by Mark Hunt
When I was a few blocks away I phoned Julie and told her where I was so she could come and pick me up. She was in tears.
‘No Mark, I can’t handle this anymore. You’re on your own. I’m not coming.’
This wasn’t the first such incident. A few months earlier I’d been involved in a bit of a road rage incident, with Julie and Noah once again in tow. Two men in a car had tailgated me, so I slowed deliberately. They raced ahead of me and parked in front of me at the lights. One got out of the car with his tyre iron as abuse was hurled to and fro. The other guy ended up under the wheels of his car, twitching with his eyes rolled back. I thought he was dying.
When the police arrived I was put in cuffs and taken to jail. After they’d interviewed the witnesses at the scene the police found I had no culpability under the law, but that didn’t mean I was without sin. I couldn’t simply walk away from a tense situation. All those little incidents in life that can spark anger between people were setting off a wildfire in me. I was dangerous again.
‘I’m not coming to get you. I won’t see you in prison. You need to sort yourself out or I’m leaving you, Mark,’ Julie said after the Campbelltown incident.
There was now only a thin membrane of principles holding back the violent madness of my youth. I couldn’t become that boy again; I couldn’t give in to those old demons. I had a wife, a child and beyond that, my fists were too dangerous to be let loose. Perhaps they’d become ineffectual in the ring, but they could be lethal on the streets.
If I didn’t get my shit together, Julie really was leaving me. She met me when I was a broke, wild, damaged kid who didn’t understand why the sheets on a bed needed to be changed. She’d gone through the drugs and the gambling, not to mention the giant hole of distrust in my heart that needed to be filled in before I could marry. She’d gone through it all, but she couldn’t stomach the anger. That was too much.
I desperately wished I could turn off the rage inside me, but it seemed the fuel for this anger in me was almost every aspect of daily life. I needed help.
The day after the Campbelltown incident I went to our GP and told him what had happened. He sorted me out with a referral for some counselling sessions, which I held as though it was covered in dog shit.
I knew Victoria had had counselling that had really helped her, but I wasn’t Victoria. I wasn’t big on strangers and I wasn’t big on sharing, but I didn’t have any choice – Julie wasn’t big on empty proclamations.
I dragged myself to the first session by necessity, but as soon as we started talking I could feel the rot in me being slowly washed away. It was like those days back in Surry Hills when I used to lie on my bed and tell Julie about what life was like when I was kid.
The counsellor was an intelligent, softly spoken African woman, and I reckon she got into the meat of me pretty quickly. I told her some pieces of my personal history – just grabs here and there – but I could tell she was picking up the rest. She was good at what she did, and could see the scars inside me.
When I left my first session I was actually looking forward to going back. Each session brought relief, like air being let out of a balloon that was fit to burst. I reckon she told me more about myself than I’d told her about me.
I realised I was naturally generous and trusting, but could become bitterly resentful any time I felt that trust had been breached. The breaking points of my trust were irregular, too. In some instances, people leeched money off me for years without me ever noticing. In others there were innocent, misconstrued words spoken to me that I harboured in my memory for years like a death vendetta.
It all went back to that house. Of course it did. I started life trapped in a house that was vicious. When I felt trapped again, I reverted to viciousness. Dog eat dog. Rage first, think later.
My counsellor not only dug into the source of my anger, but gave me some little ways to stay cool when something started to heat me up. The guys who cut me off, that bloke who shoved me in the bakery queue, the dude whose elbow keeps banging mine on the plane’s armrest; they might be having the worst day in the world. They might have just been given a nasty medical diagnosis; their wives might have just left them; hell, some of them might have even had a worse childhood than mine. Who knows? I suppose the key to keeping myself on an even keel boiled down to the simplest mantra – everybody hurts. There were so many times those sessions directly helped me.
We’d moved from my mansion in Oakdale to a smaller, but still very large place in Denham Court, but even then ended up defaulting three times on the mortgage. The sheriff came to the house to let us know it was to be repossessed, and I found out about it while I was overseas training, with a crying wife and screaming baby down the line.
My instinct was to feel the fury and fight tooth and nail to save the place. I could have rushed back and created a scene when next a Sheriff or, God forbid, a banker came to my house looking for the keys. On a less extreme level, I suppose I could have leveraged a rental property and a small personal gym that I owned outright, and tried to stay afloat that way, but I did neither. I sold the Denham Court place and downsized to a humbler place in which Julie is a hell of a lot happier. It was the right thing to do, the wise thing to do.
I also credit, in no small part, those counselling sessions for my success in the UFC. My training turned around after those sessions. Looking back, it might even be possible that I stopped training when I started losing so I could maintain the idea that I was the best fighter in the world. I could say to myself, Of course I lost, I wasn’t training. But more than that, I might not even be in the UFC without that counselling.
Like I said before, I’m not at liberty to say what happened after Pride was dissolved and Zuffa picked up my contract, but I can say that I was very angry about the situation. As far as I was concerned, the UFC were trying to put their hand in my pocket, but the situation was a lot more complex than that.
At the time I cursed those three letters, U-F-C, and when they offered me a three-fight contract I wanted to tell them to shove it up their fucking asses. I couldn’t be talked down, either. Even though I had a baby and wife to support and a latent desire to get back atop the MMA pile, I was willing to cut that nose right off my face – if keeping the nose meant working with the UFC.
I harboured secret thoughts of taking their contract and walking into the Octagon for my first fight, throwing in the towel and walking straight out again. I thank God I realised I was being an asshole. It took me a while to change my mind about fighting in the UFC, and it wasn’t the earning potential that did it, it was the idea of taking that belt.
I know it must seem odd for a guy in his mid-thirties on an epic losing streak, with some of those losses coming from middleweights, but I never really believed anyone in the world was a better fighter than me and, by then, all of the best fighters in the world were slowly but surely being collected in one place.
I agreed to the terms and signed up. I had a new fighting lease and I still felt I had some power left in me. I thought if I trained hard, I could still get past guys like Fedor and Mirko.
After the DREAM nightmare, my entire camp had disappeared. When I signed with the UFC, the first guy I called was Steve Oliver. ‘I’m going over to the UFC, and this is my last chance. This is going to be weird, because you’ve kind of been training me for years, but …’
‘What, you really want to train now?’ Steve said.
‘Yeah. It’s now or never. I really need to do this right.’
Steve Oliver comes from a long line of professional trainers, and although he swears like a sailor and is a big, tattooed unit, he puts the art in martial arts. He’s a bloke who takes sabbaticals around the world to study different disciplines and has black belts in many of them. Unlike some of the others who have cornered for me over the years, Steve wasn’t in it for the money and fun, he was in it for professional reasons. He was in it because martial arts were his passion.
He was always disappointed when I lost,
mostly because he thought I could be something special. I’d barely trained with Steve during my DREAM ‘career’ but now he agreed to get on this ride to see how far it could go. I’d been a lazy fucker, though, and most people would have given up on me.
‘Fuck Mark, I’ve been waiting for this call for years,’ Steve said. ‘Of course mate, let’s fuckin’ do this thing.’
I knew I needed Steve in my corner, but I also decided one of the few things I did right while I was on my DREAM losing slump was taking my camp offshore. It was too hard to have my training and my family in close proximity. On Steve’s recommendation we moved over to train for my first UFC fight at American Top Team (ATT), a large MMA camp in Florida founded by Brazilians Ricardo Liborio and Marcus ‘Conan’ Silveira.
Both Ricardo and Conan were BJJ black belts and ground-fighting experts, and their camp was full of veteran fighters who knew their MMA, including some of the top talents in the UFC and some particularly tall fighters, which would be useful for me against the undefeated six-foot-seven giant Sean ‘Big Sexy’ McCorkle, my first UFC opponent.
It was when I arrived in Indianapolis for that first fight that I realised how far my stock had fallen. In Japan I’d been a rock star. My face was on billboards and playing cards, I was mobbed on the street and celebrities surreptitiously asked me out on dates. When I got to Indiana, I was just another fighter at just another event in a city that would pay attention to fighting for just a few days.
For the first time in my career I experienced what life was like for the journeyman fighters. Where the Japanese organisations had laid out plush red carpets for my camp – who often got their own rooms, drivers and per diems – the UFC gave me one hotel room, a shuttle to the arena and that was pretty much it.
It had felt like only days before that I was headlining events at the 50,000-seat Saitama Super Arena. Now I was on the bottom of an eleven-fight card. The most galling fact was that atop that card was Mirko, who’d managed to carve himself a pretty impressive UFC career since the dissolution of Pride.
I went into that first fight the best fighter I’d been in years, but it still only took a minute or so to be beaten again. As soon as we touched gloves, McCorkle wrapped himself around me, looking for the takedown. He was even happy for me to be on top, as it only took him a very short amount of time to sweep past me, take one of my arms and lock it in for yet another fucking arm bar.
I tried to hold off on tapping, but the pressure built and built until my elbow hyper-extended and popped out. The ref jumped in and called it. I’d lost again.
When I heard the announcer Bruce Buffer saying, ‘… at one minute, three seconds of the very first round …’ I could scarcely believe it. I’d trained for this fight. I thought I was in good shape, but here it was, yet another submission loss. And this time it wasn’t against Fedor, but a UFC debutant right at the bottom of the toilet card. I thought I was starting my UFC career at the bottom, but after that loss, I found that there were even more depths to plumb.
After the McCorkle fight the UFC tried to dissolve my contract, claiming it was too dangerous for me to fight in their organisation. That was the ultimate ignominy. They weren’t just saying I wasn’t good enough, but that I could endanger myself by fighting in the Octagon. Eventually they relented and let me stay in the promotion, but I think only because the UFC was returning to my hometown of Sydney for their second event and they had very few local fighters to put on the card.
The guy I fought in Sydney was, on paper, possibly the worst MMA fighter I’ve ever faced, in a fight that wasn’t even on the undercard, but carried out pre-broadcast to have in the can just in case the broadcast went short. Despite the inauspicious circumstances I still consider it one of my greatest victories.
The fight started at ten in the morning, with people still filing into the stadium holding coffees and bacon and egg rolls. Most of the floor seats were empty as I walked in, but despite this, it was the warmest reception I’d had in my career. My last fight in Australia had been more than a decade earlier – against Ernesto Hoost in Melbourne – and while the Japanese were numerous and supportive in their own way, they couldn’t compare to a stadium of Aussies cheering on one of their guys.
I had fewer mates at that fight than I did for most of my fights in Japan, but as I walked to the Octagon the crowd let me know I was home. Normally when I’m walking towards a fight I feel completely neutral, but in Sydney I had to remind myself to bottle my excitement.
I’d heard about the dangers of adrenaline dumping, but I never really understood it until the Sydney crowd roared after Bruce Buffer hollered my name.
‘Fighting out of Sydney, Australia … Mark “Super Samoan” Hunt!’
In that moment I loved every single bastard in the place.
My opponent was Chris ‘The Crowbar’ Tuchscherer, an American wrestler in the Dan Bobish mould and a training partner of former heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar. Like me, Tuchscherer was in a precarious position with the UFC after a couple of losses. With both of us the wrong side of 35, it was pretty obvious this was a ‘win or leave town’ contest.
I managed to clip Tuchscherer a few times in the opening exchanges and caught him with a one–two combination that sent him to the canvas. There was a roar when the American fell, and had it been just a few years earlier I would have dived at him, but I was playing the game far more warily now.
C’mon boy, get back up. Let’s go again.
Throughout that round I managed to tag Chris almost with impunity, giving him a mouse below his left eye and a large cut above until, with two minutes left in the first round, the ref jumped in to check if the American could continue.
‘There’s something in my eye,’ Tuchscherer told the ref.
‘Yeah, it’s your eyelid,’ the ref replied.
The doctors came over to check on Tuchscherer, telling him he should probably retire, but gave him the option of going on if he wanted to. Of course he wanted to. This dude’s career was on the line. As soon as we were called back on, the newly energised Tuchscherer dived in for a takedown and he managed to get me on my back.
I guess he must have figured then that his only shot left was a submission – any more time on his feet and he was going to be stopped by either the doctors or me. From the top, Tuchscherer was pouring pints of his blood over me from the cut above his eye while he tried to lock in one of my arms for a submission.
With his blood lubing both of us up, it would have been hard to get that submission position, but he did manage it. There was a concerned groan as Tuchscherer grabbed my arm and twisted it for a Kimura, the position that had been my downfall so many times.
I thought for a moment that was going to be it until, honestly, the crowd gave me the energy to break that lock. They roared like I’d just won the State of Origin when I freed my arm.
These dudes were with me. It felt great. Tuchscherer stayed on top for the rest of the round but he didn’t get another submission chance. When I walked to my corner I couldn’t wait to get back into the middle. I was going to be stopping this shit.
We got back onto our feet and a battered Tuchscherer ran at my front leg, but he was too slow by then and I easily dived away. I was having fun now. This guy was ready to go out; I just had to wait for my spot.
I felt young again. I felt like me again.
I tagged Tuchscherer with glancing blow after glancing blow until I caught him with a crisp little uppercut on the jaw. As I felt the resistance go down my arm I knew he was out. There was no need to jump on him; this dinner was done.
I hadn’t won a fight in five years, so raising my hands in a stadium full(ish) of my adopted countrymen felt joyous. As my arm was raised, I couldn’t wait for the last fight of my contract. I’d win it, of that there was no doubt.
The last fight of the contract was to be against Ben Rothwell at the Pepsi Center in Denver. As I’d done in Indiana, I took off to American Top Team for my camp, but when I arrived there I found that a
lot of the good heavyweights had scarpered after an argument over money. Without good sparring partners, I really had to look elsewhere.
Two weeks before the fight, I called up my buddy Jamie Te Huna, who was fighting on the same card, to ask if I could move to the MusclePharm gym in Denver where he was training with the Wolf Lair team and their star fighter, Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson. At MusclePharm I sparred primarily with Cheick Kongo, a muscle-bound Frenchman of African decent, and as soon as we started working I realised those sessions were going to be invaluable. Denver sits more than one and a half kilometres above sea level, and for big boys like me the thin air at that altitude is not much of a meal for hungry lungs.
I managed to get some good shots into Rothwell’s jaw and eye during the fight, but that’s not how I won it. I won it by sheer bloody perseverance. I didn’t stop going forward, didn’t stop throwing shots and I used my escapes, which I was now drilling more than anything else, to great effect.
The way I worked on my ground game had significantly changed by the time I got to the Rothwell fight. For a while my guys had tried to turn me into a useful BJJ fighter, but by Denver we realised it would be much more prudent just to concentrate on the four escapes which, if done properly, would get me back up on my feet.
As Bruce Lee once said, he didn’t fear the man who had practised 10,000 kicks once, but the man who had practised one kick 10,000 times. I must have drilled those four escapes at least 10,000 times by then.
In the third round it looked as though we were both taking each breath through a straw, but I could tell by looking at Rothwell that the diameter of his straw was just that little bit smaller than mine. By the time I had my hand raised, Rothwell was exhausted, beaten and bloodied. I was exceptionally proud of my work. Of his last seventeen MMA fights, Rothwell had only lost twice – against Cain Velasquez and Andrei Arlovski. Rothwell was a fighter, an athlete and a talent, and I’d got over him through sheer bloody hard work.
