by Mark Hunt
As time ticked past through the first round, I grew more and more confident. Fighting just one guy, on a flat surface, with no bins or kerbs to fall over was actually pretty easy going.
When I came out for the second round I was ready to look for that spot where his chin would be open for business. With naked fists and often wildly swinging opponents, it was much easier to find that spot on the streets, but I was confident, with a little patience, that I’d get to this guy’s spot. A scenario started playing in my mind. The ring was the same, but beyond it wasn’t a nightclub, it was a stadium – the MGM Grand Garden Arena. There were thousands of people and lights and cameras, and I was stacked with muscles. I was darker skinned, too. I was Mike Tyson. My head had been playing a news clip I’d seen on TV of Mike Tyson knocking some poor fella out. It was a clean, one-punch knockout, but which punch was it?
Then I saw it – a naked jaw and dropped hands. I threw a straight right at my opponent, landing it square on the jaw. It was the same punch as the one I’d seen Iron Mike throw, and the results were the same. This dude was out cold. The crowd cheered and shouted, saying only good things, nice things.
‘They need to put this kid in the movies,’ a woman yelled. A ripple of laughter followed. It felt good. It felt really good. I started dancing around the ring – we were in a nightclub, after all.
‘Good shit, son,’ Sam said to me after the fight, handing me a six-pack. Those beers didn’t last long.
‘You know, I reckon we should probably do this again.’
I reckoned he was right.
Chapter 4
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
1994
I told my wife at the time, ‘I’m going to get a crew of hoods and street kids together and I don’t care how bad they are, I’m going to bring ’em in and turn ’em into fighters. Try to make ’em better people.’ I was brought up on the streets and no one taught me shit, and I was going to teach these kids some of the stuff I wish I’d been taught.
SAM MARSTERS (TRAINER)
After that first fight Marsters left me an open invitation to train with him for free at his little gym on Fort Street in the Auckland CBD. I was an infrequent visitor, but it was at that spartan place where I first learned to bring a little control to my fighting, a little discipline. My fighting style didn’t change – it’s never really changed, not even now – but that was where I started to learn ring craft.
I enjoyed training at Sam’s gym, but it never felt part of my real life. My real life was still all that mayhem in the south. The gym was a nice, safe harbour, but it wasn’t in my country and I’d only visit it when the current took me there.
One day Sam bailed me up at the gym and asked me why I didn’t train more often. He knew I was enjoying it and that I liked the rest of the guys, and I was getting pretty good at it, too. He just didn’t understand.
When I told him about my life outside the gym, just a little, Sam suggested I move into the warehouse he was fitting out as his new gym. He said Dave could move in too.
Why not, eh?
The warehouse started as a big empty space with a ring in the middle, but grew into a home of sorts, with a few partitions bearing some posters of fighters or girls, and a few Pakeha housemates, many of whom had come off the streets, and even some food in the fridge from time to time.
Life there was good, and I liked the other guys I lived and trained with. Discipline wasn’t particularly strict – Sam knew most of the boys he’d taken on had some issues with authority – but what rules did exist were enforced enthusiastically, and the big one was that when you were at the gym, you had to respect the gym, respect your gym mates and, above all, respect Sam.
We had free rein to do whatever we wanted outside the gym – and there were some crazy lives being lived outside that gym (one of those Pakeha dudes was even getting paid to root older women) – but inside the gym we had to be cool.
We were all shits in our own way, though, and sometimes we ran foul of Sam. When that happened, we’d probably end up in the ring with him. Shortly after you’d be waking up. Sam never knocked me out, though. Not because I was never asking for it, but because it wasn’t an easy thing to do. With me, he’d use his grappling skills to establish who was the boss. I hated that. Not the discipline, mind you – Sam was nothing like the old man, and I always understood why he did what he did – but I hated the powerlessness of being stuck in a strong, talented grappler’s embrace.
When I was living at Sam’s gym I started travelling around the country a little. In addition to the fight shows he promoted at his clubs, Sam used to offset the cost of running his gym by plugging us into events his mates were organising.
‘What do you need? A 62, an 82 and a heavyweight? Can do – they’re right here at my gym,’ I’d hear him bark into his mobile, and off we’d go to some event somewhere.
Sam would also take us on road trips to places like Piha and Muriwai Beaches on the West Coast, where the surf was good, breaking on gorgeous black sand beaches. He was a mad keen surfer, Sam Marsters – still is actually – and so were a lot of the other fighters.
I got on a board a few times, but I wasn’t a great swimmer and was probably a bit too big for those boards, so the surfing bug never bit me. I still loved those trips, though, when all of us piled into a car stacked with food, weed and booze for a few days of fun. It was like being part of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I was particularly useful to Sam, not only because I was a heavyweight, but because I could be plugged into any fight. That wasn’t true of most blokes. A lot of fighters had plans and fears and whatnot, but I never cared who the guy across from me was. Short notice, no notice, notable, unheard of, whoever they were, we could throw down. That’s how I ended up fighting Rony Sefo.
The fight was to be at the Mandalay Ballroom in Newmarket and, unbeknown to me, there was some tension between Sam and the Sefo boys. When Sam walked into the event – it was one the Sefos were promoting – Rony’s brother Ray yelled at Sam to pay the cover. At the time Sam was a pledge for the Head Hunters, one of New Zealand’s bigger gangs, but Ray wasn’t going to take any shit from him at his own event. Sam told Ray he was happy to pay if Ray would accompany him to the toilets. As talented a fighter as Ray was (and still is), he wasn’t that keen to go into a confined space with an angry Sam.
Rony was only a couple of years older than me, but he was much more advanced on his career path. He and Ray worked hard under Lolo Heimuli, and by the time I fought Rony they were already starting to make names for themselves internationally.
The guy Rony was supposed to be fighting had pulled out two days before the fight, so I got into the ring with about a day’s notice. As soon as we touched gloves, I knew it might be a longer night than most of my other fights, not because I knew anything about Rony, but because he had abdominal muscles. I hadn’t fought anyone with abs before.
Rony and I danced through six rounds, but the thing about Rony was that he just never tired, and he never dropped his hands – unlike most of the guys I’d fought up until that point. His chin never opened for business.
I lost that fight on points. I remember hoping I’d meet this bloke in the ring again, and vowed never to lose to the same person twice. Which is not to say that the close decision against a world-class fighter pushed me in my training, because it didn’t.
Training then didn’t mean to me what it does today. Today I train to win. Today I train to be not just the best fighter I can be, but the best fighter in the world. Back then training was just something to do. If there was something better to do, I’d be off in a flash.
At that time, though, I did start to realise how good I could be. Every so often, usually when training or fighting, a little squeaky voice of self-belief sounded off in my head.
You’re the best fighter in the world, man; it’s just that no one else knows about it yet.
I honestly used to hear that in my head. If I ever listened to that voice, however, it would b
e followed by a booming dissenting opinion.
Where did you come from? You think you can be shit? Just shut up, have another drink.
Living at Sam’s gym taught me some of the basics of civilised independent living, and a little bit about working and budgeting, but it was never planned to be a permanent spot, so after about nine months with Sam I moved into Dave’s parents’ garage in South Auckland. I had a good little set-up there, with a bed, PlayStation, TV and VHS, and I remember it was on that video player that I got my first peek into the scale and spectacle of K-1.
VHS copies of high-quality kickboxing matches were a hot commodity around the gym, but no tape was as highly prized as the first-ever K-1 Grand Prix tournament. For those who don’t know, K-1 was where mixed martial arts really began. Created by Kazuyoshi Ishii – the Japanese karate master who started the Seidokaikan style of full-contact karate – the early K-1 tournaments were Japanese-only affairs, where local fighters would pit themselves in full-contact matches under traditional rules in front of tiny crowds. Soon these karate students were testing themselves against kung fu fighters and the rules were relaxed to create a more even playing field. As the rules became more permissive, Ishii-san found that his open style of karate was starting to mirror the styles of some of the European kickboxing champions.
In 1993, with the help of a group of Japanese businessmen (some with pretty colourful backgrounds) the organisation planned a one-off, eight-man invitational tournament in one of Japan’s biggest indoor stadiums, so they could test their champion, legendary Japanese karateka Masaaki Satake, against the best fighters from around the world.
Fighters from the US, Croatia, the Netherlands and Thailand were invited to compete for the million-dollar prize, with the European kickboxers ultimately dominating. In fact, the only European fighter to lose – Ernesto Hoost – would do so in the final, against Croatian Branko Cikatić.
What was planned to be a one-off event turned into one of the most successful and enduring professional martial arts organisations in history, and the Europeans continued to prevail. In fact, of the nineteen K-1 Grand Prix events, only once has a non-European won. And that bloke spent a good part of 1993 sitting around in Dave’s garage, smoking, drinking and watching VHS tapes of the K-1.
I’d never seen anything like the spectacle of K-1 before: the crazy production values, the giant crowds and the huge amounts of prize money. It seemed galaxies away from South Auckland.
‘Shit man, that could be you,’ Dave said to me while we watched Branko Cikatić, the inaugural winner of the tournament, beat up Satake in the semifinal.
It seemed a crazy, unwarranted statement, but part of me knew Dave was right. What was happening outside the ring was foreign to me, but what was happening inside the ring was as familiar as breathing. A scrap was a scrap, and I never, ever thought I would be out of my depth in one of those. Even then, having only ever slugged it out on the streets and in the clubs and halls of the North Island – and with a few losses too – I’d never thought any man in the world was a better fighter than me. No man in New Zealand, no man in Japan, no man in Europe.
The fight ended when Cikatić caught Satake with a left hook that knocked the giant Japanese fighter out cold. When the streamers waved and the flags started to fly, I turned to Dave and told him that I, too, thought I could win that tournament. It’s very likely that I had a beer in one hand and a cig in the other, however, there and then, I believed I could win that thing. As was my way, though, as soon as the idea occurred to me, it disappeared again. It was an absurd thought, and the loud negative voice returned.
You’re an uneducated street thug who came from shit, is shit, and will always be wading through shit. Have another beer, and another ciggie.
I probably did.
While I lived in that garage, I put myself in a rut I thought I deserved. During the day I worked as a lackey at a furniture factory called John Young Manufacturing, and at night I did door work at K’Rock, one of the roughest bars in Auckland. I started an irregular routine of extreme monotony and boredom at my day job and booze, drugs and scraps at my night job. Video games and infrequent training filled in the rest of my time.
As the months went by, a couple of possible futures emerged. The first came into focus one night when, while working at K’Rock, I was approached by a dude I immediately clocked as a little bit shady. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, ‘Where does a guy like you get off thinking that anyone else looks a little bit shady?’ That’s because you’re thinking about this in binary terms – shady and not shady. Where I was from, there was a whole spectrum of shady and I wasn’t even nearly at the bad end of it.
The guy’s name was Tai – a big fella with tattoos bursting out of his collar and onto his face and neck. I knew these tatts meant gangs.
‘I heard you can handle yourself bro,’ Tai said to me.
I didn’t tell him I couldn’t.
‘I’ve got some work for you if you want it.’
‘What kind of work?’
‘Collections work, man. People owe me money. You go and get the money. Real easy shit. You think about it.’
I did think about it. I’d spurned that gang life once because I assumed another, better life would emerge. It hadn’t. Once again, though, I realised I didn’t want what this dude was selling. What he was suggesting was a life that wasn’t just peppered with fights, but real beat-downs and probably even worse than that.
That wasn’t me. I didn’t want to terrorise people. I had, and I felt shitty about it. I told Tai I was right where I was.
At my day job I saw my other future, which was perhaps even more unpalatable. One of my supervisors at the factory was a broken-down old Pakeha man, whose only energy for life was what he could muster from the office supply of powdered coffee. I disliked him because I saw in him a possible future version of myself. Every day I went to that place, a voice in my head got louder and louder.
You’re going to be that old man. It’ll happen in a minute, bro, in a second. You’ll look up one day and you’ll be him.
These were the two possible futures I saw in front of me, and I didn’t want either of them. For whatever reason, though, I couldn’t do anything to carve out a third path. I was in a rut and when my life hits a rut, the bad voices of those lesser angels start taking over. I found myself sporadically street fighting and robbing again, but this time it felt different. It wasn’t a lark anymore. I was doing it because I was angry, and even though I hated myself for doing it, I couldn’t seem to stop it.
Of course I ended up going down again for assault. This time it was just a month stint, but that month at The Rock (Mount Eden Corrections Facility) felt like years. We were in lockdown 22 hours a day and I soon started to despair. The last time I’d been in prison I was escaping my family home, escaping the old man. This time I wasn’t escaping anything and there wasn’t really anything to look forward to when I got out, either.
This was the first time it occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t going to be anything more than a thug and a criminal. Maybe I should just embrace that shit, nom up and be done with it.
‘At risk’, I guess you would have called it. When I got out of the joint the second time, you could have pointed me anywhere and I would have followed. Luckily for the good people of Auckland, someone ended up pointing me towards Australia.
The idea first came into my head when my mate Tokoa, whom we called Tooks – a feisty little fella from school Dave and I had spent quite a bit of time with since – came home after a year in Australia. He first came to us before he left. We were sitting in Dave’s garage playing Mortal Kombat on the PlayStation, and he told us about his plans across the ditch, and what he’d heard about Oz.
‘All you need to do in Australia is just nod at the girls on the bus, and you’re in. It’s that easy there, bro,’ Tooks said.
I didn’t know about that, sounded like bullshit. Then Tooks came back, and he found us still playing Mortal Komba
t. A year had passed and he’d come home to see his family. He found us in the exact same spot, doing the exact same thing. I was still bouncing, still at John Young Manufacturing. Nothing had changed.
When Tooks asked what we’d been doing, Dave and I gave embarrassed looks.
‘Shit boys, you got to do something with your lives. You can’t just sit around in a garage playing video games forever.’
He was right. It’d be pretty easy to spend another year the way we had the previous one and, before you knew it, those years would add up.
‘Hey, was it true about the girls on the bus?’ I asked Tooks.
‘Come and find out.’
It was an idea, but not one that took form until Dave got a call a few months later. We were once again in Dave’s garage, once again with PlayStation controllers in our hands, bashing away at a game of Mortal Kombat. When the phone rang and Dave picked it up, I could tell he wanted to get off the phone until he started to warm to what was being said. Soon he was quite animated and his attention moved to me.
‘Mark. Hunt. My mate, you remember him?’ he asked the person on the phone. There were a few words on the other end of the line, and Dave smiled. ‘I dunno. I’ll ask him. Hey man,’ he called over to me. ‘You want to move to Australia, live with my brother?’
I’d never been to Australia. I’d never been anywhere, except the country towns where Sam had taken me and the boys to surf, smoke weed and fight. I’d heard a lot about Australia, of course – not that different from NZ, but a little bigger, a little busier and with a few more opportunities.
It wasn’t here, that was the main attraction of the place. What would I be leaving behind? Dead-end jobs? Clubs I’d been to a thousand times? Endless games of Mortal Kombat in Dave’s garage?
I would be leaving one thing behind, though: a daughter. My daughter was born just after I got out of prison the first time. She wasn’t the product of a committed relationship, she came from a couple of kids who were starting to grow into their bodies. When the girl’s mother said she didn’t want me to have anything to do with the baby, I was relieved. Some people could have handled the responsibility at that age, but I was a dangerous teenager who would have brought nothing to that kid’s life besides misery and violence.
