John “Bradshaw” Layfield grew up in Sweetwater, Texas, and was a pretty damn good football player at Abilene Christian University in the same state as well as becoming a coach for the football team at Trinity Valley community college. For a brief period, Layfield attempted to pursue an NFL career by signing with the Los Angeles Raiders before the 1990s season but was released before the regular season started. He began pursuing a career in professional wrestling in 1992 and made it to WWF in 1995.
Bradshaw’s partner Ron Simmons (Faarooq) played college football at Florida State from 1977 – 1980 as a nose guard on the defensive line under Bobby Bowden (the greatest coach in program history). Simmons was considered at the time to be a huge victory in 1977 in the recruiting process. The Seminoles won back-to-back Orange Bowls in both Simmons’ junior and senior seasons at Florida State University.
Florida State posted a record of 39 – 8 in Simmons’ four seasons. Simmons also described Bobby Bowden as “a second father.” He finished in the top 10 in the voting for the Heisman Trophy in 1979 (Junior year) and his jersey number was retired by FSU in 1988. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2008 and is in my mind easily one of the 3 – 5 greatest players in Florida State history, albeit I was not alive for it.
Ron Simmons had a brief career in the NFL, being selected by the Cleveland Browns in the sixth round of the 1981 NFL draft. He was affiliated with the Browns in 1981 and 1982 but never actually dressed for regular season games. Simmons also played for the Ottawa Rough Riders in 1981. He subsequently left for the USFL’s Tampa Bay for three seasons from 1983 – 1985. During this time, Lex Luger was on the roster and seriously contemplating going into wrestling, and this planted a seed in Simmons’ mind. When his five-year football career was finished, he decided to follow Luger’s trail and legitimately try to get into wrestling as well.
Simmons started his professional wrestling career in 1986 in Jim Crockett Promotions/WCW, and the biggest moment of his entire career there was on August 2, 1992 when he won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship from Big Van Vader and became the first African-American world champion in professional wrestling history (the tag team Doom with Butch Reed, who recently passed away, a few years before that was also pretty popular).
Ron Simmons made it to the WWF in 1996 and was given the name Faarooq, which he was skeptical at first but made it work. He was assigned to The Nation of Domination as the leader, but the role of the leader of the group quickly was turned over to The Rock (who was Rocky Maivia before being assigned to the group by WWE creative). The Nation of Domination storyline was a thing until 1998 and the idea for the group was based largely on the Nation of Islam as well as the Black Panther Party which was popularized during the Vietnam War.
Being kicked out of The Nation of Domination in favor of The Rock as the leader was ironically the greatest thing that ever happened to Farooq as he was paired with John “Bradshaw” Layfield. The two men developed incredible chemistry together as the APA lasted as a tag team until 2004. Each man developed legitimate love and caring for the other which is a beautiful thing. Farooq was nearing the end of his career at 46 years old by the time the team split in ‘04, but JBL went on to win the WWE Championship in 2004 and hold the title for 280 days, which was a SmackDown record at the time (that has since been broken by AJ Styles).
The mutual love and respect Ron Simmons and JBL have for one another is reminiscent of the relationship The New Day members have currently. Both teams worked together for six years, and both teams are best friends in real life. Fans legitimately can feel intuitively/energetically how the members of a tag team feel about each other and whether they have mutual respect between one another, and these two teams do.
There are generational differences – for example, the APA were part of an era that wholeheartedly embraced the idea of men being rugged/rough around the edges, and they were the perfect example of that image. The New Day is part of a generation that is a little softer in terms of this – it’s not necessarily bad, just very different. One similarity, however, is the amount of love and respect between the two teams which is ultimately the intangible glue that is never going to go out of style no matter the values that are embraced across different generations.