Network
We sit before the television on a Friday night, and one of our favorite shows is on Spike TV: Bellator MMA. Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) has exploded as a sport in the past decade, and we’re finding it to be great entertainment – the power of boxing and the cunning of wrestling, where opponents use their training in Martial Arts and wrestling to defeat their opponent. If you follow it, you’ll notice that most of the athletes inside the octagon have tattoos, and sometimes that ink covers a large part of their body.
Most people wouldn’t know how to approach him, but Cisneros is a friend to many, and very humble.
One such competitor with a lot of ink is Johnny “Tattooed Terror” Cisneros, and we met up with him at a car show where his 2007 Dodge Charger R/T was being shown. Cisneros has been competing in MMA for about five years now, he’s a family man with two kids (one of them, he tells us, is his dog) and has a regular job just like many of us do.
Cisneros fights to collect a paycheck, we collect a paycheck and fight to keep it. Professionally, Cisnero’s record is 8-3, fighting a couple of times each year. When he’s not fighting, he’s often at the UFC Gym in Corona, California, either training for a fight or working as a trainer and instructor for people who want to learn mixed martial arts (MMA) or self-defense.
All of his ink means something to him, representing Catholicism, Aztec Gods, and his Mexican heritage. He also has a tat of his son on his neck.
He trains hard at Reign Training Center, and has another bout coming up at the Pechanga Casino in Temecula, California, on October 3rd, fighting at about 6:00-6:30 pm that eventing. The Bellator MMA event will be televised on SpikeTV, but Cisneros said he’s not sure if he’ll make it into the spotlight or if his bout will be off-air.
When we met up with Cisneros, he was busy cutting weight to make welterweight division, a drop from his normal middleweight status. His time is tight, but he was nice enough to take time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about his life, his fighting, and his love for cars. Talking with him about his fighting, his ink, and his car is just like talking to any other gearhead, except Cisneros gets to beat on people for a living. The caveat to that is that those people get to beat on him too, hopefully not as much.
Cisneros says that his Charger represents stability and achievement in his life. Not a bad way to think of your car, for a gearhead.
Inspiration and Motivation
We asked about his tattoos, and what they mean to him; we asked if it was mandatory for the MMA because he did expand his collection after he began competing, he just laughed. His ink goes a little further than most people, and it represents his Mexican heritage and things that are important to him, like his family and Catholicism.
In contrast, most people have their car all “tatted out”, but Cisneros likes the plain look and he is all tatted out.
His body is decorated with Aztec Gods and religious symbols, they all mean something to him and many of them were done by award-winning professionals. We asked how his nickname “Tattooed Terror” came about and he said he heard someone in the audience call him that after a fight one night. He liked it and now has it tattooed on his neck, so Cisneros said he thinks he’ll keep it.
He got into MMA after watching some of the reality shows on television and had an epiphany, “I can do that,” he recalls saying to himself, and five years later he is still doing it. It’s been a struggle to maintain a living as a professional MMA fighter, so training others at the UFC Gym is a perfect fit for him.
The Charger is lean and mean, kind of like Cisneros.
But he wasn’t always into MMA, saying, “When I was younger, I was a bit of a knucklehead and knew I had to clean up my act.” When he got into MMA he straightened his life out and started making something for himself. It wasn’t easy, but he’s proud that he’s no longer that knucklehead, and that he has a family and responsibilities now that help him to maintain his focus on what’s important.
When I bought my Charger, I kind of grew up. I was in a bad scene, but now the car is a symbol of everything I conquered. -Johnny Cisneros
When he got older, he worked at a vinyl graphics shop as an installer, and one day a guy came in with a Dodge Charger and Cisneros fell in love with it. He knew he had to get one of his own, and went out and bought one about five years ago.
His Charger R/T was white, and it was completely stock, but when he bought it he felt like he finally had something that he liked and he vowed to take care of it. And he knew that he was going to be customizing it like the cars he’d seen in the vinyl shop.
“When I bought my Charger, I kind of grew up,” he recalled, “I was in a bad scene, but now the car is a symbol of everything I conquered. It’s not just a car to me, it means a lot more to me than that.” Others have asked if he was ever going to sell it, but it’s too symbolic for him, and reminds him how far he has come.
Big Gus and Johnny Cisneros in front of Trisha Allen’s Super Bee. They’ve all been great friends, and being gearheads brought them all together.
He was definitely on his way to something big, and was picked up by the Sullen Clothing family after a friend of his, Big Gus from Tattoo Nightmares on Spike TV, introduced him to the family. Big Gus felt that Cisneros would be a good client, and associated his fighting style and tenacity with the way Sullen Clothing ran their business. The rest, they say, is history and now Sullen Clothing is one of his biggest sponsors.
These days, he works and trains hard, and that Charger helps him stay motivated because it’s the first nice thing that he’s had. “Everything I did was to get to the big show,” he said, and that Charger was the springboard that helped him get to where he is. At 34 years old, he’s not the youngest, but he doesn’t let that deter him.
He also received a lot of inspiration from Joker’s MMA in Orange County, California, another big sponsor of his. Cisneros looks to his friends and family for inspiration, still training as hard as ever, he also finds much of his inspiration from Innovative Results, who helps him get into fighting shape.
The gray paint, carbon fiber accents, and dark wheels make for a great looking combination.
Charger Pride
Cisneros had heard about a popular burger joint in Huntington Beach where a lot of gearheads would hang out on the first Friday of every month. “Beach Burger” opened their parking lot to groups of automotive enthusiasts, and Cisneros was at his first event with his new Charger. Still young in the MMA scene, he said, “Being all tatted up like this, there weren’t too many people who would come up and talk to me.”
Cisneros can be found at car shows all over Southern California, like the Spring Festival of LXs in Irvine, where he’s always willing to strike a pose for his fans.
But one couple did approach him, Wayne and Trisha Allen, and they all became great friends after that. Trisha drives her B5 blue Charger Super Bee often, or they’ll cruise in their Crossfire occasionally – or both. The Allens are huge Mopar fans and it’s a big part of their lives because Wayne is the Vice President of Operations at Moss Bros CDJR in San Bernardino, California.
Being a professional fighter, finding sponsors is a difficult but necessary part of the process, but Cisneros quickly found a sponsor in Moss Bros and the Allen Family. He calls them his family, and he has become a part of the a nationwide Mopar club called Mopar 360 that the Allens also belong to.
Cisneros began to see the modifications that people were doing to their cars, and he wanted to do the same to his own car. He installed some windshield banners for a while for his new friends, and eventually began to do some custom work to his own car. He wanted it to be uniquely his own, without going completely over the top.
The Charger was in good company at the Spring Festival, and as subtle as it is, it still stands out. Cisneros is planning some upgrades for the 5.7 Hemi, he wants to supercharge the mill and hopes to find a sponsor to help him out with that.
When he found Corona Sunroofs, they installed his sunroof and stitched his new interior, quickly becoming another sponsor of the Tattooed Terror. His Charger R/T has a unique battleship gray paint job that he says was something he saw on an import once and liked. So he painted his Charger the same color and began to notice other cars at shows and at SEMA with a similar paint job. He knew he had done it right when others were catching on and following suit.
Top: Cisneros is always proud to display all of his sponsors on the back window.
Bottom: The thing he likes most about his Charger is how comfortable it is to drive.
When he needed exhaust work and headers, Don Lindfors at JBA Performance Exhaust stepped up and provided the Charger with an exhaust system to make it sound better. To keep the car looking cool he installed a set of TSW Wheels with low-profile tires on his lowered ride.
But that stance and the attitude it gives off weren’t going to get him far if he kept the stock 5.7L Hemi the way it was. Spankin’ Time Motorsports provided the tune that the DiabloSport T1000 requires, a component that was provided with an intake from Stack Performance, a company that specializes in Mopars and SRT performance parts.
The car sits pretty low now, and Cisneros says that he used to take it in to get the scratches and chips fixed regularly to keep up the appearance, but when a car sits that low, the bumper sees a lot of pavement, so he tries not to overwhelm the shops, like Platinum Auto Body, that help him out and fix his car when it needs it.
Inside the ring, he’s the Tatooed Terror, but outside of the ring he’s simply Johnny, someone we call a friend.
He does plan some upgrades, namely an air bag system to make those entryways a little easier to take, and what gearhead wouldn’t want more power? His next performance mod that he hopes to install is a supercharger for the Hemi. He’s not sure when or where, but he’s always on the lookout for new sponsors for his symbolic Charger.
When you see Cisneros – that tatted up guy hanging around a bunch of other gearheads – you might not know how approachable he truly is. But under that “Tattooed Terror” exterior, behind all of that ink, under those dark shades that we often see him wearing, is the heart of a lion with the gentleness of a lamb.
He’s just another car guy looking for other friends to be a part of this “Mopar or no car” family that he now belongs to. If you happen to meet him at a car show or a cruise night, just a simple hello and he’s already a friend, just like any gearhead should be.
Just like we are with our cars, we do what suits us and it's not for anyone else to judge, because the bottom line is that we're all gearheads, and you can never judge a book by it's cover.
