No Holds Barred: Bjorn Rebney on Bellator MMA Summer Series

On this edition of No Holds Barred, host Eddie Goldman speaks with Bellator MMA Chairman and CEO Bjorn Rebney.

Bellator's eighth season, which concluded in April, and which was its first on Spike TV, was its most successful and had the most viewers in the organization's history. While another full regular season will commence in the fall, Bellator will be starting a Summer Series of monthly shows on Wednesday, June 19.

Taking place at the WinStar World Casino in Thackerville, Oklahoma, and again televised live in the U.S. on Spike TV, the main event will have the unbeaten Bellator lightweight champion Michael Chandler defending his belt against Bellator season seven lightweight tournament winner Dave Jansen.

The June 19 event will also see the introduction of four-fighter, two-round tournaments in Bellator. Previously, all tournaments had eight competitors and three rounds.

In the first round of this tournament, which is in the light heavyweight division, "King" Mo Lawal will face Seth Petruzelli and Renato "Babalu" Sobral will fight Jacob Noe.

The four-man tournament format "just gives us the opportunity to keep guys rolling through the tournaments and get those champions title defense after title defense," said Bjorn Rebney in this interview, which was recorded by phone Thursday. "It's going to keep the ball moving. Occasionally you're going to see four-mans thrown in. You're going to see a four-man, and then you might see another four-man in the fall."

In addition, Bellator's "Fight Master" pre-recorded series also debuts on Wednesday, June 19, on Spike TV, featuring 32 welterweight fighters competing for a spot in a Bellator MMA tournament, with MMA legends Randy Couture, Greg Jackson, Frank Shamrock, and Joe Warren as coaches.

We also discussed with Bjorn Rebney how he is still running Bellator on a day-to-day basis with endless "20-hour days" even as Viacom is now majority owner of Bellator, why he will always maintain a tournament format for determining title challengers rather than using subjective matchmaking, the plans to have more women's fights in Bellator, plans to have every champion defend their belts at least three times a year, the overall status of relations with Bellator fighters, the Eddie Alvarez legal situation, and much more.

You can play or download No Holds Barred at http://nhbnews.podomatic.com/entry/2013-05-09T13_14_04-07_00 and http://archive.org/details/NoHoldsBarredBjornRebneyOnBellatorMmaSummerSeries. If one link does not work, please try another.

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The No Holds Barred theme song is called "The Heist", which is also available on iTunes by composer by Ian Snow(http://magicpumpkinstudios.com).

No Holds Barred is free to listen to and is sponsored by:

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Thanks, Eddie Goldman http://eddiegoldman.com

I missed this yesterday Eddie. As usual your right on top of things. Nice. Listening to right now.


P.S. - Could you get a comment from Rebney on possible immigration issues for Russian fighters, especially Chechen, Dagastanis, & form other Muslim regions... since the Boston bombings. I'm sure there's gonna be a huge clampdown on letting people into the US form there. String fighting-aged Muslim men with neards are gonna get some big going over. They might even lockout those kinda guys from the region.


Other non-MMA stuff but realted to the subject:

I have a lot of question surrounding the details of the bombings and what is coming out of American media largely from 1 or two unnamed government sources to CNN or a very few news paper outlets.

Why would Chechen rebels or Muslim extremists from there or Dagestan want to have anything to do with attacking the U.S.? An attack itself, training, funding or whatever. They have more than their hands full with Moscow & the Russian military. Any involvement in attacks on the US would be crazy. Then they'd be in the cross hairs of the US everywhere worldwide too! How the hell is that gonna help them in keeping strong enough to maintain a substantial resistance to Russian forces. That's incredibly stupid. Even if your talking about just Jihadists, how is fighting now on another front against an even bigger enemy on an even bigger front gonna benefit the cause? Seem ridiculous doesn't it???

There seems to be some inconsistencies between that and publicly available non-refutable video, picture, and audio evidence from the time surrounding the bombing. There's also very credible eye witness accounts near the finish line of witnessing a terrorist bomb attack drill while the live race was going on and public announcements being made over loudspeakers telling people not to worry this was just a drill.

Why would you run a terrorist attack drill at a live event with 100K+++ people in attendance. How would your security team be able to discern what a fake threat is and what a real threat is?