Early Life
Harris was born in Senatobia, Mississippi and grew up in Coldwater, Mississippi, where his family owned a furniture store. The family collected welfare to help pay the bills. He became a habitual burglar in his teens and, in 1967, local police suggested he leave town. As Harris put it, "Back then if you didn't leave like they said, you would be found dead somewhere." So he relocated to Florida, where he picked fruit. At age 25, Harris moved to Michigan, where he met wrestler Bobo Brazil. Harris then began training as a wrestler, under Brazil's friend, "Tiny" Tim Hampton. He moved to Arkansas to continue training, and to escape the snow in Michigan.
Read more about this topic: Kamala (wrestler)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again.... No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)