by Mark Hunt
LOLO HEIMULI (TRAINER)
They were happy mornings, at the Mundine gym. When I’d arrive in Redfern, the suburb would be cold, dark and silent, but while I pounded away at one of the faded old heavy bags, sweat dropping onto the parquet floor, the sun would start to fill the large windows and I’d hear the sounds of the suburb waking. That place got me going.
Tony Mundine bought it in 1984, the year he retired from a long boxing career. Tony’s idea was that his gym could be a centre for the inner-city community, not just Aboriginal people – of whom there were plenty nearby as it was smack-bang in the middle of an Aboriginal housing area known as The Block – but people of all races who could benefit from a good workout and the discipline required to stand against another man or woman with your hands raised. His idea wasn’t a million miles away from what Sam Marsters was doing.
Tony Mundine is a legend in Australian boxing circles, but I only knew him as the old man of Anthony ‘Choc’ Mundine, a league player of rare speed and style who used to train alongside me, and who was about to start his own professional fighting career.
I went to Tony’s gym not because of its pedigree, but because it was close, it was easy and cheap – no contracts, no addresses, no premium memberships, it was just a dollar a session, and even when I didn’t have a dollar they’d never turn me away. I also liked it because it was often peppered with Islanders. I always felt more comfortable when there were other Islanders around.
An Islander who was almost always in that place was Alex Tui, a small, wiry, softly spoken man who’d managed the place since the eighties, and still does to this day. You’d never know unless you got him talking – which is no small feat – that Alex is an Australian kickboxing pioneer. One of the first Australasian fighters to train and compete in Thailand, he held a World Kickboxing Association world title, and, by sheer fate, was the cousin of Lolo Heimuli, the man who’d trained the Sefo and Auimatagi boys back in Auckland.
Alex says pretty much the first time he saw me working out he wanted to get me in the ring and testing myself, but he knew if he’d come on strong, he would have lost me. The only other gym I’d really trained in was Sam’s, and for the first few months I barely talked to a soul. It also took me a while to feel comfortable with Alex.
He soon moved me over to sparring, which brought out the competitor in me again. I started working hard at the gym, but that’s where my discipline ended – I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day (a habit that would extend past my K-1 GP win), drank thirstily and regularly, and my worst pokie-addiction days were still ahead of me. At least I had the gym, though. At least I had my morning routine, which required some discipline, some self-belief.
A few blokes at the gym suggested I take on a fight, but I just didn’t see the point. As far as I was concerned, I was done with the fighting thing, until one day Denver said he had a fight for me which would earn me a hundred bucks cash in hand. I was down for that.
‘Fight’s in three days though, bro,’ Denver said. Someone had dropped out of a bout and the organisers needed someone to fill in. The short notice meant nothing to me.
The day of the fight, I’d been sandblasting all day. The boys and I met at Central Station to take the train to the Serbian Club in Bonnyrigg, and we arrived just in time for my fight. I was starving – I wanted to get some Maccas before the fight but I was skint, so I rolled into the ring with an empty stomach, heavy arms and a headache.
I got dropped in that fight – the first time in my career – but my opponent, whose name and face now escapes me, couldn’t finish me. I eventually finished with a points loss. I forced myself to have a meal straight after getting the cash in my hand, because while that money was in my pocket, I’d hear whispering in my ear, telling me where the nearest poker machine was.
When I spoke to Denver again he told me the promoters had contacted him about me fighting again, not because I’d shown that much aptitude, but because I’d shown I’d fight anyone, at any time, and I would probably last the rounds.
The next time Denver organised a fight for me I had time to train, and did a little bit. I slept the night before and ate beforehand. I don’t remember much about that fight either, except that I managed to break my opponent’s tibia with a leg kick.
After that, I got my first manager. A middle-aged Islander woman with a broad and ready smile, Lucy Tui (no relation to Alex) is one of those rare women who’s perfectly comfortable wandering into a testosterone-drenched gym like Mundine’s, and start hollering about what she’d found.
‘Oh, you got yourself another heavyweight, Alex?’ she said loudly while Alex was padding for me.
‘Rolled in off the street, did he? You lucky bugger!’ she boomed. She had her fingerprints on all aspects of organised kickboxing in Sydney; she promoted events, sat on federation committees, judged fights and managed fighters.
It had been a couple of months since my last fight and Lucy had been trying to find me, but I could still be a pretty infrequent visitor to the gym. After training, she took me out for coffee and told me she wanted to organise some fights for me. She said she wanted to arrange a path for me in kickboxing, if I was keen for it. She thought that if she could put me in front of the right people, eventually she could get me on some big cards.
I didn’t get to do much talking that morning, but I do remember telling Lucy I wasn’t planning on sticking around fighting for long. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, saying that my last fight had given me some Oceania amateur title – even though I’d taken a couple of hundred bucks for it – and she wanted me to defend it.
I told her okay, quietly and without any weight to the word. I quite often agreed to things I had no intention of doing, just to end a conversation. This wasn’t a ‘no yes’ or a ‘yes yes’. It was just an ‘I want to go home yes’.
Shortly after meeting Lucy Tui, I met another incredible woman. In fact, the most incredible woman I’ve ever met. Lucy changed my career, but this woman changed my life. I honestly have no idea who, what or where I’d be without her.
I met her at a reggae club I was bouncing at in Surry Hills. The place was hazy with weed smoke, and the rumbling bass danced empty beer glasses around the tables closest to the speakers. I first saw her at some distance, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I did a double take. My first thought was that I’d seen an angel. She was glowing, this girl. Sitting in one of the few illuminated spots in the club, her pale skin and red hair stuck out in a joint full of Africans and Polynesians, and she didn’t seem to be real.
I walked past a few more times and when I saw her laughing I realised that she was, in fact, a human being, but that made her all the more desirable. Soon my eyes wouldn’t focus on anything else. I know it’s corny stuff, but if it’s ever happened to you, you know how it works. I grew agitated. What if she left? What if this girl left, and never came back?
Approaching girls was never my style. I’m a pretty shy person even now, but I was much more withdrawn then. When I asked this girl if I could sit next to her, there were klaxons blaring in my spinning head and all the moisture in my mouth suddenly disappeared. I don’t remember a lot of what we spoke about – I got her name, Julie, and that she was a hairdresser from Western Sydney – but I remember the feeling of that conversation; it was so easy. I didn’t want the night to end.
We arranged to see each other again, but our second meeting wasn’t so sublime. We met up with a few of her friends, and I brought a mate of mine whom even I considered a little rough around the edges. I was nervous. I wasn’t so practised at being in mixed company and I was pretty bad at polite conversation.
I drank a little too much that night and barely spoke to Julie. As she got into a cab, I knew I’d ruined things and, frustrated and pent up, I hurled a pie I’d bought at her taxi. As the meat and pastry hit the back window, Julie and I both thought the same thing. Well, that was that.
Only it wasn’t. I do believe in fate, in no small part because I bumped into Julie again
a few weeks later, at a bar neither of us had ever been to. I look around my house and see the kids now and the life behind me, and marvel at my good fortune.
Things were easy again that night, with the conversation flowing and I started to have feelings I’d never felt in my life before. We arranged a date, just the two of us, and then another and another. The more I saw her, the more I wanted to see her, and soon she was spending a lot of time in Surry Hills in the flophouse, where I now had my own room.
Julie wasn’t scared off by that place or my rough mates, nor how I was suspiciously and perpetually skint. She just wanted my company and that confused me a little bit, but I’d take it. We never really had to do anything together, either; we were happy just lying on my bed talking. We’d talk about anything and everything, sometimes smoking a bit of weed to mute the world outside.
One day I got talking about my childhood, my family and my old man. I’d not spoken to anyone about that shit before – not my mates, or even John, Steve or Victoria. I’d never really thought about how I felt or acknowledged to myself how thoroughly fucked-up it all was. I’d spent years just trying to get away from it, but when I started telling Julie about it, I tried to dredge up every rotten detail. It was as though something had been sitting on my lungs for years and now I was coughing it all up.
I didn’t know how badly I’d needed to tell someone until it all started pouring out of my mouth. Victoria spoke to people about what had happened, and now I had. John and Steve didn’t, and I think that’s why they’ve suffered the way they have.
As I spent more time with Julie, I realised how far behind I was in some of the most basic life skills. One day she asked me when I’d last washed my sheets. I told her I’d never washed them. I had no idea that you had to; we never had in my house. I was also awful around Julie’s friends. I smoked and drank and simply couldn’t stop gambling, but she stuck around nonetheless. She became my tether to a civilised life.
The more time I spent with Julie, the more I felt that quiet assurance that there was going to be something for me in this life, that one day I was going to be great at something. I didn’t know what it was going to be, but there’d be something. Late one night, I told Julie that, both of us lying in a haze of weed smoke. She said she knew.
After I met Julie, I spent less and less time at the gym, until one day Denver caught up with me and told me he had a fight for me, a boxing bout in Bondi. The fight was paying a couple of hundred bucks, so I was in.
The fight was at Bondi Diggers, a nice joint on the top of a hill with views down to the iconic beach and off across the ocean. When I got to the venue, I found that my fight was one of the last on the card, so I set myself up with the boys at a table near the ring and got stuck into the booze and smokes.
When they said my name, I got into my shorts and into the ring, where I found John Wyborn, a lanky boxer from Grafton, across from me. I muddled my way through the fight and when the decision was rendered and it was announced that it was Wyborn’s fight, I didn’t much care. Win or lose, I was getting some cash that I could use to take Julie out.
A little after that fight, Lucy found me and took me out for another coffee. ‘Barry Raff told me that you took a boxing bout on one of his cards. Is that right, Mark?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘Why the bloody hell did you do that? That was a sanctioned fight. You’re a pro now. That title defence I was trying to arrange is stuffed now.’
I told Lucy I needed the money.
‘If you need money, just let me know, I’ll arrange some work setting up chairs for my shows or something, just don’t take any more bloody fights until I can arrange them for you, okay?’
I agreed, but Lucy probably knew that my word would only hold for so long so she arranged another fight for me pretty quickly. I took that fight with a few days’ notice, up on the Gold Coast, against Nathan Briggs.
When I got to the venue it was full of bikies and rednecks, and as I walked out to the ring they were baying for my blood. I was this Kiwi coconut, facing off against a good old Queensland boy with a strong local fighting pedigree.
Cornering for Nathan was his twin brother, Paul, a kickboxing world champion, his father, David, a trainer and ex-fighter, and a few other tattooed brawlers. Alex couldn’t make the trip up, so I was cornered by Lolo, Lucy and a female bantamweight fighter Lolo had been training.
I was out-struck from the first bell. A tall and talented fighter, Nathan kicked the shit out of my legs, and when I couldn’t move much anymore, I started taking flush shin shots to the head. The crowd loved it – they were getting exactly what they paid for. Between the third and fourth rounds, Lolo stressed that I had to change things up. I asked what exactly he had in mind.
‘I … don’t know,’ he said. Not something a fighter ever wants to hear between rounds. ‘You’re going to have to do something else,’ he yelled as we walked back into the middle.
That round continued like the others before them: with me standing in front of Briggs, having my legs and head battered. When we got into a clinch, I could hear Lolo’s voice in my head. Something else, something else …
CRACK.
I’d wound up and thrown an elbow across Nathan’s temple, which was equally satisfying and illegal. This was a kickboxing fight, not a Muay Thai fight, and elbow strikes were outside of the rules.
Soon the ring was flooded with people, with the Briggs corner jumping in first, then mine, followed by a few pissed-up punters. Almost single-handedly Lolo, using his exceptional standing and calm demeanour, managed to cool the situation down without any unsanctioned blows, and even got the fight started again. I lost, but I’ve never forgotten how cool Lolo managed to stay in the heat of those circumstances. This would stand me in good stead when the two of us got to the UFC.
Unbeknown to me, I started to gain a reputation after that fight. Even though I wasn’t winning, I couldn’t be stopped and would agree to any fight. I was a promoter’s dream. They started calling me the punching bag of Oceania.
My next fight was in Melbourne against Chris Chrisopoulides, a tall and powerful heavyweight. Once again I’d been called in as a replacement at very short notice – just 48 hours this time. When Lucy came to pick me up from my place in Surry Hills the day before the fight, she could see and smell the night before on me.
‘Well boy, at least you’re not fighting today,’ she said to me as I got into the cab.
After weighing in, passing my medical and getting some dinner, Lucy and I got back to our hotel at around 9 pm. ‘You’re going to need your sleep. Nine am for breakfast?’ she asked.
I nodded and went to my room. I looked at the bed – it looked pretty comfortable, what with its hospitality tuck and all, and I was exhausted, but I’d seen a bank of poker machines on my way in. Maybe just a little flutter.
Lucy had breakfast alone, until the hotel security guard approached her. ‘I reckon your boy is going to get smashed,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah? Why’s that?’ she asked.
‘He only just went to bed, and he’s been drinking, smoking and playing the pokies all night.’
The phone woke me; it was the front desk telling me I had to check out. When I met Lucy downstairs she was not pleased.
‘Don’t worry. It’s all going to be fine,’ I told her.
She wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t sure when we got there and I had a chuck. She wasn’t sure when the fight started and it looked like I was still asleep. She wasn’t sure for the first five rounds, each of which I lost. She wasn’t sure until halfway through the sixth round when a right uppercut of mine landed on the Greek’s chin.
Since I was a kid I’ve always known when a punch of mine has found the spot, and before he started to lift off the canvas I knew it was all over. I had to walk past an unconscious Chris Chrisopoulides to get to my corner and Lucy.
‘I reckon you thought I was going to lose,’ I said. Turns out this fight was the most important of my career up until t
hen.
The K-1 organisation had been steadily gaining momentum since the first Grand Prix I’d seen in 1993, and in 2000 it was going global. There were seventeen events planned around the world, with many serving as feeders for the bigger Japanese events, all culminating in the Grand Prix which was now happening at the 80,000 seat Tokyo Dome.
At that time the Seidokaikan master Ishii-san still sat atop the K-1 organisational tree, but he’d allowed others to control their own, local branches, and the man to be in control of Oceania would be proud Turkish–Australian ex-fighter Tarik Solak. By the time Tarik was granted the K-1 licence, he had a long history of mounting big events, including the one that had just hosted a hungover coconut who woke up just in time.
Lucy knew Tarik was planning to hold his first K-1 event – an Oceania championship – at the start of the next year, so she started getting into his ear. After all, what would an Oceania championship be without the region’s punching bag? I was eventually invited to fill out the eight-man roster, and I’m sure it was because of my ability to stay in a fight, not because Tarik thought I had any chance of winning. To understand how he felt about my chances, you only had to look at the poster for the event, which featured me behind the other fighters, standing in the dark, barely visible.
I took one more fight before the championships against veteran Tongan heavyweight Neilson Taione, who was another of Lucy’s fighters. This fight was supposed to be a K-1 warm-up for Neilson – her golden boy at the time – not for me. While I fought, though, Lucy and Lolo got a glimpse of the form I would find in the next couple of years.
Taione won a unanimous decision against me, but after the fight Lolo told Lucy the fighter she should be concentrating on was me. Compared with the other fighters I was unfit, undisciplined, inexperienced and far too old to be as unpolished as I was, but Lolo thought I could be a special fighter, if Lucy could ever get me to knuckle down.
