WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT BARTIMUS
March 5th, 2010 | Published in SUCKERPUNCH BLINDSIDE
What can we say about Bart? If you don’t know Bart Palaszewski, your impression of him might be that he is a rough, tatted up, red headed wild man. If you google him you will see fight after fight and war after war… a guy like this has got to be a jerk right?
The truth is Bart is a promoter’s best kept secret. He is one of the nicest, funniest characters in the sport and will step up and fight anyone at a moment’s notice.
Bart has been fighting since the age of 18 and now at the ripe old age of 26 he is considered a veteran and an underdog rather than a young, improving contender in the sport. Bart knows all about being the underdog and even being bullied. After all, he got involved in training after getting beat up in school by a kid who trained in Mixed Martial Arts. Ironically, Bart was bullied by a student that trained with Jeff Curran at the time so he decided to go to the source and seek training himself. For Bart to show up at the the bully’s school definitely took some brass. Bart showed great potential and Curran took him under his wing. Outside of Curran, it wasn’t long before Bart became the top fighter in the gym. As for the student that that bullied him, well he mysteriously stopped showing up for classes.
Bart’s successes lead him to a shot in the now defunct IFL where he made a name for himself by being involved in some of the promotion’s most historic wars and cementing his name as a KO artist. However, few people know that he is a very talented BJJ brown belt which often goes unnoticed because of his KO ratio.
After the IFL Palaszewski exploded into the WEC with a KO over Alex Karalexis but then took back to back losses to last minute replacements Ricardo Lamas and Anthony Nyojukwani. With his WEC career on the line Bart was asked to fight the undefeated phenom, Anthony Pettis. “It was a big risk taking that fight with Pettis because I really wasn’t able to put in a proper camp due to an injury that only allowed me to jog and hit pads 3 days a week” said Palaszewski, “but I don’t like to complain about injuries because we all have them all the time”.
On March 6th Palaszewski will face Karen Darabedyan and there have been rumblings that a win over Bart puts Darabedyan in the hunt for a title fight. This frustrates coach and friend Jeff Curran, “Anyone that thinks Bart has peaked or has reached his potential is out of their mind. He isn’t a Gatekeeper of the LW division, he is a top contender and deserves respect.”
