King Mo: pro wrestling helped influence my persona
Heavy.com: You’re headlining the first-ever Strikeforce event in Texas, a place where you spent a lot of time growing up….
Heavy.com: You’re headlining the first-ever Strikeforce event in Texas, a place where you spent a lot of time growing up. How much influence did the state have on your upbringing.
King Mo: I claim Texas as my home, but I’m pretty much from the South. I traveled to a lot of places but I did spent a lot of time in Texas. My upbringing comes from my Momma, who was a single parent. She raised me to be a hard-working, smart and intelligent kid.
Heavy.com: When did you start watching MMA?
King Mo: I started watching it my sophomore year. It had been around for awhile, but the thing is that I never saw it until one time I saw it at Blockbuster. I rented it, and after that I just started renting all of them. I had this one friend who had bootleg stuff, so I started watching some of the bootlegs of these vale tudo fights he had from Brazil and from Japan. And after that I just fell in love with it.
Heavy.com: So when you decided you were going to do this, to start training in it, did you spend more time watching film than you already were?
King Mo: At the time, no. Back then I just watched it as a fan because that’s all I was. I was a huge wrestling fan, too, and I pretty much just focused my attention on wrestling. MMA was just something I would do when I wasn’t wrestling.
Heavy.com: You’re known as a fan of professional wrestling. Before you ever started training in MMA, did you ever look at those pro wrestling characters and say this is a way I can set myself apart from everybody else, by having this kind of flamboyant and over the top persona?
King Mo: Not really. I started doing it when I was wrestling and then when MMA hit and I started fighting, I definitely wanted to keep doing it. I wasn’t going to change nothing. Pro wrestling helped influence my persona, though.
Heavy.com: Who influenced that persona the most?
King Mo: I took a little bit from Booker T, from Jerry Lawler and Harley Race. Some of my stuff came from movies, like the rose petals from Coming to America. I watched a movie about this mafia don and he had a guy just holding an umbrella over his head while he was walking. So I just threw a little bit of everything in there. Some of it I got from TV and movies and some of it I got from pro wrestling.