Olympic loss spurs Lawal’s title pursuit

Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal describes himself as someone who fully pursues his interests – and notes that MMA is just No. 2 on his list of three sports/entertainment passions that he wants to conquer. Lawal (7-0) will bring his title belt, crown and dancing girls to the Toyota Center in Houston on Saturday night for his first title defense when he faces jiu-jitsu specialist Rafael “Feijao” Cavalcante (11-2) in the main event on Showtime. “When I get interested in something, I get obsessed,” said Lawal. “I wanted to win a gold medal in the Olympics, and then make the move to MMA as an Olympic champion because I’d be able to walk in and get paid more. I blew the Olympic chance.”

His rise to the Strikeforce light heavyweight championship is only another step in a series in his goals to becoming something of the reverse Brock Lesnar.Lawal started as an amateur wrestler largely because of his childhood love of pro wrestling. He nearly made the move to pro wrestling himself but put it off. He says it’s not a question of maybe but rather when that childhood goal will be achieved. Then he says he’ll go on to be a pro-wrestling star. But it won’t be soon, as his current goal is to not just be an MMA champion, something he achieved just 19 months into his career, but also be considered an all-time great in the sport.

“You can’t do that in 10 matches,” he said. Lawal has been studying tapes of Cavalcante, and sees him as a different challenger than Gegard Mousasi, from whom he won the title on April 17 in Nashville. “Mousasi was more aggressive standing, but Feijao is more aggressive on the ground,” he said. In particular, he’s been looking at Cavalcante’s upset loss to Mike Kyle last summer when Kyle overwhelmed him with strikes, which were key to his victory. 

But he says everything started with watching pro wrestling on television, in particular the 1980s versions of the National Wrestling Alliance and Mid-South Wrestling. Lawal can talk in detail about wrestlers and stories from back in the mid-’80s, when he was just 4 years old. He learned valuable lessons from being a pro-wrestling fan, soaking up strategy and technique by studying VHS videotapes from all over the world.

The other lesson learned was how to promote fights. But amateur wrestling came first. He didn’t start until he was 16 but picked it up quickly. When he got to college at Oklahoma State, he remembers meeting his first national champion in the practice room, sizing him up and thinking that he could beat him. Instead, he got destroyed. The next step, he realized, was finding every tape he could get his hands on. “I would steal tapes at Oklahoma, looking at guys like Kevin Jackson, David Schultz and Mark Schultz,” said Lawal, naming three Olympic gold medalists.

After placing third in the 2003 NCAA tournament, he very briefly tried pro wrestling after being recruited by Gerald Brisco of World Wrestling Entertainment, who had wrestled at OSU in the late ’60s and had a long professional career. But it was actually a current WWE wrestler, Shad Gaspard, whom he credits for putting him on his career path. “I was at OVW [at the time a Louisville, Ky.,-based operation where WWE trained its new talent] and I met Shad Gaspard, he was called ‘Da Beast’ at the time, and he told me he wished he’d gone into fighting first,” said Lawal.

After that discussion, Lawal decided he didn’t want to second-guess his decision years later. He told Brisco he’d be back after winning a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics, and said that after his fighting career is over, his plan was to move into pro wrestling. He didn’t quite get that gold, but he did win national titles in 2005 and 2008, as well as gold at the 2007 Pan American Games. Considered having medal potential in 2008, Lawal was matched against fellow American Andy Hrovat in a best-of-three series to determine who would make the Olympic team. Hrovat, who Lawal beat for the ’08 national title, won the third match by scoring with seven seconds left. 

“I already knew that was my last year in amateur wrestling,” he said. And as soon as he lost at the trials, he knew he was MMA-bound. While training for the Olympic team, however, he briefly tried another form of pro wrestling – the short-lived Real Pro Wrestling promotion. “I knew that wasn’t going to make it right away,” he said. “They had too much of an amateur wrestling mentality. I was doing the trash-talking, and they said they were getting letters from people who didn’t like it. They didn’t understand we were a television show.” The league used amateur wrestlers in non-scripted matches with a team format similar to the International Fight League, and a slightly different set of rules. Television ratings started off decent but didn’t sustain. Lawal was the league’s champion at 185 pounds and probably its biggest star.

He fell in love with MMA as a teen after someone showed him a UFC tape checked out of a Blockbuster around 1995 or 1996. He then began studying every tape he could, from the violent Vale Tudo tapes he’d find from Brazil to fights all over the globe. He still watches as many matches as he can. When it was time for his pro debut, taking a fight on short notice in Japan against Travis Wiuff, watching the tapes gave him an edge on Wiuff, a natural heavyweight who outsized him and was on a nine-match winning streak before his 67th pro fight. The fight only lasted 2:11, with Lawal winning with punches on the ground.

“Roger Gracie got hurt and I was called,” he said about his debut fight on Sept. 28, 2008, on a Sengoku show in Japan. “The weight didn’t matter. In wrestling, I always went against bigger guys. [Wiuff] had experience, but I had seen so many of his fights before that I knew him, and he knew nothing about me.” He liked the idea of debuting in Japan. Lawal had watched so many tapes of the glory days of the Pride Fighting Championships with its big crowds that going to Japan meant something. Plus, MMA fighting in Japan is more of an entertainment spectacle, so he could be billed as “King Mo” instead of Muhammed Lawal. On the U.S. scene, he uses a mix: King Mo Lawal.

While he still had to win the fight, he became an instant star in Japan based on his ring entrance and rapper persona, saying after the fight: “When I say King, you say Mo,” and encouraged the sides of the arena to chant. He scored three more wins in Japan before hearing from Strikeforce. “When I wrestled at 184.8 pounds, I would go against anyone of any weight,” he said. “I always liked to go against the 96 kilogram [211 pounds] and the heavyweights. To me, the weight made no difference.”

He said he wound up in MMA as a light heavyweight because he considered it the strongest weight class. “I can still make 184.8 pounds, but it’s not easy,” he said. As for how he found his way to Strikeforce, Lawal said simply, “Strikeforce called me and wanted me, and UFC didn’t.” That turned out to be a benefit, though, as there was a shorter line in getting a championship opportunity. He got that opportunity in his second fight with the company and was a major underdog in his title fight against Mousasi. 

“People on Twitter and the Internet were telling me that I didn’t have enough experience [he had six fights while Mousasi had 31], but I knew he couldn’t stop my takedowns,” said Lawal. “I took down Olympic and world champion wrestlers, national champions from Cuba. I can take down anyone in MMA except maybe Daniel Cormier. “I also predicted that after I beat Mousasi, those same people would go around saying Mousasi was overrated.”