Mustafa Ali recently joined Talk Is Jericho. Among various topics of discussion, Mustafa talked about how he got his ring name, an interesting feedback from Vince McMahon and more.
On the topic of Ali’s name, Ali said he at first refused to have a terrorist heel gimmick and instead started out as a luchador.
“When I started wrestling, I was 16 [years old]. I loved wrestling and I wanted to go out and entertain people and all that stuff, so I get trained and when they decided, ‘hey, you’re ready for a match and you’ve got to start thinking about a character,’ I was thinking this guy and this guy and they go, ‘no, no, no, you’re a Muslim. You’ve got to be a bad guy.’ ‘What do you mean, I have to be a bad guy?”
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to push that agenda and be a part of that,’ so I refused to do that type of character initially. I was like, ‘hey, I love highflying. I love lucha libre. Can I just put on a mask and pass myself off as a luchador?’ Everyone was like, ‘you’re going to do what you want to do,’ so that’s what I did for the first four or five years. I just put on a mask and pretended to be this luchador. And obviously the wrestling was fine, but there was no connection to the crowd. I was just a guy doing moves. There was no real personality behind it, no connection.”
Ali also talked about Vince McMahon, where he said that Vince McMahon has always given him positive feedback. He also received a very interesting feedback from Vince.
“Vince has always been [supplying] very positive feedback. I’ve actually met with him a few times to kind of introduce myself and what I represent.” ‘I’ve talked to him before, but this was the first time he gave me very specific direction on how he thought I could make money in WWE. And I came back, he gave me feedback about the promo, and this and that. And he goes, ‘the one thing I wish you would’ve changed, you have to remember a guy like you, you are always, always fighting from under because you have this rare quality to get actual empathy from the crowd.”
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h/t to Wrestling Inc for the transcription.
