Antonio Inoki, a pro-wrestling legend, told some Japanese presses on Thursday that Josh Barnett was interested in fighting at Inoki's new organization "INOKI GENOME FEDERATION (IGF)", according to Daily Sports.


The organization officially announced that they would hold the first event "TOUKON BON-BA-YA" on June 28th at Ryogoku Kokugikan, Tokyo.

That event is supposed to be pro-wrestling-oriented, not MMA.
Since Josh loves pro-wrestling and showed a kind of disgust to new PRIDE owned by Fertita brothers, he could showed his interest on that event. But there has been no announcement of him since then. It means he has never commented on it but only Inoki said something.
"INOKI GENOME" was originally the name of Inoki's new concept and event.

It had been announced several times to be held and then postponed everytime. It appeared at first as the plan of huge MMA festival in Bangladesh with 100,000 audiences scheduled in Feb.2006. We heard "Inoki Genome" next as the Inoki-Ali 30th-year Memorial event planed in Sep.2006, then Oct. both in Tokyo. They announced that Josh Barnet, Ken Shamrock, Mark Coleman, Bus Rutten, Naoya Ogawa ...etc would fight there but none of them was offered in reality.

Then in November they decided to hold the event in Korea with Korean promotion "WFX" but postponed. Inoki seems to stick to inviting a former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali to the event, however Ali's condition is too unstable to visit Japan, some sources said.

After all not only MMA fan but also pro-wrestling fan know Inoki is a kind of braggart. So they (and me) are still doubt the June event will really take place, while they started selling the tickets today.

Source: daily.co.jp