One of America’s best Street Fighter pros, NoahTheProdigy, says his dad, Moises Solis, deserves credit for his gaming success after telling young Noah to blow off his schoolwork. The fighting game star opened up about his father’s unconventional parenting approach in a recent interview.
“I didn’t do school work growing up,” he admitted. “I never did homework. My dad told me, ‘Eff school, watch Tokido and Mago.'”
“I’d pull out homework, and my dad would ask me what I want to do in life,” he continued. “I was like, ‘I want to be a firefighter,’ and he was like, ‘Be realistic, don’t you want to have fans? Don’t you want to be a superstar?'”
NoahTheProdigy shared that he eventually confessed to Solis about wanting to be a pro gamer. His dad, not surprisingly, backed him completely.
“He said, ‘Alright, so, eff school, screw school. We’re not gonna do no schoolwork, throw it away,'” NoahTheProdigy recalled.
NoahTheProdigy has been dominating gaming since he was just a kid. At only eight years old, he landed in the top 48 at Evo 2011 competing in Marvel vs Capcom 3. Since then, he’s become one of America’s premier Street Fighter players, earning over $50,000 from his gaming skills.
Back in 2011, Solis revealed that to cover NoahTheProdigy’s tournament entry fee, he had to sell the rims off his car.
“The way the economy is, I lost my job,” he said. “But I had a nice set of rims on the car, so I sold my rims and said, ‘Let’s go, let’s see what he’s got.'”
In that same interview from years ago, he explained why he’s been so supportive of his son’s gaming passion.
“If you look out your window, the things kids are doing nowadays…I have options here in my home,” he explained. “There’s reading, there’s math, there’s gaming. I can either let him go outside, smoke pot, run around with gang members — if this is what he wants to do, this is what I’ll support him in.”
