Early Life
Lloyd was born into a law-enforcement family in Brunswick, Georgia. His father, Harold, served as a commander with the Georgia State Patrol for 28 years, while his mother, Lois, worked with the Georgia Driver's License Division prior to her retirement in 1999, and his fraternal twin brother, Ron, is a state trooper. Lloyd graduated from Brunswick High School in 1982, and played offensive tackle for the football team all four years. In his senior year, he became the school's first All-State player. He also competed for the track and field team, in the shot put and discus.
A skilled martial artist, Lloyd took up Hung Gar at fourteen, later adding other disciplines such as Judo and Kempo. His school was owned and taught by a former government agent and a U.S. Marshal, before it closed to the public in 1982. In 1983, he began competing for the World Karate Association in full-contact tournaments, eventually winning the United States Southeastern Super Heavyweight title. During his WKA stint, he was never knocked out or even knocked down; his only loss came on a disqualification for stalling, which he attributed to nervousness.
However, when the WKA changed its rules in 1985 to allow kicks from the knee up (they were previously only from the waist up), Lloyd opted to retire from competition in order not to jeopardize his football scholarship by risking injury. He played center for Valdosta State University (the same alma mater as former WCW announcer Scott Hudson), under coach Mike Cavan, and was a teammate of former Atlanta Falcons linebacker Jessie Tuggle during his collegiate career.
Lloyd graduated in 1987 with a master's degree in education, before which he commented in jest to a local newspaper reporter that he and another teammate, R.D. Swain, planned to become world tag team champions. He had a chance to enter the NFL that year, but declined due to the players' strike and because he had just gotten his first teaching job.
Read more about this topic: Glacier (wrestler)
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)