King Lawal: I thought if I die, I die

He doesn't like to talk about it now, but there was a time very recently when former Strikeforce champ "King" Mo Lawal almost gave up. As in, all the way up. As in, the kind you can't come back from.

"I got to the point where I was like, [expletive] it," Lawal said in a phone interview. "I just felt like, hey, I'm going to quit taking this medicine, and if I die then I die. I'm tired of this stuff."

That was somewhere around the ninth or 10th time he went in to get his infected knee flushed out. That was after he'd lost about 30 pounds. After he'd hobbled around with a pump, pushing syrupy, viscous fluid out of his knee as strangers stared at him as if he was urinating in public. After doctors had sewn up his knee with a nasty staph infection festering inside, just waiting to change his life in ways he'd never even thought to be scared of before.