And then the round – the fight – ended. Exhaustion hit me like a tidal wave. I’d spent all of myself. Nothing was left.
You never know when close fights go to the scorecards, but all three judges scored it 48–47 for me. That moment was overwhelming. The swelling and blood gave my tears cover as they streaked out of my eyes. I was overcome with emotion. This was my world title win, the Big One.
When the critics least expected it and when I needed to the most, I produced the performance of my life. I took control of the narrative of my career like I had the narrative of my life 14 years before. I was one of the best fighters in the world. No one would be able to take that away from me again.
Dan Hardy was hovering around with a microphone in his hand to interview me but I ran out of the cage to my family. The first person I gave a blood-splattered hug to was my mum. Then I saw Rebecca, and the look of pride on her face. She knew what this meant for me. (Unfortunately, I didn’t know what her new suede jacket meant to her. I got blood all over it – and to this day I have to hear all about it.)
I shared a brief moment with my family before turning back towards the Octagon. I’d run out of the cage seconds before but, with the adrenaline gone, I limped up the steps towards Dan.
‘I wanted this fight for so long,’ I told my old training partner. ‘These people (I looked around the arena) – they give me the power. I’m just a guy, from a very normal background, and you guys have been in my corner every single time. Thank you so much.’
I addressed Anderson, who was stood just feet away putting on a tracksuit. ‘Anderson, I know I said some things, but I worship you. You’re the greatest martial artist of all time. That’s why I am so emotional, this has been a lifelong dream. The respect I have for you cannot be measured. You inspired me when I was a cocky young kid, saying things I regret, and there was you … I wanted to be like you.’
The UFC didn’t want me to go to the post-fight press conference. My fresh stitches had finally stopped weeping pink ooze but my face was a mosaic of black and deep red swellings. The medical staff was insisting I go directly to the hospital. I refused. I was going to get dressed and go to the post-fight press conference.
Desperate, the medical team asked a couple of UFC staff members who I had a lot of respect for and had personal relationships with to come and change my mind. They didn’t.
‘I’ve wanted to fight – and beat – that man for ten years,’ I told Reed Harris, a silver-haired UFC vice president I’d always liked. ‘If you think I’m missing the press conference about the biggest achievement in my entire career you’ve got another thing coming.’
The media room was crammed with over 70 reporters and crew clutching cameras, lights and laptops. It isn’t supposed to be the done thing, but the media stood and gave me a round of applause when I took my seat at the dais.
Ariel Helwani waited until the presser was over to speak with me. ‘Why didn’t you call for a title shot?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been calling for your shot after every win for the last three, four years. The moment was perfect tonight. So why not?’
I didn’t have a good answer for him. Calling for a title shot just never entered my mind while I was in the Octagon. I had too many people to thank, too many emotions to allow myself to feel. I’d reached the summit of a mountain few believed I could climb and I just lived that moment rather than moving on to the future.
I turned 37 years old two and a half hours after defeating Anderson Silva. I didn’t know how many fights I had left in me.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ACTING HARD
In 2010, before I’d moved to the US, my T-shirt sponsor Tapout called and said they were putting up some money for a feature film entitled Beatdown. Tapout had cast several of its sponsored UFC fighters – including Mike Swick and Bobby Lashley – in the movie and, out of the blue, offered me a major part. I’d started martial arts in the first place because of beat ’em up movies so, terrified as I was, I jumped at the chance.
Director Mike Gunther – who’d worked on everything from Sons of Anarchy to Grey’s Anatomy – and producer Stan Worthing helped settle me down when I arrived in Texas to shoot the film.
‘I was kinda shocked you’ve not acted before,’ Stan said after the first couple of days’ filming. ‘You’ve got real presence. I encourage you to continue with this as a side-career to your fighting.’
Upon my return to the UK, I continued taking acting lessons in Manchester. The first thing my coach did was get me bawling my eyes out crying by getting me to focus on my children, what had happened to my brother Konrad and other emotional touchpoints. I found the craft fascinating. I wanted to do more.
My second acting gig was on Hollyoaks Later – the annual five-episode spinoff series of the long-running British soap opera. Some of my mates had the time of their life taking the piss, but for me, it was about getting more time on a set, having more lines to learn, meeting more people who knew what was what in the industry. My villainous Nathan McAllister character also got one of the best on-screen deaths since Christopher Lee’s Dracula – I was thrown off a rooftop into a giant vat of oil. My on-screen brother – played by Chris Overton – desperately drains the oil only to discover I’d been impaled on a spike. Chris and I are mates to this day and he went on to become an Oscar-winning director.
The move to California was for the benefit of my UFC career and so I wasn’t away from my family quite as much but, obviously, for someone who had developed a passion for acting I couldn’t have relocated to a better place. I hit up Stan from the Beatdown movie on email and he put me in touch with a manager, Aaron Ginsburg, who agreed to meet with me at his offices in LA.
I was five hours late to that meeting. I was entirely reliant on my car’s sat-nav to get me there and it proved as dodgy as Vitor Belfort’s protein supplements. Aaron, amazingly, laughed it off and agreed to manage me.
He helped me land a role in the big Cinemax/Sky One action series Strike Back: Legacy, based on the novel by SAS officer turned writer Chris Ryan. It was a hugely successful, big-budget show, and the cast featured people I’d seen in movies and TV. This was during the time my MMA career was supposedly over due to my eye injury, so getting cast on a major network show like Strike Back felt like a lifeline.
We began filming in January 2014 in Bangkok, Thailand. Nine years before I’d flown out there to work on my clinch work, and now I was back to get a crash course in shooting an action series.
The star of the show was Sullivan Stapleton, an Australian actor who’d just finished the sequel to the 300 movie. ‘Sully’, as everyone calls him, was just a great guy to be around and we hit it off right away.
One night after filming was done, a whole bunch of the cast and crew went out for a meal and a nightcap. We filtered into the street outside the club we’d been in and began flagging down rides back to the hotel.
Me, Sully and four others flagged down what’s known as a ‘tuk-tuk’, an auto-rickshaw taxi. Three guys and a woman from production jumped in the cab while Sully and I stood on the thin bumper at the back and grabbed onto the roof.
The tuk-tuk was soon hurtling down Bangkok’s side streets at 30mph when – BUMP! – the whole vehicle jolted forwards and then lurched into the air for several terrifying seconds. Sully was thrown into the air and slammed onto the asphalt behind us.
‘WAIT! STOP! STOP!’ I banged on the roof until the driver brought the tuk-tuk to a halt. Sully was still on the ground 50 yards back down the road. He was spread-eagled on his back and wasn’t moving.
I sprinted over to him. A pool of blood was creeping out in a circle from behind Sully’s head.
I dropped to my knees and tried to rouse him. ‘Hey, Sully, Sully! You okay? Can you hear me?’
He was lifeless.
The others caught up and started freaking out.
‘Sully? Sully? SULLY!’
My brain flew back to a bit of CPR training I’d had in Nottingham all those years before. I checked
his pulse – but couldn’t find one. The blood flow from Sully’s head kept coming.
The knees of my jeans were soaked like blotting paper. I checked for breath, putting my cheek next to his mouth. No breath. I pressed my ear against his chest. No heartbeat!
He’s gone – he’s dead!
A muttering crowd formed around us. Mopeds beeped and honked and swerved. No one helped. Somehow, it was on me.
Copying from what I’d seen on television, mostly, I started pumping his chest and giving CPR. I did the one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand and breathed into him. Nothing. I did it again. Still nothing. And again. Nothing, nothing.
‘NO! NO! COME ON, SULLY! DON’T YOU DIE! DON’T FUCKING DIE!’ I heard my voice bark. I wasn’t going to give up. I tried hitting his heart as hard as I could. I hammer-fisted his chest once, twice and then …
‘Arck! Arck!’
He was breathing!
Slowly, I turned him on one side. I cradled his head and could feel breath pushing out on my wrist.
A white ambulance arrived seemingly a minute later. Two men leapt out and lifted Sully onto a blue stretcher and into the ambulance. My four colleagues piled into it along with Sully and within moments its whirling blue light was a mile away into the night. It then turned a corner and vanished, leaving me to walk back to the hotel covered in blood.
Everyone was in a state of shock the next day. Sully was in critical care. Then we were informed the local police were doing a full investigation into how a Hollywood actor had almost died on their streets. Everyone who was present at Sully’s accident would have to go to a police station to be – I’m quoting here – ‘interrogated’.
As if that didn’t already sound dodgy enough, we were then told to say that no one in our party had been drinking alcohol. Why we were told that, I can guess, but I was having none of it.
‘Yeah, I was hoping this would lead to more television work but starring in Locked Up Abroad wasn’t what I had in mind. Lie to the authorities in this part of the world? Sorry, I’m not risking spending the next three years in the “Bangkok Hilton”.’
That afternoon me and five others (none of whom would appreciate getting named here) were picked up and taken to a bunker of a police station located on a side street to nowhere. In a car park area to one side, thirty police in uniform were stood in a rank formation listening to a little man wearing medals and a moustache.
Directly across the road from the station was a breezeblock wall, unpainted and unrepaired, running down the street in both directions. It was covered in dozens of posters, not quite weathered enough for me not to see they were advertising English-speaking lawyers.
Everyone had heard horror stories about the Thai authority’s corruption. Fake arrests to get bribes, that sort of thing. There was an American movie star in intensive care and I felt anxious as I followed the group inside the station.
There was no air conditioning, just humming fluorescent lights and cops with hair slicked back with sweat. We were taken – marched, really – down zigzagging narrow corridors. The place was way bigger than it looked from the street.
‘Sit here.’ A tall, skinny policeman gestured to plastic chairs lined against a wall. Then a windowless door opened to our right, and they took one of the guys inside to be interviewed. We sat in silence. The girl looked petrified and on the verge of tears. Sweat was streaming down my ribs and back. I was now sat nearest the door – I would be taken in next.
Twenty minutes later the door opened and out came my Strike Back colleague. I stood up and gave the police officer an expectant look.
‘Not you! Sit,’ the skinny policeman said. ‘You talk last,’ and, with that, another guy was taken in and I sat back down.
My paranoia kicked in. Were they looking to pin this on me? To get me to pay them so I could leave the country? To send a message that Thailand was tough on crime? Were they going to tell me to pay a ton of money or I was going to prison?
I really began to sweat.
‘We find it very strange Mr Stapleton fell off the tuk-tuk so violently but you did not.’
Finally, I was sat inside the interrogation room with the two policemen. The room was small and I was sweating so much my forearms slid on the table.
‘I don’t find it strange,’ I said.
‘No? So, explain to us why he fall and you did not.’
‘I can’t explain that, can I? Maybe he wasn’t gripping as tightly as I was?’
‘When he was on the ground in a serious medical state, why did you strike him with your fists?’
And that’s how it went on, for almost an hour. Finally, they were satisfied what had happened was simply a terrible accident.
When I got back to the hotel the call had been made to wrap filming. What else could they do? There were still no details on how Sully was doing for a while after I got back home. A short statement was put out, but that was it.
The truth eventually came out that my mate had fallen into a coma. When he woke he was kept under care for six months. Amazingly though, Sully rehabbed his way to a complete recovery.
Fourteen months after the accident we were all back in Thailand to finish the series. I dropped my bags off in my room and went to see Sully in his suite. It was the first time we’d been face to face since he’d been driven away in that ambulance.
We sat down on the balcony and he asked me what had happened that night. ‘I can’t remember a bloody thing,’ he said. So I described it to him pretty much like I have to you.
He got emotional. Then he stood up and gave me the biggest hug. We’ve been brothers ever since.
A loud and abrasive personality gets you noticed in combat sports; if you can then back it up when it counts it can boost your career. That’s not how it works in the acting world, where those traits will get you nothing but a reputation as hard to deal with.
That said, there are some attributes that made me successful in MMA that are helping me in Hollywood. Just like in the UFC, I like to think I’m earning a reputation as a hard worker who shows up prepared every time. I’ve also experienced a lot of great highs and lows in my fighting career that I can tap into when I’m playing different characters and, like my opponents found out, I’m not discouraged by setbacks.
And, of course, because I’ve trained in half a dozen martial arts since I was a small boy, I pick up fight choreography quickly. In fact, when I got my big break in xXx: Return of Xander Cage in 2016, they were interested in having my input in the fight scenes. It was really cool that massively experienced action-movie veterans Vin Diesel, Donnie Yen and director D.J. Caruso were so openly collaborative in a huge summer blockbuster.
It was also ironic because, years before, on a tiny movie that may not have seen the light of day, I was informed I had ‘little aptitude for martial arts’.
True story. It was on a small independent movie about kickboxing; I had a small part as the main character’s sparring partner. It actually cost me money to do the project – I turned down two weekends of working as a TV analyst for Fox Sports’ UFC coverage – but I wanted the experience.
And what an experience it was.
The fight choreographer – I’m going to call him Sensei Guru – was one of the most conceited and unbearable characters I’ve ever come across (and, remember, I’ve met Colby Covington).
There were five of us actors in the small dance studio in the outskirts of LA. We lined up in front of the mirrors and Sensei Guru got off to a flying start by introducing himself as ‘the motivating dynamism behind the most successful people in America’. He listed off a bunch of big-name actors, pop stars, TV presenters and, I think, basketball players. ‘These A-listers turn to me for enlightenment,’ he said, ‘and they leave with the courage to grab greatness.’
Then he got to his McDojo martial arts credentials. He was the first Westerner to be taught at ‘the Temple’ by some grandmaster in Japan, he’d won some super-secret tournament he’s not supposed to talk abou
t and, yes, he even mentioned the dim mak.
Over the coming week in that studio, we were assured, he would distil some of this knowledge for us lucky wretches. It was weird but, whatever, I was there to learn and so applied myself to doing exactly what was asked of me.
He barked orders like we were Marine recruits but I didn’t so much as roll my eyes when he ‘corrected’ my stance over and over again. Nor did I utter a word when he singled me out as ‘doing everything one-eighty degrees wrong from how it works in real fights’.
‘Show me a left hook!’ he suddenly snarled at me. I did, but apparently not to his satisfaction.
Sensei Guru closed his eyes and whipped his head left and right like he was riding an old roller coaster. ‘No! No! Wrong!’ he howled.
He took two steps back to ensure everyone could see him clearly. Ancient martial knowledge was about to be imparted, I could just tell.
‘This is how a left hook is thrown!’ He demonstrated three times and then glared at me. ‘See the difference?’
I nodded and said, ‘Absolutely, I can do that, no problem. It’s the position of my fist you want me to change, yeah? I throw hooks with my thumb facing the ceiling rather than back towards my face – but I can do it your way, easy.’
‘My way is the correct way,’ he stated. ‘I’ve no idea where you picked up that.’
This is the most bizarre day of my life, I remember thinking. This would make for a hysterical hidden-camera prank.
The studio was an hour’s drive home – two hours if I hit traffic – but I had barely got halfway before the production company called.
‘The fight coordinator says he can’t work with you,’ I was told.
‘What?’ I asked over the car’s hands-free.
‘Yes, [Sensei Guru] says you’re struggling with the complexity of the fight choreography and, because this project is on a tight schedule, we’ll have to move on without you.’
Quitters Never Win Page 26
