Bellator star "King Mo" Lawal is fed up with poor judging and trash talking by bloggers in combat sports

By Bryan Levick

King Mo spends a lot of time training at Jeff Mayweather’s gym in Las Vegas, Nevada. Mayweather is Floyd Mayweather Jr’s uncle and is also a former boxer himself. Floyd Jr. just improved to 45-0 with a dominating unanimous decision victory over Saul “Canelo” Alvarez on last month. It was clear from the beginning that Mayweather was too much for Alvarez and fans watched him put on a clinic the entire fight. The vast majority of fans, pundits and other athletes had him winning all 12 rounds, but somehow one of the judges scored it a draw. Lawal pointed out that MMA is not the only combat sport that has problems with its judges.

“I don’t think Canelo won a round, maybe one,” said Lawal. “You could see Alvarez was confident in the first two rounds, but after rounds three and up he looked like ok I’m getting hit too much. As far as the judging, all judging in combat sports right now is suspect. A lot of the judges who are judging boxing are judging MMA as well. People have to realize it’s become a problem in all combat sports.”

Then you have the know-it-alls going on the forums and expressing their opinions. Some of them may have valid arguments, but most seem to have no clue what they are talking about. They may think they are helping, but a lot of the times they are complaining just for the sake of complaining. Mo thinks it would help fans and the judges to learn more about what a fighter goes through on a day-to-day basis.

“I don’t mess with the forums, because most of the people know nothing about combat sports,” Lawal explained. “Instead of talking about it on the computer go to the gym and see what we’re doing. I think the judges should do the same thing. I think they should have a judging seminar every three or four months. This way they can hear what a body shot sounds like or what a good jab looks like. A lot of guys are stealing rounds with shoe shine punches. Those are all arm punches. What hurts more arm punches or hard digging shots? A lot of the new judges can easily be persuaded by the sounds of the fans and the crowd cheering for somebody.”

Lawal used to allow what others had to say frustrate him and throw him off his game a little bit. These days he has little use for fans and/or MMA writers who ridicule his every word and every move. He’s content on letting their comments go in one ear and out the other.

“I started to think to myself who are these guys?” questioned Lawal. “Especially a guy named Brent Brookhouse, he was trying to bash me and I was thinking who is this guy? No one has ever met him before. No one knows these guys, they live on Twitter and that’s their world. I don’t live on Twitter, I have the real world. They live on Twitter and that’s how they feel like they are somebody that’s important.”

“I guarantee if I got to meet them they’d be like bums. They live with their mother; they hang out and have no job. For them to go out and bash me that means they don’t have anything going on with their life. Do something positive, I’m not out their bashing anybody. I’m worried about myself, my family, my training and my friends. I want everyone to do good, get deals, get paid and work your ass off. I don’t care about negativity; the guys on Twitter can have that.”

This new found attitude can be attributed to the serious knee injury he suffered back in 2011. He was able to come back from the surgery, but after fighting Lorenz Larkin he developed a severe staph infection. Lawal was hospitalized for almost two weeks and was running a fever of 103 degrees. After going through such a hellacious ordeal, Mo was able to look at things in a much different light.

“Let me tell you something, I was so bad off,” admitted Lawal. “I had 20+ surgeries on my knee and for a month and a half I had a fever of 103-104. I was wasting away, I couldn’t eat and I was sweating profusely. I was so weak when I tried to walk I would fall down. After awhile I began to think, MMA is great and I love it, but my health means more. If I was to get healthy again my goal was to try and fight again.”

“I needed my health and the people who were there supporting me. I didn’t have time for anything else. That’s when I started realizing things about people on Twitter. I used to be strong on Twitter, now I use it as a good way to market myself. I have people who help me with my Twitter and Instagram. Some stuff matters, but a lot of stuff really doesn’t matter.”

“I started thinking that my biggest loss was greater than their best win. These guys are nobody’s, for them to gloat and be happy that I lost. I remember one guy on my Facebook page said he was so happy that I lost and watching me go down was the best thing in his life. I was like what a loser, that’s pretty pathetic. If watching someone lose makes your day then that means you have nothing going on.”