Josh Barnett tested positive for steroids again.

Affliction scrambled to save the card--at one point, Fedor was going to fight Vitor--but they couldn't get the contracts or the licenses in time, and unlike the UFC, they couldn’t survive the financial loss. Affliction had never been stable, its death was almost certain, but Barnett's test results sunk them overnight. The newly-booming Strikeforce gathered the remains and populated the first American heavyweight grand prix with Pride standouts, including Barnett, Fedor, Alistair Overeem, Fabricio Werdum, Sergei Kharitonov and Arlovski, once again hoping to book that long-desired Fedor/Barnett dream match. Instead, Fedor fell to Bigfoot Silva in the first round, Barnett choked his way to the finals and was dominated by a little-known rising prospect named Daniel Cormier.

Barnett finally returned to the UFC in 2013. Strikeforce had folded, decades had passed, tensions had abated, and it was time to win back the title he'd never lost. He beat three of the standouts that had reigned during his time in Japan--he stopped UFC champions Frank Mir and Andrei Arlovski and outgrappled IFL and TUF champion Roy Nelson--but he couldn't stop the knees and elbows of Travis Browne, and after forty-one fights and just shy of twenty years of competition, for the first time in his career, he found himself on the wrong end of a submission hold thanks to "Big" Ben Rothwell.

Barnett hasn't fought since September 3, 2016, and officially left the UFC in 2018. He never officially retired, but his focus shifted to grappling and professional wrestling. There's no shame in that. He spent twenty years fighting and featured in nearly every major promotion in MMA history. No one in the history of the heavyweight division has ever stayed so good for so long.

But you can't talk about his career without talking about steroids, and kickboxers, and what might have been.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (Pride 28 vs Cro Cop / UFC 36 vs Couture / Strikeforce: Overeem/Werdum vs Rogers / UFC Fight Night vs Arlovski). Just built for MMA, so if you try to use him in pro-wrestling it's gonna get weird.