Karrion Kross has learned a wide variety of martial arts throughout his life that has helped shape his in-ring style.
SmackDown Superstar Karrion Kross was the latest guest on El Brunch de WWE to discuss a wide variety of subjects. When asked about how he got into martial arts, Kross told a story about getting into it when he was younger.
“When I was a little boy and I would watch TV, my generation, we had Jean Claude Van Damme. We had Bruce Lee. We had Jet Li, Chuck Norris,” Karrion Kross began. “And I would see them always doing these fancy kicks, these high kicks, and my father was on the boxing Olympic team for Puerto Rico. So all he did was box, and he would wrestle for the Olympic team in Puerto Rico, and he would get mad when I would ask him to teach me; he’s like, ‘I don’t do that. I can teach you to punch someone in the face, that’s it.’
“So it was like, a natural progression. I started going to karate schools, Kyokushinkai in New York, and then someone from another school would come in and do a new technique, and I’d go, how do you do that? And he would say, ‘Well, I’m not from karate. I’m from another school,’ and actually, it was a Sambo school.
“So then I started taking Sambo because I wanted to learn how to throw people, and Sambo has a good mix of, in my opinion, freestyle karate and judo. And so I would see something, and I would be really impressed by it. And then I would want to go learn it. So that’s kind of how I want to find my way there. And I was learning Sambo up in Toronto, Canada, as a teenager. So it ties a lot of different martial arts together very nicely.”
What do you make of Karrion Kross’ comments? Do you think his love of martial arts has helped define his unique in-ring style? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
If you use any of the quotes above, please credit El Brunch de WWE with a link back to this article for the transcription.
