Spend a day with Rashid’Roc’ Shabazz and it starts to make sense. Not the dream of a short skinny kid from a small southern Mississippi town who thought he could become a professional bodybuilder, but how he made it come true despite a thousand reasons why it would never work.
Once you hear how he thinks and see how he lives, you can’t help but feel it too Shabazz’s belief that if you want something to happen, you have to take full responsibility for the result, then work as long and hard as it takes to make it happen.
That’s why it made perfect sense for a 5’5″ 132-pound guy barely out of his teens to leave his family and hometown of Bay St. Louis behind in 1991 to go find the reigning Mr. Olympia, Lee Haney, so he could learn how to become a pro bodybuilder. In Mississippi, there were no professional bodybuilders, Shabazz says. All I knew was what I saw in the magazines, but I needed to see for myself. Lee Haney had been Mr. Olympia for years, and he was in Atlanta, Georgia, so I packed up everything I had and put it in my little truck a 1988 Suzuki Samurai and I moved.