Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me

by Dan Hardy

  Back in the UK, I had three fights and three wins in less than a month. The run began with a trip to the Aston Villa leisure centre for a bout with Stuart Barrs. The Scotsman was coming off two submission victories, but he had lost to both Doski and Paul Jenkins earlier in his career and I was extremely confident. I saw him sitting with his family when I walked into the sports hall to check the ring out and gave him a look to let him know I was here to fight. His energy appeared to be more like a Sunday morning football match whereas mine was, I’m coming for blood. The fight itself was relatively straightforward. He attempted a few takedowns and we scrambled about a bit in the first, but fresh from sparring with the elite of Team Quest, I was always in complete control. Barrs seemed like he didn’t really want to fight and as soon as I landed cleanly a couple of times he didn’t like it. I beat him up and won by technical knockout midway through the second round of a fight that contained little excitement.

  The following weekend I fought in Sheffield on a huge show put together by King of the Cage. KOTC was an American promotion and, along with Gladiator Challenge, sat behind only the UFC and PRIDE in terms of size and prestige. I watched a lot of their shows and followed the careers of the likes of Joe Stevenson and Mac Danzig as they appeared regularly on KOTC promotions across the US. I could see how those guys were progressing and improving with every fight and I knew they were destined for the UFC. So when someone in the UK acquired the rights to put on a KOTC event in the UK and invited me to fight on the card, I saw another massive opportunity to advance my career.

  It took place in iceSheffield, a newly-built £15m, 1,500 capacity arena and there were some big names competing, including future UFC star Martin Kampmann from Denmark and future PRIDE fighter Joey Villaseñor from the US. It should have been a massive night for British MMA, but unfortunately those in charge badly mismanaged the event. By blowing most of their budget on the venue, the quality of the line-up, and simply acquiring the franchise rights in the first place, they had little left for marketing or promotion. As a result, barely 300 tickets were sold and, in such a vast space as iceSheffield, the cries of those in attendance echoed eerily around the ice hockey stadium. It was disappointing from a legacy point of view, but it had zero impact on me as I readied for battle. Once more, I had to take a late and drastic change of opponent in my stride. I had been preparing for Henrique Santana, a Brazilian who had recently defeated Paul Jenkins and the highly regarded Matt Thorpe. He was a strong and wily grappler with legitimate submission skills and always had a sizeable group of his jiu-jitsu school with him for support. When he withdrew at the last minute, his jiu-jitsu instructor, Alexandre Izidro, agreed to step in for a two-round contest. Izidro was a totally different kind of problem, a really slick and crafty operator with great submission skills. We had a good tussle for the full ten minutes, spent mostly on the floor as he threw submission after submission at me. I stayed sharp, using the defensive skills I’d been honing for six weeks in the US to escape dangerous positions and land strikes. I wasn’t able to hit him cleanly with anything damaging, but at one point in the first he locked in a loose triangle and I saw my Rampage-Jackson opportunity. I rose to my feet with Izidro clinging on with his triangle partially locked in, walked him across the cage with my hands aloft, and then jumped as high as I could before slamming him onto the mat right in front of my corner. Izidro had a style that turned out to be a real spoiler for my refined striking skills, but the fact that I could deal with constant attack from someone with his black-belt pedigree settled some of my concerns about where my submission defence was at. I felt comfortable throughout and my hand was deservedly raised at the end. It could have easily turned into another fight like the one I had with Baron, but was instead the clearest sign yet that the trips Stateside to train with top jiu-jitsu fighters were paying dividends.

  Next up was an appearance at the Skydome Arena in Coventry for a Cage Warriors event and a match-up with Lautoro Arborelo from Spain. Arborelo was another submission wrestler looking to ground-and-pound me. He was a short, thick-set guy, very strong and with a low centre of gravity. In the first two rounds he did have some success with his stubborn grappling and surprise takedowns, but once on the ground he simply held on defensively. Having encountered much more advanced wrestlers in my US training camps, I was always comfortable and never close to real danger. By the time the third round began, his tank was already empty and I was able to use the extra space between us to land at will with head-kicks, knees and strikes with my fists. I had him bloodied and bruised before an overhand right buckled his knees and he almost collapsed against the cage wall. As he leant on the fence, covering his head with his eyes closed, I teed off with upper-cuts, skip-kicks and more knees until the ref stepped in to save the brave and durable Spaniard from himself.

  Keen to maintain the momentum from those three victories, I was back out again in September against Sami ‘The Hun’ Berik. Berik was a bit of a strange phenomenon on the British MMA scene in those days. He would post weird training videos on the internet which tended to feature soft-focus tai chi sessions in a forest to a background of poor-quality kung fu movie soundtrack music. He was a regular voice on the Cage Warriors forum and many believed his ultimate goal was to become a kung fu movie star. Perhaps with that dream in mind, he moved into MMA to test his skills and, if he could prove himself effective in a real fighting environment, catch the attention of the entertainment world.

  Not long before we faced off, Berik attended a seminar with Royce Gracie and managed to get his blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He was rightly proud of this achievement and his confidence was suddenly through the roof. He began chasing submissions and had some success, but he was fighting mediocre fighters at best, or certainly nobody trained to defend against Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He let these victories go to his head and when our fight was announced he was straight onto the Cage Warriors forum, mouthing off about how he was going to knock me out. I had never encountered such confident trash-talk before and this was the first time someone had come at me with total self-belief. I wondered where it was coming from but my response was pretty simple: come what may, I was going to give Berik the full fifteen minutes to make good on his promise to knock me out. The anticipation in the Octagon Centre in Sheffield was electric as the fans in attendance had clearly been following the online quarrel and were eagerly anticipating this score-settling bout. It was the first time I could see with my own eyes the power of the trash-talking and hype that the superstars of combat sport seem to devote a lot of their energy towards. I even changed up my musical choice to accompany my arrival and, rather than the usual Hardcore, Metal, or UK Grime offering, I picked ‘Nowhere to Run’ by Martha and the Vandellas. I had loved the verbal back and forth between Berik and me and wanted to keep trying to get inside his head until the final moments before we traded on the canvas.

  As I had promised, I gave Berik his fifteen minutes. It wasn’t particularly competitive, other than for the first third of the contest when my complacence in front of this apparent lack of challenge was met by Berik’s gameness and will to win. But after that I began managing the range, landing more shots, wearing him down, and generally beating him up quite badly. Midway through the second, his gumshield was already hanging out of his mouth, half from exhaustion, half in surrender. At one point I aimed a punishing kick to his liver and he dropped, but I just waited for him to get up and continue. I kept hurting his body, but I was landing on his face and head at will. By the third, he was bleeding from his nose and cuts on his brow, while swollen pockets of flesh around his eyes were obscuring his faltering vision. I could have finished him, but I had an agenda: I was going to let this go the full fifteen minutes and hurt and embarrass him for every second of it. Looking back now, it was actually quite a sadistic game-plan, but it was good that I was disciplined enough to stick to it. I guess I had a touch of blood lust inside the cage as the animalistic side of my psyche sought to dominate. That’s why I never went
looking for submissions. I knew I had to dedicate a massive portion of my time to practising submissions, but that was always simply to improve my ability to defend against them. If I could execute a perfect kimura, it follows that I would also be able to better avoid getting caught in one. If someone was lax enough to present me with an opportunity to use one, I’d certainly capitalise, but I took no great satisfaction from submitting a rival. What I took pleasure from was inflicting damage on an opponent, on drawing his blood and leaving the canvas stained with it. But the pleasure was always part of a bigger picture for me. If I split someone’s skull open, not only would it represent immediate success, it was a statement to future opponents. I was looking to strike fear into potential rivals looking on from cageside. I wanted everyone to be under no illusions that fifteen minutes with me was their worst nightmare. And if some of them then chose to duck me and allowed me to leap up the rankings, so much the better. I wanted to be seen as dominant in a very violent, as well as technical, way. That is why I would always keep beating the face of the man lying underneath me until the referee physically dragged me off. And if I could, I’d land a couple of final blows as I felt the official’s arms on me. In my opinion, that is how an MMA fighter should be. When you are facing a man like Wanderlei Silva, the question within yourself as to whether you really want this is asked long before the bout starts. That’s a powerful position for any athlete to hold, but particularly in combat sports. This is a game of psychological as well as physical dominance. Some may find it hard to imagine that an otherwise warm and friendly character can behave so brutally, but I always felt my profession demanded I be this way. I wasn’t trying to earn victories, I was taking them from opponents with violent force. And it was from such means of victory that I drew my confidence and was able to re-enter a cage and do it all over again.

  Sami raised my hand up in victory before we even heard from the judges. It was as unanimous as a unanimous decision could ever be. But when interviewed immediately after, I gave Berik great credit for not looking for an easy escape route as I battered him and then encouraged him to drop to lightweight where he could be a force. I also had to thank him for his role in the manufactured antagonism between us that guaranteed our bout was the most talked about of the night before we’d even thrown a punch or kick.

  Three weeks later, I was on another Cage Warriors show, this time Strike Force 3 in Coventry. My old pal Izidro was there, submitting the very useful Swede Jani Lax inside three minutes, and Bisping and my Rough House teammate Jimmy Wallhead both impressed with first-round stoppages. My opponent was a Swedish grappler, deceptively named Diego Gonzalez. He was another submissions specialist and was in the middle of a run that would see him lose just once, to me, in fourteen bouts. He was also streetwise, as I discovered to my cost at the beginning of our fight. Up until that point, my routine had been to walk to the centre of the canvas and respectfully touch gloves with my foe once the referee had ordered us to fight. Only after that ceremonial formality took place did I consider the fight to be on. But Gonzalez was sly. As I walked forward to meet him, he held his left hand out at length as if to reciprocate my goodwill gesture. Then, six inches away from the ritual fist-bump, he threw an overhand right that cracked the side of my head and shot for a takedown that sent me crashing into the side of the cage. He had attacked me in that split second before I’m mentally, and thus physically, ready for war. It was like being fast asleep and suddenly tipped into a pool of iced water. I started scrambling, trying to get back on my feet, but he felt strong and heavy on top of me as I struggled to turn. I managed to get halfway round, but as I did so he dropped a series of elbows and fists onto my skull at the base of my neck and behind my ear. And that is the last thing I remember about that fight. It continued for another six minutes, but I have no recollection of anything that happened up to and including the moment he submitted me with a rear-naked choke.

  I was still in a daze in the dressing room after the fight, but my team were raging. The sucker punch at the outset wasn’t an issue to anyone, however. It was sneaky and certainly not particularly sportsmanlike, but nothing in the rulebook forbids it and I should have been alert to the possibility. The big problem was the elbows to the back of the head. It doesn’t take much for violent blows to that region of the human head to damage the spinal cord, or even detach a brain from its stem and thus end life, and for that reason they are understandably outlawed in MMA. One side of my face was numb for about two months after that night. I would be chewing my food and suddenly become aware that everything bore the unmistakably metallic taste of my own blood after I had bitten a chunk out of the inside of my cheek without even realising. In time, I made a full recovery but it was a scary sensation while it lasted.

  The referee should have picked up on the illegal attacks at the time, but he was officiating his first professional bout and was perhaps too nervous to make such a dramatic intervention so early in his own career. So my team immediately took our complaint to Cage Warriors and they agreed to sit down and watch the fight again and make a decision on the validity of the result. They also brought in top ref Marc Goddard to get his input into how the incident should have been handled. What they saw was Gonzalez landing several times in the vulnerable zone, suggesting it was not merely a one-off accidental strike as we twisted and turned on the canvas in the heat of battle. The verdict was unanimous: Gonzalez had clearly benefited from a severe breach of the rules and the bout was declared a no contest. I guess I was pleased and relieved by Cage Warriors’ decision to overturn an unjust defeat, but all I can remember thinking at that time was, Let me get back in the cage with that bastard. Yet that revenge mission would have to wait as I had already been informed that I had earned a shot at the vacant Cage Warriors welterweight title. And as an added incentive, Cage Warriors told me I could make my first defence against Gonzalez if I managed to win the belt.

  Standing between me and a first major title was a submission wrestler from Bolton by the name of Matt Thorpe. Thorpe was part of the Northern Cartel, an affiliation of different teams from the north of England. He did a lot of his training in a gym in Huddersfield alongside quality guys like Ian Butlin and one-time UFC veteran Leigh Remedios, who fought on the first UFC event in the UK back in 2002. We were very familiar with the Northern Cartel and knew they were no joke. They were also up to date with how the elite in the US were preparing for fights and were particularly adept at cutting weight. They were absolutely convinced of the importance of being the bigger man in the cage and there were even rumours that they had a fighter once donate blood in order to make weight. There was a big rivalry between Rough House and the Northern Cartel, and we made sure to play up to that on the internet in order to hype fights, but in reality there was always a healthy respect between us as teams and individuals.

  What made Thorpe such a tricky proposition was his size. At six foot four inches tall he was an absolute giant in the welterweight division and those long limbs gave him two major advantages. First, he was always going to have a longer reach and greater leverage in his punches than everyone he fought, and secondly, the lanky limbs ensured he had great submission skills off his back, particularly triangles. So for the first time in my career, I sat down and analysed an opponent in order to devise a sound game-plan. It did genuinely feel like I was making a step up in my career now, a little like moving from GCSEs to A Levels and immediately realising that, despite how it felt at the time, GCSEs weren’t shit. The prize of being a world champion was huge and I decided I should prepare accordingly. I watched all the footage of Thorpe I could find, and then put myself in his shoes and watched my own fights. I knew that he and his team would be developing a specific approach to defeat me and I wanted to try and second-guess them. To be honest, it wasn’t difficult. Nobody in British MMA, outside my own team, rated my ground game and so everyone presumed I would always rely on my stand-up striking ability. I was Rough House after all, the sprawl-and-brawl, kill-or-be-killed guys
that don’t stop throwing kicks and punches until the victory is secured. So while Matt Thorpe was in his training camp, working on trading on his feet, I was in my own with a trick up my sleeve: I was going to take him down, hold top position and, while defending the inevitable submission attempts from the bottom, rain down punishing punches and elbows.

  The only problem I could see was that we had no one in or around our team of the physical stature of Thorpe with whom I could spar and perfect the tactic. Long, rangy, six-foot-four welterweight mixed martial artists don’t exactly grow in trees in England or anywhere else for that matter. Then, as if sent from above by someone looking out for me, Tamai Harding strolled casually into the gym one afternoon. Big T, as he was soon known, was a six-foot-four kickboxer and Snoop Dogg lookalike. He was also hoping to get into MMA. It couldn’t have been any better and for the next eight weeks he became my Matt Thorpe impersonator. And he did a fantastic job. Sparring with him was like kicking a bag of wrenches: everything was sharp and angular on him. I hurt my hands and feet every time I connected with his knees, elbows or hips. Even hitting him in the ribs hurt sometimes. But it was perfect preparation for the biggest night of my career to date.

  It was my first five-rounder, but my cardiovascular conditioning was always good and I had no concerns about going the distance. Thorpe on the other hand had never been beyond one round in his MMA career and I sensed a slight desperation in his work in the opening stanza as he chased submission after submission. It was a competitive start and, although I was never in any danger, I can see how the judges may have been swayed by his constant, if futile, attempts to finish. But from the second onwards, it was my fight. Every chance I had, I took him down, climbed on top, and tried to crash fists or elbows into face. He struggled gamely to get up or even just keep me in his guard, but he rarely managed to do that and thus had to resort to merely tying up my arms to limit the clean strikes with which I marked up his face. There was just one close call in the third round when he almost locked in a nasty armbar, but I twisted and squirmed like a barracuda on the end of a sport fisherman’s hook and freed myself within a few seconds of struggle. Almost the entirety of rounds four and five were spent with me in a top position, striving to create enough space to batter him, and Thorpe struggling to stay offensive beneath me as I worked from a controlling position. I blackened his right eye, marked up the bridge of his nose, and generally did enough damage to catch the judges’ attention. One particularly sharp elbow opened a sizeable gash on his brow. When the end arrived, I was exhausted but confident I had won the belt. The almost commiserative shakes of the hand from his team, while my Rough House boys leapt about the other side of the cage in jubilation, said it all. One judge saw it differently, meaning I won by a split decision, but I didn’t care in the least. I had eight hundred plus two hundred more for winning in my account, my teammates gathered in celebration and, most importantly, a nice gold-plated belt was around my waist to signify that I was the Cage Warriors welterweight champion of the world.