Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me

by Dan Hardy

  • • •

  By the spring of 2004, I felt ready to fight professionally for the first time. Having forged a strong bond with Paul Daley, he asked me to work his corner as he took his first few professional MMA fights. While I was still competing in local Muay Thai and kickboxing events, Paul was winning two and losing two in MMA events held under a variety of promotional banners. At that time in the UK, Cage Warriors and Cage Rage were probably the two biggest promotions but there were promoters putting on shows in the likes of Bracknell, Coventry, Sheffield, Liverpool, Sunderland and London every other weekend. It was a bit of a free-for-all trying to get a slot on a card, but that wasn’t really surprising when you considered the stage of the sport’s evolution and the characters that were running the business side of things. This wasn’t too long after Senator John McCain had described the sport as human cockfighting while the future presidential candidate was leading the drive to ban MMA from American TV screens. In the UK, press and public alike continued to refer to MMA as cage fighting, thus fostering a sinister image of bloody, underground violence. And in truth, plenty of practitioners, keen to be seen as hard and dangerous men, were more than happy with the negative connotations. It was no surprise then that the criminal underbelly of Britain’s large cities were drawn to the sport and it tended to be figures from these shadows that ran the events. But I didn’t really care whether they were drug dealers laundering money or not. All I wanted to do was fight and earn some cash so I could train for the next one.

  The Cage Warriors forum was then the centre of the UK MMA world. It was the social and business hub that fighters needed to be connected to if they were going to be anyone in the sport. I was on there as the Outlaw and logged in throughout the day to check what was happening as frequently as I might access my emails or Twitter account today. But it was actually Paul who made my first fight for me. He had debuted on an Extreme Brawl promotion and he knew the seventh event of that show was taking place in Bracknell in June. He also knew that Lee Doski, a fighter he had just beaten, was on the card and in need of an opponent. Doski was an awkward southpaw with boxing experience and some crafty submission skills. With six fights and three wins under his belt he was more experienced than me, but he was exactly the type of name I needed to get my career off to a flying start. I had no intention of simply dipping my toe into this to test the water, I had an eye on the British rankings and was planning to rip my way through the domestic scene as quickly as possible. I had watched from the corner as Daley dropped Doski with a left hook and finished him with punches inside the opening minute of their bout and, having sparred hundreds of hours with Paul, I was certain I would destroy him too.

  My purse for the night was only £150 but that was totally irrelevant to me. I just couldn’t wait to get in there and compete with no amateurish restrictions and against a game opponent primed to hurt me if I made a mistake. But in the weeks and days and hours building up to the fight, the anticipation turned to impatience which soon developed into a frustrated anger. It was the opposite of the anxiety that had consumed the six-year-old me in advance of my first taekwondo bout and led to me freezing in the limelight, but my state of mind now was just as dangerous. Backstage, Paul was busy getting me riled up. He needs that before a fight and, as I was in some ways following in his footsteps, I presumed I did too. Many fighters do thrive when they are whipped into a Berserker-like frenzy, the Brazilian Wanderlei Silva, known as the Axe Murderer, being an obvious example, but I would later learn that rage didn’t work for me. I didn’t know any better on my debut, however, and so when ‘Drag the Waters’ by Pantera blasted out over the loudspeaker, I literally sprinted to the cage and ripped my T-shirt off like a madman.

  After so long without a street fight, this was going to be my release. With zero thought process, I launched myself into an attack and threw everything I had at him. From the very first punch, I was looking for and expecting the knockout. There was little technique, and zero tactical sophistication, as I swung from the hip for the entirety of the five-minute first round before sitting down in front of Owen and Paul. Owen is generally a very laid-back, Caribbean dude. But when he is in the mood, he can be a wild man and I had the two of them screaming me into another fury before marching out to continue my all-out assault for the second.

  Only the fact that I was in decent shape allowed me to keep up this aggressive offensive for as long as I did. But I had expended so much energy even before the first bell that it was no real surprise when midway through the second round I started to feel the foolish pace I had set. I also saw that Doski, having covered up well and weathered my uncouth storm, was still in relatively good shape and I would need to try something different. Taking a step back, I inhaled a couple of deep breaths and decided I would take him down and beat him up on the canvas. In my head, it was just that simple. But I had been doing a lot of kickboxing and that proved to be inadequate preparation because there was less to think about in comparison to the MMA arena. Inside any type of boxing ring there are much more limited points of attack to defend against and that can lead to complacency that has no place in a cage. Seeing my chance, I shot for a double-leg takedown landing in his guard, but Doski sat up, secured a kimura grip and instantly hip-bumped me over onto my back to take a mounted position. I saw him twitch to begin striking my head, so I bridged to escape, but, experienced enough to see the opportunity, he lifted his body weight and allowed me to spin beneath him and expose my back. Doski gleefully took it and secured a rear-naked choke before I had time to resist. I fought it for a few seconds, but he had it locked in tight and, with just one second remaining of the second round of my professional MMA debut, I was forced to tap out.

  I was devastated. Having genuinely expected to blow through everyone in the UK and Europe, here I was at zero and one after facing what I considered to be a very beatable domestic opponent. The fact that I had tapped out, accepted I was beaten in the most visible way, made the pill all the more bitter to swallow. One of the lessons I learnt was that if you can tap, you can strike. Don’t give the fight up, fight until it is taken from you. Added to the realisation that I had won every minute of the fight up to that point on aggression alone, I was not a nice person to be around in the immediate aftermath. I remember going through all the factors that led to the loss. The over-excitement which turned into rage with the addition of Pantera. My lack of respect for my opponent’s skills in comparison to my own, and a lack of acknowledgment of his willingness to go to war. I also felt frustrated with my corner that no one was on the timer letting me know that the final seconds were ticking away. It was a rude reminder of why I don’t like team sports. But I soon calmed down and accepted that I had no right attempting to pass the blame to anyone other than myself. This was fighting to me, genuine fighting. And in a real fight there are no breathers and no being saved by the bell. If a fighter is ever saved by the bell, that means he actually lost the fight. I probably would have recovered in the break between rounds and been able to go on and get a W on my record, but in the back of my mind I would have always known that Lee Doski really beat me as he would have choked me unconscious given a few more seconds. The fact was, I lost that fight fair and square. I made a mistake and paid for it. All I could do now was move forward and use it as motivation.

  It was a massive wake-up call. As early as the next day, I could see clearly all the mistakes I had made, both during the contest and in the days and hours of the build-up. I was nowhere near as efficient as I needed to be. I was still too much rage and not enough technique. I needed to be cold and clinical in combat but was still getting dragged back to brutality and getting lost in a feeling of being on the battlefield ready to die. But at the same time, I acknowledged that it was very much a case of having to learn on the job. In an ideal world, I would have flushed all those schoolboy errors out of my system during a few years on an amateur circuit, but no such thing existed then. I knew I should have done more Muay Thai, more jiu-jits
u, more grappling and wrestling, but such training or sparring was not so easy to set up back then. I would have loved to have organised hours of proper MMA sparring as well, but who was there to do it with me when we were all making it up as we went along? The Doski fight was the first time I had ever faced someone under full unified MMA rules, sparring included! I had just watched Chuck Liddell beat Tito Ortiz at UFC 47 in Las Vegas, but the UK scene was still so far removed from that world and there was no point complaining that it should be any other way. I had to focus on myself and what I could do, and my only concern was getting back into the cage as quickly as possible to improve and win and banish the losing record that haunted me every time I thought about it. And as I had already signed the contract for my second fight before I had even fought my first, I didn’t have to wait long.

  3

  THE OUTLAW GROWS

  A couple of weeks before the Doski fight, I was chatting to Grant Waterman, promoter and matchmaker of Full Contact Fight Night, when he let it be known that Paul Jenkins was still without an opponent for the main event at an upcoming show in Portsmouth. Paul ‘Hands of Stone’ Jenkins had been competing on the British MMA circuit from the very beginning, appearing at the original incarnations of the likes of Cage Warriors, Cage Rage and Pride & Glory. He was popular and relatively successful and by the summer of 2004 he had compiled a record of 25 wins, 16 losses and 3 draws. Certainly no mug, he had already fought most of the fighters on the European circuit and had picked up a lot of useful journeyman skills along the way. He was crafty, well-rounded, calm to the point where he would be cracking jokes and fooling around mid-fight, and adept at surviving when he was outmatched. FCFN were reluctant to put a debutant in against Jenkins as a bill-topping fight, but I foolhardily assured them I would already be 1 and 0 by then. When I then showed a willingness to accept a paltry £100 purse for my efforts, they agreed to give me the gig.

  The venue was a dingy pub at the end of Portsmouth pier. Paul Daley fought a kickboxing match first and then it was my turn to wade through the second-hand tobacco smoke and find the boxing ring. I remember jumping on the spot in my corner as I waited for Jenkins to arrive and my head went past a low-hanging light fitting. The ring seemed small, and the boozed-up punters so close at ringside that I felt slightly claustrophobic as I listened to the referee’s final instructions. Then the fight began and, sadly, lived up to the inadequate setting in which it took place. Jenkins was smart enough to realise that he couldn’t give me any space whatsoever to work and, in such a cramped arena, it wasn’t difficult to deny me that luxury. For a good portion of the fight, he pinned me to the corner buckle and stomped on my bare foot until it swelled up like a balloon, but that was the grand total of the damage I suffered over the course of the fifteen minutes. It was my hand that was raised as a majority decision winner at the end, but I took no real pleasure from the victory and drove home disappointed with both the fight and my performance, unable to even get my shoe on over my swollen foot.

  Within a month, our paths crossed again, this time at a Cage Warriors show in Sheffield that had been christened ‘Brutal Force’. I was on the card for a K1 kickboxing contest and Jenkins was to fight Andy Melia under MMA rules. Daley was scheduled as the main event but on the evening of the show his opponent withdrew and Jenkins got bumped up the bill as a replacement. This left Melia without a dance partner and me spying an opportunity to get another win on my record by offering my services. So after winning my K1 fight in the second stanza, I quickly swapped Thai shorts and 10oz gloves for Vale Tudo shorts and 4oz gloves, stretched and practised a couple of double-leg takedowns, and marched out to face Melia in an MMA contest. My shins were marked up where bone had been striking bone under K1 rules half an hour earlier, but that pain was soon forgotten as I set about dismantling Melia’s comparatively limited game. I bullied him in the first to earn the round on points, but nothing much of note took place. Early in the second I dropped him with a head-kick but he did well to ward off my attempts to finish him. A minute later his luck ran out, however, as I took him down against the cage and he tapped out under a barrage of punches. Paul and Owen burst into the cage to hoist me aloft and I screamed some guttural, atavistic cry of delight for my first submission victory. Within an hour we were all back in the cage celebrating Paul’s win over Jenkins in the main event: it was a strong showing from the Rough House.

  My hunger to learn and improve was all-consuming at this time. I watched every MMA event I could get my hands on and studied the evolution of the sport and the development of individual fighters. Thanks to the Gracie family, Brazilian jiu-jitsu was the dominant force in the early years and we all scrambled to learn some of the techniques which Royce utilised to comfortably deal with men twice his size. Martial artists often feel like something is missing from their game, that they must continue searching for the missing piece – hence my pilgrimage to China, for example. Yet Royce was apparently so at ease against bigger, stronger, more intimidating opponents. For a while we all believed that Brazilian jiu-jitsu must be the answer, the final piece of the puzzle. But then powerful and athletic wrestlers like Team Hammer House’s Mark Coleman and Kevin Randleman, and later Tito Ortiz and Randy Couture, came along with their ground-and-pound style and started taking these Brazilian masters down, smothering them, and beating them up on the canvas floor. It shouldn’t have been a surprise given the very earliest form of mixed martial arts was the ancient Greeks’ Pankration, which in turn spawned Greco-Roman wrestling, but I always thought of wrestling as a sport and MMA as a fight, so I did not originally hold it in sufficient regard. In my eyes, it was also a much more brutish and animalistic style of winning fights, lacking the finesse of a jiu-jitsu sweep or a spinning hook-kick to the temple, and I saw a martial artist as being able to subdue and defeat a strong athlete that was trained in physically controlling other humans. But the effectiveness of ground-and-pound was changing my perspective of what I required from my skill-set if I were to compete on any worthwhile stage. I had gone from taekwondo to Thai boxing to Vale Tudo, but now I was looking up wrestling techniques in books and on the internet. I remember watching Ortiz versus Vitor Belfort at UFC 51 in awe. Now this is the future, I thought. It was a tough wrestler with good boxing skills against a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt with incredible speed, power and striking ability. They were two well-rounded fighters, proficient in everything, in perfect shape and at the ideal weight and size for the division. The transitions from striking to grappling to submissions were so seamless and I saw wrestling as the glue that held their whole game together.

  But the evolution of MMA never ends; there are always questions being asked and answered, and by the time Chuck Liddell was on the scene and utilising his wrestling experience defensively, sprawl-and-brawl was the new approach to be mastered.

  The importance of being able to dictate where the fight takes place, controlling your opponent and taking away his offensive, became paramount and there was a shift towards a more all-encompassing approach to training. Phrases such as ‘ground-and-pound’ or ‘sprawl-and-brawl’ became specified training sessions. And drills like boxing with takedowns, or grappling with strikes, isolated parts of the game where seams were present. Fighters initially trained in the different disciplines separately, but when the lines between striking, wrestling and jiu-jitsu were blurred, the holes in their games became exposed. By training the transitional phases in isolation, it forced those wanting to stay standing to integrate takedown defence into their game, and for those wanting to fight on the mat to take into consideration the striking range which had to be negated to close the distance. The same deal applied on the ground. You couldn’t focus on chasing submissions without paying attention to striking, and if you wanted to work your ground-striking, a comprehensive understanding of the submission attack was a necessity. Where before strikers might wade forward without regard and get slammed to the mat, or jiu-jitsu guys would leave themselves vulnerable for ground-and-pou
nd, fighters became more savvy, more well-rounded, more like true mixed martial artists.

  I needed to be learning and practising all these different styles and approaches every day if I wanted to keep progressing, but the skills simply weren’t yet in the UK. I tried to go along and work with the Team GB Olympic wrestling team, but their governing body didn’t want to have anything to do with an MMA fighter. I had Owen as my Thai boxing coach and Nathan Leverton and, later, Victor Estima training me for all ranges of grappling. Victor is a world class Jiu Jitsu player, and very much focused on the grappling arts with little concern for the danger of ground and pound. Training with him was a great opportunity to see what standard of grappling I could ultimately face at the top level of competition. Nathan cornered me for several of my fights, both before and after I signed my UFC contract. His method of teaching was the most up-to-date I found in the UK. He was excellent at watching videos of an opponent, deconstructing their grappling game and creating training plans to prepare us for what we were likely to encounter. I felt that with those sessions, my Thai boxing with Owen, and our Rough House sparring sessions, I was covering all parts of my game, but there was still no sense of having an overall, complete MMA training session. We did our best to use our specialities to round each other out in Rough House, and with Wallhead and his judo, Winner and his boxing and Daley and his kickboxing and ninjitsu, we didn’t do a bad job. But it wasn’t enough and I knew I needed to travel and seek out the best in the business if I was ever going to fulfil my full potential.