Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me

by Dan Hardy

  • • •

  I was now 3 and 0 in the UFC and the rest of the welterweight division were forced to sit up and take notice of the brash Brit backing up his words with actions in the Octagon. UFC 105 was scheduled for Manchester in November and I was told I’d be on the show and high up the card. The Korean Dong Hyun Kim was named as my opponent, but he injured himself in sparring and had to withdraw. That was good news for two reasons. Firstly, Kim was like a human backpack in fights, another spoiler that could make for a very boring fight. It would have been a frustrating contest and I hadn’t been excited by the prospect of facing him. The language barrier would have negated my burgeoning trash-talk skills too. The second reason I was glad the match-up never happened is down to the fighter Dana White soon announced as the replacement opponent. Mike ‘Quick’ Swick was not only a much more exciting fighter, but he was also the number one contender in the welterweight division. That meant he was at the front of the queue to face the champ, Georges St-Pierre. It also meant that if I could beat Swick, I would fast-track myself into that title-challenger position. The magnitude of that situation, the possibility of becoming the first British fighter to contest a world title in the UFC, saw our bout bumped up to co-main event alongside Randy Couture versus Brandon Vera. Bisping was on the show as well, fighting in his home town against Denis Kang, and yet I was higher up on the card. It was an unexpected promotion to such a lofty position, arriving at least three bouts earlier in my UFC career than I had ever anticipated.

  It was also a big enough fight for me to take the decision to make a change to my coaching set-up. Owen had been great for my career, but I felt I now needed a level of commitment from a coach that, largely due to the demands of his real job and his family, he was unable to give. Instead, I looked to Steve Papp, a guy I knew to absolutely live and breathe martial arts. Steve worked out of a few spit-and-sawdust gyms in the Midlands and was renowned for his ability to cultivate killers within the otherwise unassuming fighters under his wing. He was a hard-nosed Thai fighter, small, stocky, tenacious and mean, with a variety of training in other martial arts such as Jeet Kune Do. My first ever session with him was a non-stop forty-five-minute round of serious sparring. Whereas Owen was a taller, looser fighter with a lot more finesse, Steve was a rugged, march-forward-and-land-an-elbow-type guy. He was also unquestionably, totally committed to training camp preparations and I needed that consistency. I knew he was new to the sport of MMA, but he was an extremely fast learner and I was convinced his passion and enthusiasm would make up for any gaps in his knowledge.

  I had my reputation now and Swick was expecting months of online trash-talking, so I decided to hold my tongue. It was a question of horses for courses and I figured that silence or platitudes might screw with his head more than Davis-esque abuse. I did change his nickname from Quick, earned via a series of early finishes, to One Trick, but it was all very mild. At the pre-fight press conference I thanked him for making the trip over and then handed him a runners-up trophy so he wouldn’t fly home empty-handed. He thanked me and promised to bring it to the Octagon the following night to return it. The only person who made any effort to get under Mike Swick’s skin was the cheeky fella who swiped the cap off his head as he made his way through the crowd to the Octagon in the Evening News Arena!

  Swick was taller than me, had a longer reach and was fast on his feet, famed for sprinting forward while throwing a flurry of punches to catch opponents off-guard. When people panicked and made defensive errors as he charged, he also had a good guillotine attack in his locker that was dubbed the Swick-otine after he used it to beat Steve Vigneault and Joe Riggs barely two minutes into those fights. But I studied his back catalogue and a strategy to counter his style soon formed in my mind. First of all, he had a clear tell, a lift of the chin and a swelling of the chest as he rose up to launch his charge, which indicated when he was going to plough forward. I visualised this movement for hours on end every day so that I’d recognise the very first muscle twitch and be ready for Swick approaching at pace. The second part of the puzzle was what to do with him once I knew that he was coming. It was here that I noticed the natural response seemed to be to back away from him and his flying fists, but that appeared counter-intuitive to me as you simply gave him more time and space to keep building speed. Despite him having begun his MMA career as a light heavyweight, I didn’t think that Swick was actually a naturally heavy-hitter, more that he generated his power via forward momentum and gained his knockouts in that fashion. If I stopped the momentum, I was sure I would negate his power. So I resolved to simply stand my ground when he came for me and time my own strikes to catch him on the way in. I would win this fight with an ‘intercepting fist’, as The Master would say. As far as I could see, the absolute worst that could then happen was I’d have to deal with a maximum of two punches and then a clinch as our bodies collided and his assault was smothered. Part of my preparation included watching a lot of Wanderlei Silva, famous for never wanting to give an inch to any of his opponents, and by fight night I had my game-plan perfected: I’d throw hard and, aiming directly at his lifted chin, use his momentum against him and stifle his attack.

  I put it into action in the opening seconds when he made his first predictable rush towards me and I caught him flush on his jaw with a right hook as soon as he was in range. I knew I must have buzzed him, but it wasn’t until we spoke later that I realised how bad he actually was. He fell forward and kind of sagged against me, but I presumed he was angling for a takedown and so I secured an underhook and basically held him up. I didn’t know then that he hadn’t a clue where he was and had I let go he would have likely slumped to the floor, allowing me to steal an early finish. Swick told me in the hotel reception after the event that he didn’t remember a thing about the fight from that right hand onwards. For the rest of the opening round, he basically held on like grim death and it was an attritional battle of knees to the thighs and midriff. But by the end of it, I was the man with a smile on my face. That smile widened fifteen seconds into the second round when a trademark left hook buckled my foe’s legs and sent him retreating backwards fast. This time I knew he was struggling, but I missed a monster overhand right by an inch and he was able to grab on, pull me close and steal some respite. I punished his body for the rest of the round, but it wasn’t until the third that I really put the gloss on one of my best performances. We both stood our ground and swung for the fences but I was the man to land the big blow and Swick stumbled away on drunken pins. I advanced, struck him a couple more times, then picked him up and took him down. There, I slashed an elbow across the top of his skull that opened his scalp as if I’d used a razor blade. I leaned over him in his guard and kept piling on the misery as his blood began to stain the canvas. He sporadically made vain attempts to lock in a triangle, but I merely rose out of it and then plunged back down with a fist aimed at his face to discourage further attempts. The ref stood us back up, but Swick, with his left eye badly swollen and his shaven head stained red from his own claret, was a beaten man. With ninety seconds to go and the capacity crowd shouting Hardy! Hardy! I waved a hand to get them to up the decibels. I was in my element. I didn’t get the finish, but the decision was unanimous and indisputable.

  The champion, GSP, was cageside and Dana led him into the Octagon as I was talking to Rogan so the photographers could get a few early shots to start the publicity machine for my next outing. I had a shot at the title and was facing a legend of MMA.

  6

  THE FALL

  My shot at GSP’s welterweight title was announced for UFC 111 in New Jersey on 27 March 2010. I wasn’t used to having a fight set in stone so far in advance, and all that extra time to think about what was coming down the road worked against me. I knew my body needed a period of total rest after the exertions of the Swick bout, but I was so eager to start my preparation for St-Pierre that I couldn’t stop myself from training. I slowed down somewhat for a couple of weeks, bu
t I was still running, lifting and grappling every other day during that fortnight, so it was hardly a holiday. Then, come December, I officially began what was to become a sixteen-week training camp.

  It was crazy, and looking back now I can see that. My enthusiasm for training actually peaked then faded while still inside camp and that is never a good sign for a fighter. But getting everything right in terms of preparation is one of the great challenges of mixed martial arts. I was always a real planner, with everything drawn up and documented on charts and schedules and highlighted in notebooks. With the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight vision, it was the wrong approach for me. I would keep to those schedules throughout the camp come hell or high water, and that invariably led to over-training. On days when I was carrying a knock, or just bone tired from pushing it too hard in a previous session, I still went on that run, lifted those weights, or strapped on my gear and sparred a few rounds. It is one of the symptoms of not having a specialised MMA coach to oversee everything. I was basically my own overall performance manager with complete autonomy over training. Part of the reason why I relocated to the US for my camps was to seek out that authority figure who could guide me through the process. But in reality, I was still always making my own decisions. When I first joined the UFC, I linked up with Ollie Richardson, the strength and conditioning coach of the Leicester Tigers rugby union team, and he became one of my best friends, as well as a fantastic addition to my team. There were big changes with Ollie on board, a much more professional feel. It was hard graft too, the Saturday morning sessions in particular a total nightmare. Ollie did his best to help me manage the overall schedule, but it was a big ask when my coaches were spread across three counties. In Leicester I would go and do a session with my jiu-jitsu coach and he would beast me for a couple of hours. From there I’d drive across town, or to another city, for another two or three hours with my Thai boxing coach and he would put me through the mill as well. An MMA camp is a real team effort, but often the different members of that team are not communicating enough to know what the other is doing or planning to do. It leads to every single session being 100 per cent, 100mph, when maybe it should have been dialled back a notch. It is one of the clear benefits of the MMA super-gym model that has become established in the US. Everything is under one roof in the likes of the Jackson-Winklejohn gym in New Mexico or American Top Team in Florida and so it is easier to micro-manage a fighter’s routine. But even within such a system, there are always specialised coaches with their own competing priorities or ideas. When I was at ATT, Ricardo Liborio was regarded as one of the best MMA trainers in the world, but he told me absolutely nothing about the striking range. For that major aspect of the game they had the ex-pro boxer Howard Davis Junior. More all-round coaches are emerging all the time, but MMA is such a multi-faceted beast that it is hard to see anyone becoming a true specialist in every discipline needed. The more holistic the approach to preparing for a mixed martial arts fight the better, but two or three heads are still better than one as far as I can see.

  The other reason why I was training flat-out a full four months before the fight was my opponent. Like every welterweight in the MMA world at that time, I looked at GSP and knew I had a lot of work to do and a lot of catching up to do if I was going to compete with him. From a totally objective point of view, it was undeniable that the Canadian was superior to everyone else on the scene in 2010. He was just an awesome athlete on top of all his specific fighting skills. He was probably the key influencer in the sport of mixed martial arts at the time. At the grassroots level, fighters were mimicking his style and getting tips on training from any footage that the UFC would put out. I know this because I was doing the same, just as I used to watch the HBO boxing countdown shows and copy Bernard Hopkins’ and Roy Jones Jr.’s training sessions. When GSP was the champion we were all looking at him to see what he was doing differently, and anyone that says they weren’t is either ignorant or a liar. He was the catalyst behind the evolution that now has us approaching an era in which every UFC fighter is a pure athlete, capable of competing in whatever sport they put their mind to. GSP was at that level when the rest of us weren’t. I was a fighter striving to be a martial artist whereas he was beyond that. He was a genuine professional athlete with formidable fighting skills.

  I didn’t consider the task in such stark terms. I didn’t simply accept that he was better than me. But I did acknowledge that he was clearly further along in his evolution as a combat athlete, which is where the sport was going. It was possible the opportunity had come too soon for me. At the same time, however, I always believed, and always will believe, that every MMA fight is winnable by both contestants. The beauty of mixed martial arts is that no one individual will ever be the best in every discipline of the sport and that gives every fighter hope. I could admit that GSP was above me in a certain area of the game, but that is vastly different to just throwing my hands up and saying he is better than me, full stop. If I fought him under Thai boxing rules, for example, I was confident I could knock him out every night of the week. So the challenge for me then was going to be keeping our fight in the ranges within which I could beat him or at least be competitive.

  The big fear was finding myself embroiled in a pure wrestling match with GSP. The vast majority of UFC competitors have a relatively rudimentary wrestling game, so St-Pierre was the first genuine elite-level grappler I had faced. And I say that despite the fact he came from a karate background and learnt wrestling as a secondary skill-set. Some guys seem to naturally gravitate towards a particular aspect of the game and that becomes their preferred range in which to compete. Georges had a varied and dangerous striking game, but wrestling seemed to be something that really made sense to him. Much like striking makes more sense to me than most other things in life! He chained his takedown attempts together beautifully, and the transitions were so smooth that even veteran college wrestlers struggled to keep up with him in the MMA arena. Usually when I sensed an opponent considering a takedown, the steps to defend were quite clear and I’d spent years working hard to improve my speed at going through those steps. Some were still skilful enough to successfully take me down, but I knew I could hold my own with them on the floor and that I’d eventually get back to my feet, where I could start searching for their chin again. GSP was a different animal, however. What made him such a nightmare was the combination of elite-level athletic ability and fluid transitions in grappling exchanges. He would go for a double-leg and at the exact moment you began to defend that, he would instantly switch to a single leg to keep a step ahead of you. I couldn’t really prepare well to counteract such an attack because, unless GSP himself was willing to spar with me, no one in my circles had the ability to replicate it, and I didn’t have the money to fly around the world looking for someone who could. I understood the principles of it and how it worked, but without being able to physically practise against it for hours every day, it was impossible to teach my body to react quick enough when it happened.

  So instead my focus for the camp became working on my ground skills. I can look back now and think that maybe I did misdirect my energies, that perhaps if I had worked on my takedown defence more it would actually have enhanced my striking offence. But at the heart of that debate is the fact that I didn’t want to enter the Octagon already on the defensive. I didn’t want to be in there fully focused on twenty-five minutes of defending takedowns. I didn’t become a fighter and sign up to the UFC to be so negative. My goal is always to be on my feet offering the threat of a knockout, or on the mat threatening a submission or establishing a top position in order to ground-and-pound. And while I dedicated a huge part of my time in advance of GSP to grappling and striving to improve that side of my game, I’m happy to admit that it will always be striking that drives me. Attempting to perfect my ability to switch a human being off with one clean strike is why I am a martial artist. It is undoubtedly impressive to witness someone out-grapple another on the deck, but only if
you are one of the trained minority who knows what they are looking at. With a pristine KO, on the other hand, everyone recognises that for exactly what it is. It is the ultimate way to finish a confrontation and, as far as I am concerned, the most efficient. In a real fight situation, it can be the only means of victory as well. If I’m attacked in the street on Saturday night by three different guys simultaneously, I’m not going to be able to choke all three of them out. But, utilising my ability to strike a man, I’d back myself to walk away unscathed from three sleeping bodies on the pavement.

  • • •

  When you fight the pound-for-pound number one fighter on the planet for the UFC’s welterweight title you expect a little more media attention than the norm, but nothing could have prepared me for the overwhelming intensity of the scrutiny I felt under ahead of the GSP fight. I have always enjoyed the media side of the fight game. It may not have been quite the monster it is today, flying around the world for mass press-conferences and the like, but I received a lot of requests from the moment I signed for the UFC and I was happy to meet all of them. Sometimes the UFC would rent a studio for hours of radio interviews and I would sit there patiently through every one. In the early days it was still more like an introduction to mixed martial arts and answering a long list of basic questions. It was more like a morbid curiosity from the media outlet rather than any educated interviews or desire for informed analysis. But I understood the value of it all, to me as an individual and to the organisation and sport I was representing, so I said yes to every TV programme, radio show, newspaper, magazine and website that came knocking. More than that, I wanted them interested in me, both for the value of the promotion it would provide and from a posterity point of view. I want to be able to look back on records of my fighting journey in forty years and share them with the grandkids. But, even so, handling the media obligations that came with the GSP fight became a major battle in itself.