Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me

by Dan Hardy

  I stuck with my Shaolin lifestyle for a while. For months I woke at 5am and was doing chi gong and tai chi on the fields near my house at six before the sun had even risen. But gradually, the urge faded away as the mornings got colder and darker in the winter months. My experience with the monks in China was incredibly rich, but I found the nuts and bolts of what I learnt quickly lost value for me. I realised that the Shaolin culture is frozen in time and was not actually what I was searching for or needed. At my core I have always held the belief that the essence of martial arts is to be effective in combat. As soon as it became clear in my head that the Shaolin style of kung fu was not going to help me achieve perfection in real combat, I knew I would just waste three years of my journey if I returned to the temple. I decided not to go back to China, but I will forever treasure the two months I spent there with the monks. I maintain so much respect for the Shaolin way of life, as testing as it was on me. Perhaps the greatest value in that trip was the psychological breakthrough I made when after days of being totally and utterly convinced that I couldn’t do something, I suddenly woke up and realised I was doing it. It is a lesson I have carried close to me for the rest of my career.

  • • •

  Back in Nottingham, there was nothing else for it but to continue training and return to my second year of university at Nottingham Trent. By now I had pretty much finished with taekwondo and had begun to focus on Muay Thai and kickboxing, training hard every day and taking amateur fights or entering local tournaments when opportunities arose. They are two tough sports but Muay Thai was always particularly brutal. In addition to striking with the fists and feet, knees and elbows were allowed, as was clinching, grappling and targeting anywhere below the waist bar the groin. Sparring and competing was so much more to-the-point than anything I had previously experienced in martial arts and I came out of each session or round feeling a little beaten up, even when I won. But I was convinced that this emphasis on striking was exactly what I needed to evolve as a fighter.

  I was fortunate to train under Master Lec around this time. Master Lec began fighting before he had even reached his teens, hiking through the Thai jungle from village to village in search of an opponent as a means of making some money for his family. By the time he made it over to England, he already had over 400 fights under his belt so he was both legitimate and highly respected in martial arts circles. The first night I went to one of his classes, I ran the three miles from my house to the leisure centre and arrived sweating and ready to go. I think Master Lec saw me as someone serious about martial arts and he took to me straight away. He teaches a very traditional form of Muay Thai and it is real old-school, hard-nosed training, basically exactly the type of thing he had put himself through in the Thai jungle. With Master Lec, you march forward, blocking kicks with shins that have been conditioned by rolling bottles against the tibia until it is a solid calcified mass of bone. Rapping my knuckles on my shin to make a sound like knocking upon a mahogany door is still one of my favourite party tricks. Once in range, you elbow your opponent in the face then get your hands around his head and knee him as many times as you can. And if the referee does not explicitly warn you at the face-off, Lec encouraged us to land one good groin strike. There is nothing fancy or sophisticated about Master Lec’s fighting style, but that perfectly reflects the raw and brutal nature of a true Muay Thai battle and I immediately fell in love with it all.

  I also loved the ceremonial aspect of Muay Thai. Before a fight, Master Lec applied a Thai oil to my body, a liniment that made my skin freeze and burn at the same time and really switched on my senses and ignited something deep inside. I walked to the ring with a Mongkhon around my head for luck and to protect against harmful spirits. Then, unlike some other schools, Master Lec would insist his pupils adhere to the full Wai Khru Ram Muay ritual before each bout, so I performed the ceremonial dance to seal the ring, offer thanks and respect, and throw down the gauntlet to my opponent. The traditional Sarama music, a wailing clarinet and beating drum ensemble, helped dictate the pace of the fight. My first competitive outing with Master Lec was in a nightclub in Manchester and after years of scraps in pubs and clubs I felt at home in the surroundings. It didn’t last long and following a few wild and imprecise exchanges of punches, I viciously kicked my way to the first of many stoppage victories.

  But I was always eager to expand my knowledge of the martial arts and one day I heard about a jiu-jitsu class taking place at the campus sports hall and decided to go along and check it out. The instructor was a man named Paul Lloyd Davies and when he saw my striking ability and how seriously I took each session, he knew he could do something with me. After a couple of classes he pulled me to one side and told me not to waste my time in the university group but to come to his gym and train properly. Well known in British sports circles, Davies worked with all sorts of athletes, including elite rugby players, Olympic weightlifters and professional golfers. He was also the head of Sports Science at the university and he immediately made big changes to what nutrients I put into my body. Up until that point I’d been surviving on pasta, beans and toast, and attempting to stomach a few portions of broccoli each week. Now I was taking Creatine, ZMA, whey protein, fish oils, selenium, vitamin C and plenty else. It was a whole new world to me and the beginning of my appreciation of the lengths to which a dedicated athlete must go outside the gym if they are to succeed.

  Fighting was all I wanted to do now. Confrontations on the street had all but disappeared since I gave up alcohol, so I had a lot of pent-up aggression that needed an outlet. Davies saw this in me, but in the beginning I wasn’t too sure exactly what he wanted from me. There was always a handful of other guys in his gym, each from a different martial arts background, but none appeared to have the desire to actually fight and they tended to come and go, or drift away completely. It was only after a few months that I realised Davies was intent on putting some sort of team together. He spoke continuously of someone who was going to come down from Manchester one day and become the leader of our competitive group. This guy was supposedly a natural-born fighter with skills and gameness to boot. His name was Michael Bisping.

  When Bisping did eventually arrive, finally there was someone else in the gym who was clearly determined to fight. He strolled in like a big mean bully, staring hard at whoever caught his gaze until they backed down first. He was six foot one, about 115kg and looked ferocious in each training session, putting everything he had into every exercise. Soon the group thinned out to just Davies plus four of us. As well as myself and Bisping, we had a specialist Thai boxer named Mark Ferron and a mad farmer named Andy Harby. Andy was a big hairy beast with that freakish farm strength that comes from manhandling livestock like they are cuddly toys every day. He drove a Jaguar, always carried a huge wad of cash in his pocket, and invariably gave off a distinct odour of the countryside. I learned a lot from Andy, but mainly about life in general rather than the martial arts. He was a fascinating man and had done so many unusual jobs that I found his life-experience intriguing. Many hours were spent sitting in the passenger seat of his car on the way to training or competition, listening to his stories. The one that always stands out is his tale of the motorcycle accident that broke both of his femurs and shattered his kneecaps. He was forced to drag himself out of the bushes on a dark country lane and back into the road so someone would stop and help. I found his determination to continue training inspiring, especially as his physical limitations must have become even more apparent while training with a bunch of much younger, fitter men.

  Bisping would drive down from Manchester each Monday morning and pick me up in an old blue Volvo which was christened the Batmobile. He’d often be munching on pasties or sausage rolls ahead of seeing Davies, who had him on a strict diet to bring his weight down. We then drove to our training hut, a unit on an industrial estate with mats and a punchbag, which inevitably became known as the Batcave. There, each day, we trained to fight. Davies’s martial
arts background was in traditional Japanese ju-jitsu, and he put on regular Knockdown Sport Budo tournaments in which we could participate. KSBO was yet another of the modern-MMA precursors and was essentially a full-contact form of jiu-jitsu in which kicks, punches, knees and elbows were permitted and no protective clothing was worn. Bisping was taking part in these largely no-holds-barred fights against grown men when he was just fifteen years of age, and he had a game, based around Yawara Ryu Jiu-Jitsu, perfectly tailored for the job. But the style of fighting was new to me and for the first half-dozen contests I invariably found myself taken down, smothered and beaten on the ground. Back in the Batcave I proved to be a fast learner, however, and my fortunes quickly changed as soon as I had mastered a little basic takedown defence.

  I was winning and I was enjoying it, but something just didn’t feel right. The penny finally dropped on a training trip to Wales. When we got there, we found that Davies had invited a friend along who had a bit of spare cash and was interested in investing it in an MMA fighter. It was a very strange weekend, more like an assessment centre than a training camp, and over the course of it I realised that the only beneficiary of any investment was going to be Michael. Looking back now I see that all the time I thought I was training with Davies for a fight, the focus had been on Bisping. The rest of us were only there to get him ready for his professional debut and at the end of the weekend contracts appeared which would have tied me to such an arrangement.

  I returned home a little disillusioned, thought the situation over, and then phoned Davies to tell him I was leaving the team. I said that I was a legitimate fighter in my own right, that I was more than ready to start my MMA career, and that he didn’t seem to be actively doing anything to move me along. I told him I had some Muay Thai and kickboxing matches lined up and I was going to go away and focus on them. Davies took the news calmly and much better than I had expected. No worries, he said and wished me all the best. It was only when I started calling sparring partners to try and arrange sessions to prepare for my upcoming fights that the full impact of leaving Paul’s set-up hit me. One by one, guys I was close to and had trained with many times before made lame excuses for not being able to help me out. Finally one let it slip that he had been warned off working with me. Word had somehow spread throughout the local martial arts fraternity that I wasn’t to be helped. And as Davies was a very influential figure in the fledgling British MMA scene, it was a difficult bridge for aspiring fighters to potentially burn and I understood their position. But it didn’t help me, the persona non grata of MMA in the East Midlands. That unwanted social status is why my fighting moniker became the Outlaw. It made sense on another level because I was born and raised in Nottingham, just down the road from Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest hideout, but it was really all down to my days as a post-Paul Davies outcast. I first used it when I needed a nickname to log on to the new Cage Warriors Forum and it has stuck with me ever since.

  For a while I was struggling. The only place I could get sparring or training was in the Leicester Shootfighters gym but that was over thirty miles away and I had neither a car nor a driving licence. I was restricted to bussing it everywhere, making each effort to reach training as long and arduous as the work I put in once inside. Then, with a couple of strokes of fate, my luck changed. I had dropped out of university by now in order to focus all of my energies on fighting, but I needed income from somewhere. So I took on two jobs, one in the stockroom of a shoe shop and the other in the gym of Portland Leisure Centre. The latter role was great in terms of getting time off to train and fight and they even turned a blind eye when I spent an hour of my shift working out. On one of those occasions I found myself training alongside an impressive-looking boxer named Ricardo Samms and his coach Owen Comrie. Owen was actually a Muay Thai fighter and when he saw me kicking rather than punching the heavy bag, he came over for a chat. We immediately clicked, and I agreed to go along to one of his classes in another gym the following Saturday. One thing led to another, and Owen would go on to be my chief trainer and cornerman for the next six years.

  A second pivotal moment in my career soon followed when, climbing the stairs on my way to the Formula One strength and conditioning gym on Nottingham’s Victoria Street one evening, I spied two guys training in a second-floor studio. I paused to watch and recognised them as Paul Daley and Matt Howell. I knew both fighters from the local martial arts scene and, in fact, I had always wanted to fight Matt at the KSBO tournaments as his bleached-blond hair reminded me of Tito Ortiz. I knocked on the door, introduced myself and they told me they were training for Paul’s upcoming MMA bout. It was just what I was looking for and I was delighted to join in. This was the genesis of Team Rough House, an MMA team that would eventually boast six UFC fighters among its alumni. The name was coined when an uninitiated member of the public inadvertently walked in on one of the sparring sessions and was moved to ask, ‘What is all this roughhousing going on in here?’ The original T-shirts were printed with Rough House Domination on the front and Anytime Fucker on the back but, partly due to concern over what our mothers might think, they were toned down for the second batch.

  Matt soon drifted away as his university studies demanded more and more of his time, so it was left to Paul and I to keep Rough House growing. We basically set about recruiting anyone we came across that appeared dedicated and capable of improving our own games. We were forming a team but there was no charity involved; if someone lacking the skills Paul and I wanted to work on entered the gym, they would struggle to get an invite to join Rough House. Hundreds have come and gone over the years, the majority lasting little more than a session or two, but a handful did match our expectations, beginning with ‘Psycho’ Steve Tetley. Steve worked with Owen and was just a naturally tough man with mean intentions. I sparred with him on his first day with us and after he elbowed me in the nose out of frustration during a wrestling session I immediately christened him Psycho, a moniker which has stuck fast ever since. But he was a very talented fighter in his own right, the type of guy you only needed to show something once and he would be able to immediately run with it. I remember sitting in the dressing room with him one night before a fight and just before he went out I gave him one piece of advice. ‘Everyone knows you as a Thai boxer,’ I said, ‘and that’s what your opponent will be expecting. So look at his leg in the opening seconds so he presumes you’re about to shoot a takedown, then level change to sell it to him and surprise him with a left hook.’ Psycho marched straight out, followed my recommendation to the letter, and knocked his man out inside the opening thirty seconds. He fought four times as a pro, retiring after losing to future UFC fighter Ross Pearson at the end of 2007. But more than that, Steve was a unique character, the father of a full first-team of eleven boys and the artist who inked my first three tattoos. Rough House was lucky to have him.

  Another important member of the team who joined later was my best mate in MMA, ‘Judo’ Jimmy Wallhead. Jimmy is from just down the road from me in Loughborough and a similar age so we always seemed to be fighting on the same cards as we came up through the ranks. He was a crazy man in his youth, all shaved head, tattoos and hyped-up rage seeping out of every pore. I saw him debut at heavyweight, face-barring an overweight chef from a local military base into submission in the first round. I remember then sharing a warm-up space with him at one show and looking on a little bemused as his team physically slapped him into a rabid fury before unleashing him in the cage. ‘You’re a bad man, Jimmy,’ they yelled, ‘a bad fucking man!’ ‘Yeah,’ Jim screamed back, ‘I’m a bad fucking man!’ He then charged a talented French fighter who simply weathered the early frantic storm before calmly submitting him. The truth was his team didn’t really know what they were doing, their qualifications being little more than watching the UFC every night. It was Jimmy’s father-in-law who took him to one side after a defeat and told him he needed to drop that lot and join Rough House if he wanted to get anywhere in mixed martial arts.
Thankfully Jim heeded those wise words and in 2016 made his long-overdue entrance into a UFC Octagon in Hamburg.

  There were three or four other long-term and key fighters in the Rough House family. We found Andre Winner in the Leicester Shootfighters gym and with his all-round athletic ability and naturally fast hands, he was an excellent man to practise striking with. Tamai Harding and Dean Amasinger also proved to be invaluable additions while they were with us, as did Lee Livingstone, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt from Nottingham. Lee actually opened his own gym called Bushido MMA in the city and that became the unofficial Team Rough House headquarters for the sessions in which we all came together to train and share skills. The rest of the time we were scattered about the Midlands doing our own thing in various combat sports establishments. I worked out in a local leisure centre and also spent a lot of time with Daley in a spit-and-sawdust boxing gym on Prospect Place named Majestik. It was also used by bodybuilders and the steroid-fuelled atmosphere was thuggish and attracted a good portion of the local criminal underworld to its doors. It was in the Majestik that I first started working with Ricardo Samms, the incredibly talented super middleweight I saw the first night I met Owen. Ricardo would eventually go 4 and 0 as a pro before growing disillusioned with the sport and returning to university. At that time he was in the British Olympic squad, although he would miss out on a place at the Games after being robbed in a final qualifier in Germany. Coming from such a background, Ricardo had a different mentality when it came to fight preparation, a much more advanced and scientific approach. He was already gearing everything towards one fight or tournament six months down the line, whereas Paul and I were still training to fight 365 days of the year. Looking back I see that Ricardo was miles ahead of us in terms of how to look after our bodies and peak at the right time, but it would be a few years before I could even dream of such an approach. Until then it was non-stop pushing myself to the limit to break into the professional MMA world.