by Dan Hardy
With that support I kicked on hard and fast with the taekwondo. After winning a load of tournaments in a row, I began going to competitions to try and judge how effective my taekwondo skills would be in an actual fight rather than focusing on winning the trophy. Taekwondo is largely a kicking art, with jumping, spinning and head-height kicks all emphasised. Some say it developed that way in order to fight an opponent on horseback from the ground. Lower-body strength is key and my quick, strong legs made me the perfect build for it. But from quite early on, I wanted more. I watched a teammate, Mahmood, closely when he fought. Smaller and more nimble than me, Mahmood was incredibly fast and skilful and invariably left with the competitor of the tournament trophy. He learnt Taekwondo in Iran before moving to the UK and, while my emphasis was always on fighting, Mahmood was always primed to leave with silverware. I knew I was a different and more aggressive beast, but I sought to integrate Mahmood’s speed and technique and flamboyance into my own repertoire too.
I began entering tournaments in other martial arts disciplines as well, just to see how my fighting technique stacked up. In particular, I sought out competition in Japanese ju-jutsu – not to be confused with its Brazilian descendent jiu-jitsu. My mentality was to try and keep the fight within the range in which I could work and do my best. If I got beaten by a different skill-set, I’d go home and research it for weeks, building my own private library of information. I took something away from every loss: win or learn, as Conor McGregor’s coach, John Kavanagh, says. I’d find books and videos and pore over the technique and how I could counter it, how I could add to my game and improve and inch closer to being a complete fighter. I had such a thirst for knowledge of every aspect of martial arts I hadn’t yet explored. It was as if I had unlocked a door, walked into a new world, and life was a pick ‘n’ mix for me to dip in and out of whatever interested me. Then I’d go to Mick and work on how to put the new ideas into practice, on what was my next step to becoming a better martial artist.
And Mick was a kindred spirit in that regard. He too was a lateral thinker when it came to martial arts, always keen to think outside the box. In truth, I see now he was preparing me for a career in MMA from the first day I walked into Eagle & Hawk Taekwondo. In comparison to what my peers were doing in their karate or judo schools and gyms, Mick was already light-years ahead in terms of the variety of our training. The focus was on taekwondo, of course, but an extremely rough and ready brand of that martial art. The sport was edging towards Olympic recognition at this time and mutating into what you see on your screens now every four years: taller, slighter athletes flitting in and out of range on fast, light feet, aiming to score, but hardly damage. Mick remained old-school, however, and we were encouraged to march aggressively into range, throwing kicks and punches to the body in order to lower the head and target it with more kicks and punches. That suited me down to the ground.
But beyond taekwondo specifics, Mick always tried to spice training up and keep it as interesting as possible. He knew as well as I did that expertise of just a single discipline limited you greatly in an open fight. Unlike any other taekwondo school I knew of at that time, we were going through boxing drills, throwing mats on the floor and grappling, stick and sword fighting and spending hours working with focus mitts. I remember one class in which Mick came up with a novel way to use the mitts and started hurling them towards me at various heights and speeds. My goal was to jump and spin-kick each one before it got past me. I caught one particular mitt clean and it went rocketing towards the ceiling and smashed through a skylight window. Mick had me out in the pitch-black night, scrabbling about in the rain looking for his prized piece of kit. The term MMA was not yet well established but looking back that is exactly what I was already preparing for. We just happened to call it Mick’s, rather than Mixed, Martial Arts.
• • •
By now I was sixteen and not what was termed a normal teen for the late 1990s in Nottingham. Basically, I was still struggling to find my niche in the world. I grew my hair out long, wore coloured and totally unnecessary contact lenses and sometimes painted my nails black just to sit in class and scratch it off with a penknife. Soon I was getting involved in music and ended up fronting a Rage Against the Machine cover band. I had completed my GCSEs and decided to stay on to study art and graphic design, but I never felt that school and I clicked. I hung about within a motley crew of about twenty misfits, mostly kids with behavioural problems or from broken homes. Every day we’d divide into teams at the first break time to ostensibly play a football match. The reality was we were going through the motions in order to facilitate a physical clash that would guarantee a fight. Scraps broke out, and from them a more organised confrontation was arranged between two of us for the second break. It was a strange and violent cycle that kept us occupied until we graduated.
I also had an innate aversion to the authority figures within school, especially when I didn’t believe they deserved their position or my respect. And I hated being told I was wrong or couldn’t do something I wanted to do. I gravitated towards art because success or failure couldn’t be measured in such a black-and-white manner and I spent most of my days in the art block, where I could throw paint on the walls, build huge sculptures, take random photographs, or mould clay into whatever I wanted and be left in peace. Graphic design was more rigid and more structured and I found myself in continual conflict with teachers who were intent on telling me to colour in-between the lines.
Around this time, opportunities to practise my fighting skills on the street began to present themselves with alarming frequency. I don’t believe I ever set out to deliberately look for trouble, but it invariably found me nevertheless. Having said that, I guess I did put myself in certain situations in which a violent outcome was predictable. I was very into Metal and Hardcore, musical genres inextricably linked to anger and aggression. My dad had introduced me to Punk music years before, but he was into the Sex Pistols and The Clash, whereas I was drawn to a much more extreme sound and culture. The music created a pretty aggressive ambience and that united us Hardcore and Metal fans. In the midst of it we felt like we were at war. I broke two ribs at a Biohazard concert in Bradford and that was just from being punched and shoved around in the mosh pit. I met some crazy friends in that scene, and fights in bars and outside on the street, occasionally organised but more often than not a function of alcohol and testosterone, became a weekly occurrence. Even within my group of tough young men, I soon became known as the go-to guy when it all kicked off, the first to wade in at any hint of aggro and the quickest to let his hands go when tempers frayed.
It was not a good way to be, but it did feed positively into my martial arts development. In the brutal setting of a drunken street fight, it soon becomes clear what techniques are and are not effective. I realised I was not as comfortable as I would have liked when someone got their hands on me, that I felt smothered at close range. There were close-range movements needed to pass grades in taekwondo but I didn’t find them particularly applicable in the real world. Looking elsewhere, I soon discovered the Chinese martial art Wing Chun, which specialises in close-range combat. The up-close parries, deflections, and counterstriking that characterise the discipline immediately made me more at ease in the hustle and bustle of a bar brawl and were further strings to my fighting bow.
For a couple of years, I expected at least one serious fight per week. After training on a Thursday night I went out to either Rock City or the Old Angel Inn and drank, sometimes through to when the pubs closed on a Sunday evening. We frequently got into scraps with local bike gangs and firms, but failing that, any random arsehole mouthing off in the club would do. Alcohol was without a doubt the determining factor when it came to whether a confrontation would be defused or escalated, that liquid poison that seeps into the reptilian part of our brains and guarantees bad decision-making. I remember jumping in when three guys had isolated a member of my group in a club. I dropped one with a
punch and then threw another onto the ground. I sat on his chest, grabbed him by the hair and began smashing his head into the floor, totally consumed by rage. At that moment I wasn’t in control, there was something else driving me to really hurt this guy. I can see now that I was on a very dangerous path, one that has led old friends to prison or early graves, but one violent incident when I was seventeen saved me from a potentially similar fate.
It was a Thursday night and I was in Rock City celebrating a friend’s birthday. I went to the club directly from taekwondo training, where I had spent two hours in a self-defence session, repeating a defensive block and throat strike move until it was practically hard-wired into my muscle-memory. After a couple of hours drinking, an inevitable situation arose between a few of my friends and another group. I strode into the thick of it as they were starting to square up and somebody threw a punch. Without thinking, I instinctively blocked it and struck his throat. It was a Bruce Lee moment: ‘when there is an opportunity, I do not hit; it [raising his fist] hits all by itself’. He dropped where he stood, holding his throat with both hands and making an alarming wheezing noise as if he was struggling to breathe. In an instant I was sober. It was the first time such stark and jarring evidence of what I could do, and what the consequences of those actions could be, was held before my eyes. For a couple of minutes I was genuinely terrified that I had killed a man. I was fortunate that the lesson came without cost as the guy soon recovered and there were no serious repercussions, but I went home from the club a different person that night. I had been attacked first so I didn’t feel guilty or ashamed, but I saw I needed to be in full control of my reactions or, if it was down to my subconscious, that I could rely on it to make the right decision. That was the last time I ever drank alcohol. The decision cost me some friends, as without the common bond of drinking to excess we naturally drifted apart, but I know I made a very wise decision. I still have a lot of love for that old crowd, but some of the more aggressive are already gone and others are in prison and I know there is every chance I would have made similarly reckless and destructive life-decisions.
In place of drinking and street-fighting half my week away, I recommitted to martial arts. I entered every tournament I could and was more focused than ever before on my goal of becoming a complete and well-rounded martial artist. I continued testing myself against other disciplines to see how my developing skill-set stacked up against judo’s grips and throwing techniques, or jiu-jitsu’s takedowns and submissions. I watched boxing too and loved the likes of Great Britain’s super middleweight kings Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn, but I remained convinced that Bruce Lee would have dealt with both with ease in an open rules fight. Professional boxing just looked like a restricted form of fighting to me, hard-headed and inflexible. Boxers relied on their gloves to take most of their opponent’s shots whereas martial arts demanded a higher level of skill and carried an air of mystique that set it apart.
Another reason I was looking beyond the confines of taekwondo was that I had outgrown the competition within my school and area. Other than Mick himself, there was no one who could push or test me. It is true that Mick always managed to get the better of me in some way or another, but I like to think a part of that was down to the innate human aversion to usurping a hero-figure. I remember reading an apt poem, ‘The Follower’ by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, in school around that time and making the connection. The verse depicts a farmer’s son idolising his father before growing up, taking his role, and becoming frustrated with the stumbling old man now following him around. I also thought about the battles between Mick and me years later when I read Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. According to Greene, the first law is never outshine your master. He elaborates to say that you should always make those above you feel comfortably superior, that if you display too much of your talent in a desire to please you may just inspire fear and insecurity. ‘Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power,’ Greene concludes. To this day, Mick is far from being a stumbling old man, and my successes have caused him to feel neither fear nor insecurity, but I’m sticking to this explanation for why he was always the master and me the pupil!
Not long after I gave up the beer-fuelled late nights, Mick decided I was ready for my black belt. His final test was a brutal sparring session in which he and a policeman-friend of his, Nick Carroll, attacked me repeatedly and simultaneously for what felt like hours. It was fierce, as ferocious an experience as anything I had ever been in on the street. They effectively beat me up as the rest of the class looked on and it was right on the limit of what should be allowed in a taekwondo dojang. I trusted Mick to know where the line was and not to cross it, but they broke me again and I stormed off effing and blinding with the threat of tears burning my eyes.
The six-hour-long grading process was then almost as intense. It began with running through a series of twelve forms. They begin with basic moves involving low blocks, straight punches, and short and long stances, then progress onto more advanced and complex catching and throwing patterns while turning in different directions to face multiple opponents. There were twenty-two separate moves in the first form and forty-eight in the twelfth and each one was graded in terms of skill, execution and balance. After that I had to spar six consecutive black belts, including two-on-one attacks. Finally I had to break bricks and wooden slats with a range of hand and kicking techniques. It was an important achievement for me because I felt I needed and deserved some tangible reward for all the effort I had put in over eleven tough years. But by this stage I already realised that it was all such a tiny part of the martial arts world, a very limited skill-set. I can’t even remember those forms now because none of them are applicable in a real fight. They were more a means to build neuromuscular pathways and increase physical strength and endurance. They were varied in order to test every range and prove as good a way as any to provide a uniform test within a universal grading system. But I never saw the point in continuing on to do my second dan and beyond. That was never going to help me get to where I wanted to go. The first dan grading was like the end of my taekwondo journey, but that is not to say I wasn’t extremely proud to strap on that black belt. I was proud because, as Mick always said I would, I knew that it belonged around my waist. The profligate manner in which belts are awarded in martial arts today has rid holders of the respect they may or may not deserve. Brazilian jiu-jitsu aside, I take every proclamation of ‘I’m a black belt in such and such’ with a pinch of salt and withhold admiration until I know what school they are from and where they did their grading. As far as I’m concerned, a black belt is someone who stands on the front line of a pitched battle and is ready to go at any time. Suffice it to say, not many of the so-called black belts walking the street today meet that estimation.
• • •
It was time to leave school now but with martial arts being my only true passion, I felt the options on the table in front of me were extremely limited. The only other vague interest I had was art and so I enrolled in Clarendon College, an art school in the centre of Nottingham. Almost immediately, I found myself back in conflict with tutors who insisted I spend more time reading books about who may have influenced my work rather than just creating something fresh myself. I was sure that my inspiration came from within or the environment I existed in, not long-dead artists, stuffy galleries or dusty tomes in the art history section of the library. But I went through the motions when I had to so I could escape as soon as possible to head to the gym.
Around the same time, I was walking through Nottingham city centre one day and decided to call into Virgin Megastore to see what martial arts videos they had. Among the various subsections, the letters UFC grabbed my attention. There were only two videos in the section, UFC 2 and UFC 3. As I only had enough cash for one, I opted for the earlier instalment and rushed back to college to find a video player and check it out. I put the tape in, watch
ed it in stunned silence, then immediately watched it again. This was the time of the Gracie dominance and Royce tore through the competition to win four fights, using three different submissions along the way, and claim the Ultimate Fighting Championship trophy. I was somewhat in awe and somewhat terrified. The Gracie family created modern Brazilian jiu-jitsu and later introduced Vale Tudo, a violent and largely underground fight scene which translates literally as ‘anything goes’, to the US. Royce was raised in this environment and so I hunted down some shadowy footage of the brutal fights in which it appeared everything other than biting and eye-gouging was encouraged. It was slightly unsettling to watch, but fear was a big part of the attraction. The UFC video was rated 18 and Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves screamed out from the cover. This was the ultimate of martial arts, I thought. This is what I had to aspire to. This is where I needed to go to prove myself a truly effective fighter.
