by Dan Hardy
4
THE PROMISED LAND
I was extremely proud of that Cage Warriors belt, but life did not change in the slightest after becoming a recognised world champion within my sport. To be honest, there was still a lot of doubt about making the leap from small European shows to the UFC, or even earning decent money from being a full-time, professional mixed martial artist. I was simply living to train and training to fight. Fighting was the be all and end all to me. If money came along off the back of it, great, I’d reinvest it in another training camp. But the financial rewards were still something of a novelty or a bonus at that time and I would have stepped into the cage for free just for the sheer pleasure of it. I never discussed money or tried to renegotiate purses like other fighters did after they had a little success. I just accepted what was on offer. Having a management team trying to squeeze a little extra cash out of promoters may have been useful, but when most purses were still three figures it was hardly worth playing hardball in negotiations and there was little incentive for a legitimate management company to get involved. Instead, most fighters were managed by a friend or relative or, as in my case, the promoter on whose show they fought the most. I had little concern as long as I was getting matched up regularly, and was able to pay for my coaches and training camp. I’ve never been much of a money-chaser, it was always about the competition. That may seem naive of me, and maybe it was in some respects, but I know that while such an approach may have cost me a few quid in the short term, in the long term it opened up doors and provided opportunities that may have otherwise gone to the guys on the circuit willing to accept hard fights for less money. But, as I say, dreams of achieving fame and fortune through fighting in MMA were still the furthest thing from my mind.
A big part of the reason for that was down to the British public perception of the sport and the lack of positive support or recognition it received from mainstream media. To the average punter on the street, it was still just cage fighting, violent thugs punching each other bloody and senseless for a baying mob. To them it was human cockfighting. The very presence of the cage, a simple matter of athlete safety, even seemed to offend our hyper-sensitive critics. That it is in place for the perfectly logical reason of preventing fighters from falling through the ropes of a boxing ring and injuring themselves, a scenario not uncommon in training when cages are hard to come by, rarely entered the discussion. But I must confess that, due to the negative connotations, I always hated the term cage fighting and avoided using it as much as possible. When asked what I did for a living I would answer that I’m an athlete. If pushed for more information, I’d specify that I’m a mixed martial artist. ‘Oh, like karate and shit,’ was then a common response. When I tried to elaborate and educate, even the mention of a caged arena would engender visions of some basement or warehouse straight out of the Fight Club movie. Most fighters were working to move opinion forward, but there were also plenty of wannabe tough guys latching on to the sport, calling themselves cage fighters, and continuing to sensationalise the violent element. The involvement of criminals looking to clean money and earn street cred helped perpetuate the sinister, underground image. This association with morally corrupt, ego-driven or shameless self-promoters left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths upon their initial introduction to what was a relatively new and polarising sport. It also turned most mainstream media outlets off. Even the likes of Alex Reid and his escapades on reality TV cast a negative light on what should be respected as a high-level sporting endeavour. This all left British MMA struggling to gain the widespread acceptance and recognition that its American or Japanese counterparts were beginning to enjoy.
But I certainly didn’t blame the average member of the public for the perception they held because the truth is that the sport of MMA had done little to help itself in the early days. Original UFC marketing had no holds barred plastered all over it and sensationalist slogans like two men enter, one man leaves screaming out from menacing posters. It was all very short-term and narrow-minded thinking. But it revelled in its dark reputation for years and it wasn’t until Zuffa took over that MMA was truly successful in moving away from the violent, quasi-legal freak show image.
Zuffa LLC, the name taken from an Italian word meaning fight or clash, was the company the Fertitta brothers, Lorenzo and Frank, and Dana White formed when they paid Semaphore Entertainment Group $2m for the struggling UFC business in 2001. Lorenzo later admitted they basically paid the money for the three letters alone and Zuffa immediately set about polishing up the UFC’s bad name and mainstreaming the sport of MMA across the globe. Within three months, standardised regulations were drawn up, accepted by the New Jersey Athletic Control Board, and adopted as the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts. They covered everything necessary to govern MMA as a modern sport, with the list of fouls gaining particular attention as it expanded from the original three – no biting, gouging or groin attacks – to over thirty. The next target was to secure sanctioning from the Nevada State Athletic Commission, the gold standard in combat sports’ regulatory bodies. This goal was achieved six months later, just in time for UFC 33.
Zuffa kicked on and grew the brand worldwide by debuting the UFC in England and later introducing it to another fifteen countries in four continents including Canada, Mexico, Ireland, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, China and the United Arab Emirates. They lost money hand over fist for the first four years, but when a final roll of the dice launched the hugely successful Ultimate Fighter reality television series, the organisation turned a corner and has never looked back, ultimately signing a seven-year, $700m television deal with Fox in 2011. Fighter safety has improved beyond recognition from the early days and in 2015 the UFC contracted the US Anti-Doping Agency to implement one of the most stringent drug-testing regimens in all professional sport. One by one, states across America saw the light and agreed to legalise and sanction MMA events, with New York City the last of the fifty to do so in 2016. The road to universal acceptance is probably never-ending, but in the space of fifteen years the UFC has carried mixed martial arts a lot further along the journey than it was before Zuffa arrived on the scene.
Throughout this evolution, however, the UK was always playing catch-up. A huge swathe of so-called mixed martial artists were indeed little more than thugs who had done a bit of boxing and drunken street fighting and now wanted the reputation of being a no-holds-barred cage fighter. I was loath to be lumped in with that subsection and for that reason I never fought on a Cage Rage event. They had great fighters on their cards, with the likes of Anderson Silva, Cyborg Santos, Jorge Rivera and my mate Paul Daley all appearing regularly, but the whole promotion was packaged in such a thuggish manner that it never appealed to me. I was never interested in gaining a tough-guy image. All I wanted was to test myself in a fair fight, in an arena, in a sporting environment.
So around the time I was a Cage Warriors champion, MMA in Britain still had a distinct underworld feel about it. Many of the characters you encountered who had the spare capital to risk were shady to say the least, but they were integral to the sport so there was no way they could be avoided if you wanted to fight. Many of them were involved in the shows that, along with the Cage Warriors forum, were the only things keeping MMA alive in this country. I always presumed the guys putting the money in and taking the money out were criminals involved in the drugs trade who invested in MMA purely for the money laundering and extra street-cred opportunities, but I never let any of that concern me. By and large, I was treated well and fairly by whoever was my nominal manager or promoter at any given time. Even the one from the darker shadows of society who was so paranoid I could only speak to him through his wife! There were only a couple who ever gave me serious cause for concern. The first was Dougie Truman, the founder of Cage Warriors. He was clearly dodgy, almost comically so, like a Del Boy character from Only Fools and Horses. He would wear a shirt only half-buttoned up with too much jewellery on show and drive a Be
ntley with the registration CAGE. I later heard he was involved in an attempt to retrieve drugs from a family member’s car in a police compound but was predictably caught and sentenced to a substantial stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He had to take a step away from the sport during that stretch and I haven’t seen him since.
The second miscreant in charge of my affairs that I could throw further than I could trust was Tony McDonagh. He was always running scams and trying to squeeze out some extra money for himself. He’d organise coaches to bring my fans to shows and then charge through the nose, or sell cheap T-shirts under the auspices of growing the support, but really just so he could further line his pockets. I also know that on more than one occasion he failed to pass on the full amount I was due from the meagre sponsorship deals I managed to secure. But they weren’t all bad, and Andy Lillis springs to mind as one of the good guys. He was the only one I saw to be truly invested in the sport of MMA and who genuinely hoped it could become a success. He cared about my career too, making every effort to be cageside for my bouts and looking just as gutted as I was after a defeat. He had a good heart and always treated me well, yet even Andy got involved in something he shouldn’t and ended up serving time inside. Such was the world of MMA in the UK back then that even the angels sinned.
So within that environment, even though I was now a recognised world champion, it was difficult to envisage professional MMA fighting becoming a secure and lucrative long-term career any time soon. In the meantime, my focus was fully on exacting revenge over Diego Gonzalez. Some fighters would have been fine using the no-contest ruling as a means to justify and then totally forget about what happened in my first encounter with the Swede, but I was still burning up inside over it. At the end of the day, I felt like I had lost a fight. While it is true that I only lost due to a sucker punch and then illegal strikes, it is equally true that Gonzalez was only able to land those blows because I stupidly left myself vulnerable to such attacks. He may have bent or broken the rules which governed our battle, but he submitted me and won by doing so and I took no comfort from hiding behind excuses or complaints or Cage Warriors overruling the original result. It all comes down to the conflict I always have in my heart and soul as to the balance between MMA being a fight or a sport. It is a conflict I have never quite reconciled, but as a fighter first and foremost, I raged inside for the six months I had to wait to get my hands back on Diego Gonzalez.
The night finally arrived on 25 March 2006. I set the tone inside the opening minute when, after he had taken me down, I easily rolled him over and then smashed forearms and elbows into his face. Every blow was venomous. I wanted to really do some damage to this guy. I sought to punish him, not just for being a dirty fighter and for what had gone on in our first meeting, but for the arrogance with which he approached this rematch. I had seen him swaggering about the hotel acting the big man and I knew he had come over with a large posse who sat at the cageside tables liked they owned the place. He was so cocky, so sure he was going to win, and I just thought to myself, You’re going to get something, motherfucker, but it’s not my belt.
He was already blowing hard at the end of the first and looked tired in his corner as he struggled for breath. I opened the second round with some sharp strikes and then we grappled against the side of the cage. I could feel his tiredness and it gave me more strength. Once again I turned him, mounted him, rolled my wrists out of his controlling grip and unloaded with punches and elbows and hammer fists in an attempt to shatter his nose and open up cuts around his eyes. If he was tired at the end of the opening round, he was completely exhausted now. Marc Goddard was thankfully in charge of proceedings this time and he had to practically manhandle Gonzalez’s lingering corner team out of the cage to begin the third. I looked across and saw that as a reluctance on his part to recommence war, saw it as a man close to the end. I was buzzing, knowing exactly what was coming next. I marched forward and landed a spiteful jab to his jaw before immediately following up with a low kick to the outside of his thigh and a high kick with my stronger left leg that connected my shin to the side of his head. He backed off in a semi-fugue state and then wearily shot for my legs in a desperate takedown attempt. I sprawled, flattening him out before he turned to pull guard and I postured up and was ready to end the bastard when Goddard intervened. He called in the doctor to look at the damage my high kick had caused and within seconds the medic had seen enough to know Gonzalez now belonged in a hospital rather than in a cage with me. I later learned that he did go straight from the arena to University Hospital, Coventry, where it took nearly sixty stitches, inside and outside of the wound, to close the gash over his right eye.
I had the swagger now as I strolled about the cage, yelling out, Who’s the champ! A photographer appeared and took a picture of my first ever tattoo, freshly inked just a few weeks before. It was a skull and crossbones on the inside of my lower lip, the only part of my body which would heal quickly enough to let me fight almost immediately after, and the photo of me revealing it made the front cover of Fighters Only magazine the following month. The one and only Ian ‘The Machine’ Freeman, the first Brit to fight in the UFC and conqueror of Frank Mir in the Royal Albert Hall at UFC 38, then entered to do the post-fight interviews. I was in China when Ian stopped Mir but the photograph of him astride the cage wall absorbing the adulation from the crowd is iconic and was a big inspiration to me. When he asked me what it was like to get my revenge, I went off on one. ‘Fucking sweet,’ I began before ripping into Gonzalez. ‘There’s one thing in the world I hate more than anything and that’s losing. The second thing is unsportsmanlike fighting. Fucking touch gloves, it doesn’t take much. We’re fucking athletes, not thugs, we touch fucking gloves.’
Not done there, I then decided to challenge anyone who might have felt like I didn’t deserve to wear the championship belt. ‘Don’t anyone say I’m not the fucking champ,’ I yelled. ‘Because if there is anyone out there who thinks I’m not the champ, I’ll rip your fucking head off. All right!?’
The combination of sweet revenge and adrenalin is a terrible cocktail for post-fight interviews, but it was all good: part theatre, part self-promotion, and part a need to get some genuine feelings off my chest. All in all, it was a very productive night. I’d cemented my status as the best welterweight this side of the Atlantic and gained a lot of exposure and new fans along the way. I was on top of my own little world, feeling invincible, and when I got a call a couple of days later offering me a fight in the US against Forrest Petz for the vacant Fightfest welterweight belt, I didn’t hesitate to start packing my suitcase.
• • •
Forrest Petz was a solid fighter with an impressive 15 and 4 record. He was a heavy hitter with decent wrestling skills, and good enough to go on and make seven appearances at the UFC, but I knew I’d beat him. It was also just a great career move for me. I’d gain more experience seeing how another major US show operates and, as it was for an American belt, I’d be guaranteed an invitation back across the pond to defend it. My prized title would also be on the line, but thoughts of losing that strap didn’t even enter into my head.
I flew into Akron-Canton airport with Owen on the Tuesday before the fight in order to have enough time to acclimatise to Ohio. There was a gym near our hotel where I could work out and a sauna inside the Pro Football Hall of Fame in which I could sweat off the excess weight. I cut 15 pounds pretty comfortably and felt great. I remember the weigh-in took place in the risqué surroundings of Christie’s Cabaret Club and we got changed upstairs in a room used by the working girls before two strippers linked my arms and walked me down to the scales. I recognised the pair the following night as the ring girls holding up the round cards and it made me realise that cross-promotion Stateside wasn’t a great deal classier than it was back home. The fight itself took place in a massive sports hall with a stage at one end to host a live heavy metal band that blasted out their hits at any interval in the action. Eric Esch,
the multi-disciplined fighter more commonly known as Butterbean, was the co-main and turned out to be a really nice guy. I had a few meals with him during fight week and couldn’t believe that, despite his 385-pound heft, I probably ate more than him and I was cutting weight!
The fight was competitive in a raucous and entirely partisan atmosphere, but I was always at ease and always on top. We both knocked each other down a couple of times, and took each other down a couple of times more, but once on the canvas I beat him up or threatened submissions whereas he offered very little as an offensive force. I broke his nose during a barrage of elbows in the first as the ref warned Petz he’d stop the fight if the American didn’t get out from under my sustained attack. His only option to escape was to give me his back and allow me to lock in a body triangle, but the move allowed him to make it to the bell at the end of round one. I didn’t let up for the rest of the fight, making a mess of his face throughout the full twenty-five minutes. Seeing he had zero defence against it, I also pounded his legs with low kicks at will. I was so comfortable that I spent the minute between rounds casually chatting with an old friend that used to live in Nottingham and had made it cageside to watch me perform. The major difference was my conditioning and after one last flurry of elbows from half-guard at the end of the fifth, I stood up and could easily have done five more. Petz on the other hand was shattered and covered in his own blood.
