You know what’s great about this behind-the-scenes All Elbows video of "King Mo" Lawal‘s destruction of a hapless Mark Kerr at M-1 Breakthrough? Everything. Not only does it mix sharp editing and a sweet soundtrack with backstage footage and an awesome shot of Mo knocking Kerr’s mouthpiece across the ring at the end, but we also get to see just how painfully low-budget M-1′s Kansas City event was. Check out Mo’s locker room. That thing would make a convict feel claustrophobic. It’s so small he has to warm up in the hallway, not that it seems to have hurt his performance any. Seeing this now really makes me wonder how/if Mark Kerr got warmed up for this fight. Do you think he just sat in his car with his eyes closed, listening to "Desperado" on the tape deck over and over again until the promoters came out to tell him it was time?
On a completely unrelated note, after the jump watch the sucker punch at the end of last night’s Oregon/Boise State game that got the college football season off to an embarrassing start. If only Boise State had recruited that nice Anderson Silva boy to play free safety, no one would have dared to try something like that against them.
I was at Memorial hall that night (the guy I was with is in the background of the Fedor shot). This video doesn’t even come close to doing justice to how low budget the show was. It is an old venue in Kansas City, Kansas (which is a ghetto ass burb of Kansas City, MO) which sat max 2000 people and was only 80% full. I found out about the fight on CP, because there was no local advertising til a week before. Half the crowd were friends of the local fighters on the under card. The venue ran out of beer. It is basically a large high school gymnasium.
The Wrestler reference was pretty apt. Handsome Harley Race is the legend of Memorial hall. Saw him there 25 years ago.
And the rose petal girls were the good from far but far from good ring girls.