by Mark Hunt
In LA and London Jules and I ate and drank like Caesars, never looking at a price tag the whole trip. One night when the fire alarm in our London hotel kept going off, we just grabbed our bags and moved to the hotel next door, despite the fact that the rooms were £1300 a night. Fuck it – it was only money. It came easily, why should it not go in the same fashion? It was a trip I’ll never forget. It ended up costing $150,000, but I don’t regret a minute of it.
We went up to Scotland to meet Julie’s cousins, and I’d never seen a country quite so enchanting. Jules and I hired a driver to take us out to Loch Ness, and while he told us about the region I whispered into her ear, saying, ‘Close your eyes.’
Our guide kept talking and she started to stifle girlish giggles. The dude sounded exactly like Sean Connery’s James Bond. It was as though James had a twin brother who’d missed naval recruitment and had ended up in hospitality.
When we got out onto the loch it felt like there was no one else in the world. The soft, rolling hills disappeared into haze, like a video game with a short draw distance, and when the sun appeared it came in soft panes, diffused by the clouds.
I was so happy there, with Julie, in that moment. We were happy. I’d had relationships before but they were highly combustible affairs. I’d never really known someone who could be at peace like that – not my mates, not my girlfriends, not anyone.
We could just sort of be there, together, and we’d be happy. We didn’t need to be doing anything, we were just happy enjoying the loch. I wasn’t sure life could get better than that.
Perhaps I should have asked Julie to marry me there and then – it would have been romantic, classic. It didn’t occur to me, though. I know that some things occur to me later than most.
I ended up asking Julie some years later, at home over a box of chicken and without any forethought. I have no regrets, though. She’s my wife now, and my proposal epitomised the way we enjoyed spending time together.
Another aspect of that overseas trip I enjoyed was the frigid northern European temperature. It felt like my knee had been getting hotter and hotter each day since the Le Banner fight, and I only really got relief from it when I stepped outside into the chilly air.
When we got home I was happy. I was happy in our little apartment, happy in Western Sydney, happy with Jules and happy to do some training. When I did get back to training, though, something had changed. I wasn’t in shape, which was to be expected, but I couldn’t get any traction from my left leg.
When Auckland Auimatagi floored me with a leg kick during a sparring session I knew something was really buggered. I went to the doctor and discovered I’d torn the posterior crucial ligament in my knee. I’d be on the shelf for a year.
With too much time on my hands and a healthy bank account by my standards, of course I hit the pokies hard again. First it was an outgoing trickle of cash, then a torrential gush. Tens of thousands flew away until, thankfully, one day Dave and I walked past an internet café that was offering LAN gaming. We walked in and it was like we were stepping into a secret society. All the dudes hunched over their computers were silent and still, except for infrequent quiet calls of disgust or glee and a crescendo of excitement for a few moments, then they resumed their silent poses.
The place looked like a crack house, with people passed out under tables, full ashtrays and empty bottles, and chip packets strewn around, but the players’ dedication to their screens was enticing. Most of the Asian blokes (and they were pretty much all Asian blokes) were playing the same game, the multi-player first-person-shooter Counter-Strike.
Counter-Strike seemed exceedingly simple at first. The game was round-based, each round starting with the players choosing to be a terrorist or a counter terrorist, and fitting themselves out with some weapons before being dropped into a designated area – terrorists in one area, counter terrorists in another. The game finished when all the players on one side were dead, or when a team’s objective had been fulfilled.
This game spoke to me. This game spoke to us. Dave and I jumped on a computer and we were there for hours. It seemed that with each round we played, the game revealed another level of depth. Every map had its own points of tactical importance; each weapon was useful in certain areas; and there were numerous tricks – fast-switching weapons, crouching behind walls, entering rooms after throwing flashbang grenades – that kept me a little longer in each round and with a slightly higher kill-to-death ratio.
There was a visceral aspect of the game that I liked, too. When you found yourself in a gunfight, things happened very, very quickly. The good players seemed to be able to get a crosshair on their opponent’s head with preternatural speed. When I first started playing there were many times I’d fire on an opposing player who hadn’t even seen me, and find myself dead. It felt like they were cheating. I know they weren’t, though, because eventually I got to that crazy, twitchy level of speed.
I figured out that I liked to play CS the way I liked to fight, choosing to equip myself with the AWP (Arctic Warfare Police) – the big heavy sniper rifle – and the slow-firing but high-calibre Desert Eagle pistol as my weapons. My CS game was all about the one shot that would take you out.
For the first few weeks Dave and I played in that café, then we moved to late-night LAN parties, then we got our own gaming PCs. It was a good scratch, for that gambling itch, that Counter-Strike, almost as good as the pokies and a shitload cheaper, although perhaps it was even less sociable than the pokies. Woe to the person who talked to me during a round, and death to the person who talked smack to me when I’d just died.
There was one particularly embarrassing moment in my CS life when I was performing poorly in an online session and some keyboard warrior kept riding me and riding me. Things got heated and I ended up asking this dude where he lived. He told me, and to my delight his place was just round the corner from me.
When I got to this guy’s house, a ten-year-old opened the door. I asked the kid where his dad was, and he said he was at work. I went home with a face so red it was about to spontaneously combust.
I loved CS, and it did keep me from drinking and gambling, but it seemed my life was always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. Any time I’d find a solution to a problem, some other bullshit was just around the corner.
Victoria was the one who called me. She said Dad was dying and he wouldn’t go to the hospital. He’d been diagnosed with cancer, but was refusing any treatments and he was starting to rot, stinking up the house.
I didn’t want to know about it.
‘Dig a hole in the garden and chuck him in it. Wait till he’s dead if you’re feeling generous,’ I told her.
I bought him that house. I’d done my son’s duty. In my mind, that motherfucker lived in a locked box that existed only in the past, not the present.
‘You have to come over and help,’ Victoria pleaded.
I didn’t understand why it fell to me. Even when I got to New Zealand and saw the silent, brooding husks of my brothers – in no shape to help anyone – I still resented that I was needed. I didn’t want to engage with my family. I didn’t want to know what was happening in John’s or Steve’s or Victoria’s lives, and I certainly didn’t want to have to think about the old man, or Mum, who was then incapacitated after a series of strokes.
If they were away from me physically, they would be away from me mentally. Ever since I was a child I’d been able to choose which thoughts would go so deeply into storage that they didn’t even exist anymore. I had a capacity – a gift as I see it – to put things aside and not think about them except when forced to. I knew being able to do that wasn’t normal, nor would it help most people, but it kept me going.
I’m sure it helps me as a fighter. No matter what might have happened to me in the ring or what my record may be, I’ve always thought I was the world’s greatest fighter. I can forget losses very easily.
I guess this gift came from my father. I don’t really feel pain and fear either,
and that’s probably something he gave me too. In a hideous way, my father has probably been the most important figure in my fighting career.
When I got to the house, Dad absolutely stank. He smelled like death, and he was little more than a sack of saggy skin and brittle bones. I didn’t say anything to him when I picked him up and tossed him over my shoulder. I didn’t feel much either – he weighed nothing, and he meant nothing.
As I’ve already described, the devil took my father’s soul, but the question of his body was left to me. There are costs associated with getting rid of a body and while I had money, I didn’t want any more of it to go to that old rapist.
The Hunts stepped in – Dad’s brother and cousins – saying that the old man had to be buried, not cremated, as some of us kids wanted. They also tried to absolve Charles Sale Hunt’s sins, posthumously painting him as a kind and moral man.
Victoria was the one who finally said Dad should have a proper burial. The task of speaking at his funeral was also left to her. She said what she could, not what she should. I can’t imagine what that job must have been like for her, but at the time I just felt relieved the task wasn’t mine.
I didn’t know many people at the funeral and the ones I did were mostly from his church. As I was leaving, an older Samoan woman approached me, claiming she was my sister.
I asked Victoria if this was true, and she said it was news to her, but most likely true. The stories flew around after Dad’s death about repeated infidelity. It turns out this woman was one of at least three other siblings.
I wasn’t warm to her. I didn’t need any more siblings. I didn’t need any more cousins or uncles either. I didn’t even want the brothers and sisters I already had. I didn’t want any more hands out, any business proposals, any reunions, any catching up, or anything to do with my old life. I just wanted to get home to Australia.
Chapter 11
TOKYO, JAPAN
2002
After negotiations had gone to shit, Daisuke [Teraguchi, K-1 head of fighter relations] and two goons came to Auckland to meet with me. [Daisuke] said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, Glenn. You must be careful. People go missing all the time in this business.’ I stuck my finger out and said, ‘If you want to do it, do it now then.’ I was mixing up my yakuza lore; I was pretty pissed by then. I spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder the next time we went to Japan.
GLENN ELLIOTT, EX-MANAGER (SORT OF)
The last fight of my K-1 contract was in Las Vegas; a place that, for a poker machine addict like myself, was pretty much heaven and hell rolled up in one 24-hour-a-day, neon-lit ball.
If you haven’t been to Vegas, there are pokie machines at the airport, there are pokie machines in the car rental offices, there are pokie machines in the gas stations and the fast-food outlets, and there are certainly pokie machines in the Bellagio Hotel, where my suite was. If my fighting career primarily took place in Vegas (or if I really understood how to play pachinko) I’d now be in more debt than the US federal government.
I was in Las Vegas for a week and I spent … a lot. I don’t know how much, but it was a fortune. I did so much gambling I never even got into the local time. It was just too easy to be out gambling and drinking all night and sleep in a darkened room during the day. I even missed my weigh-in for the fight because I was too busy gambling. The commission sat around for almost an entire day waiting for me to turn up, eventually catching me when I stumbled back to my room to sleep in the afternoon. They had to pretty much drag me down onto the scales.
The fight was against Gary ‘Big Daddy’ Goodridge, a heavy-hitting Canadian journeyman who would finish his kickboxing career with a record of 12–24–2 and, sadly, a diagnosis of dementia pugilistica.
I fought with heavy strapping on my left knee and was still moving pretty slowly, but that wasn’t the reason I didn’t take Gary out. He was the kind of guy who got stopped and I was the kind of guy who did that stopping, but I was coming back from injury. I’d only been able to train back home for a few weeks beforehand and when I got to Vegas I’d only managed a couple of light training sessions in my suite.
I beat Goodridge, but when I returned home after the fight I was out of sorts and low on motivation. I’d fucked around in that fight and wasn’t sure I could get myself up for another K-1 tilt. I had money and I’d proved I could beat the best K-1 fighters. I didn’t feel the need to keep doing it.
I also felt the K-1 was ripping me off. There were rumours flying around that managers were deliberately and habitually screwing fighters over, and I knew of some instances in which managers earned more than their fighters. The conventional wisdom was that the K-1 had fostered that disparity, too, trying to keep all the fighters lean and dependent on both a pay cheque and their managers.
I’d become a big name in Japan and had also won the biggest tournament of them all. I started feeling like I no longer wanted to fill up stadiums at sixty grand a pop. I didn’t mind telling people I was done with K-1, either. I was ready to be plucked by the then surging Pride Fighting Championships.
I didn’t have a manager for a while after Dixon, but lucrative martial arts organisations are like nature in that they abhor a vacuum. A Pride representative managed to track down a guy called Glenn Elliott, a Kiwi TV producer who’d been coming to some of my events with a view to making a documentary about me. When he fielded that call, I guess he became my manager of sorts.
For many years K-1 and Pride had worked in concert, both relatively happy with their piece of the pie, but in 2003 both organisations were in tumult. K-1 boss Ishii-san had been arrested for tax evasion, an issue that, supposedly, had been a by-product of an obsession to generate enough money to sign Mike Tyson to K-1. On the other side of the equation, Naoto Morishita, the long-time boss of Pride’s parent company, Dream Stage Entertainment, had died in suspicious circumstances and many were speculating that the death might have been over how Pride should be run, and by whom.
Little did I know that Miro Mijatovic, another Australian in the Japanese fight game, was seeing close up how heavily involved the yakuza were in martial arts in Japan, and especially Pride during that time. A Sydney-born Australian with a Croatian background, Mijatovic had worked as a resource and infrastructure lawyer in Tokyo until he changed professional tack, starting a sports management company, with Aussie swimmer Ian Thorpe and my old foe Mirko ‘Cro Cop’ Filipović on his books.
After working with Cro Cop, Mijatovic saw there was a great amount of money to be made outside the K-1/Pride duopoly and brought in a number of disgruntled foreign MMA fighters to an annual Japanese MMA and pro wrestling show called Bom-Ba-Ye (named after a Lingala phrase that translates into ‘kill him’ which the Congolese people used to spur Muhammad Ali on against George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974), which was hosted by former pro wrestler and politician Antonio Inoki.
The show included a who’s who of international fighters, including Lyoto Machida, Rich Franklin, Josh Barnett, Semmy Schilt and perhaps the most famous Pride fighter of all time, Fedor Emelianenko, who had previously been signed to Pride but could fight on the Bom-Ba-Ye card due to a contract technicality.
Normally the Bom-Ba-Ye cards would be accepted by the yakuza clans involved with K-1 and Pride, as long as the events didn’t happen on their turf (most Bom-Ba-Ye events happened in Kobe), but this Mijatovic card involved too many of ‘their’ assets. Although the yakuza seem to prefer to operate subtly, the affront that Mijatovic had brought to them apparently warranted a similarly harsh response. After the event, Mijatovic was held at gunpoint in his hotel for three days, until he signed all of his foreign fighters over to Pride in iron-clad exclusive deals.
At the same time Pride was also trying to woo me, but I was getting more carrot than stick. A female executive at Pride named Yukino reached out to Glenn with an offer for me – a quarter of a million dollars per fight. This was a new sport and it was more money, so there wasn’t any part of me that didn’t like the o
ffer.
Glenn voiced concern as to whether I could move to this sport, which involved ground fighting, submissions and wrestling. As he pointed out, I’d be thirty by the time I’d have my first MMA fight, and I had no history of martial arts training in anything other than kickboxing.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to adjust to it?’ he asked.
I thought I’d be fine. With far fewer rules than in K-1, these Pride fights looked a lot more like the street fights I’d had in South Auckland. At the time, I’d never even really heard of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, vale tudo or catch wrestling and perhaps I’d underestimated how different Pride would be from K-1, but I just said to Glenn that I’d be sweet.
Go set it up, mate.
The structure of my K-1 contract dictated, however, that they would have an opportunity to match any other offer I might receive, and when Glenn told Ishii-san about the Pride offer, he invited us all to travel to Japan to explain what they could offer. When we arrived, Glenn and I had to suffer interminable meetings in which we were offered the stars, including a potential fight against Mike Tyson, if I would only re-sign with K-1. I told Glenn I was ready for a new challenge so they’d have to back up a Brinks truck to keep me in kickboxing, but no matter how much they said I was an important asset to them, they’d still only shift to twenty or thirty grand more per fight. This wasn’t nearly enough.
The trip to Japan coincided with an event K-1 was hosting at the Saitama Super Arena, and I was invited as a guest. When I got there I found myself seated next to Shannon Briggs, then IBU world heavyweight boxing champion.
‘You see Mark, you sign with us and you can fight Shannon Briggs. First Briggs, then Tyson,’ Ken Imai told me that night.
Fighting Briggs would be great, fighting Tyson would be a dream, but that was only going to happen if they could beat the Pride offer of a quarter of a million a fight. It was something they wouldn’t budge on.
