Mansoor recently spoke with Bill Pritchard of Wrestle Zone for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During the discussion, the former WWE Superstar spoke about how he would go to Mustafa Ali most frequently behind-the-scenes for veteran advice.
“Oh definitely [Mustafa] Ali. I always call him my work dad,” he said. “Mace is my work wife, Ali my work dad [laughs]. We have a very dysfunctional family, and Dijak is my weird uncle because he’s the weird one who’s always shouting and complaining [laughs]. So when we did that tag team, where it was sort of an odd pair where we had similar backgrounds, we both had the same faith, but I was a fresh face, blue-chipper, doe-eyed babyface, and he was sort of the bitter, resentful, had just gone through Retribution, so he had quite the axe to grind. That was kind of the dynamic in real life, too.”
He continued, “I remember Ali dragging me around all over backstage to writers and production guys, and important people in the office, Kevin Dunn, that I had never met before, even though I’d been called up for months, because I was too shy to basically introduce myself. He would drag me to all these places and go, ‘What are we doing this week? What are we gonna do this tonight? We filmed this vignette, can we get it on the show?’ ‘Okay, we’re gonna do our best.’ ‘Alright.’ He was the serious businessman, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I just need to try and be as professional as possible and do whatever he says.’ Because he’s so incredibly ambitious, and that definitely rubbed off on me. After that run, that’s when I really started to get involved and trying, rather, to get involved in the creative process.”
Check out the complete interview via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.
