by Dan Hardy
But rather than show me the door, it wasn’t long before Dana was asking me to headline a show in Milwaukee against Chris Lytle. Lytle had starred on The Ultimate Fighter season they called 'The Comeback'. It featured guys who had previously been cut from the UFC and the prize was a shot at GSP’s welterweight title. Lytle fought his way through to the final, where he lost a very close split decision to Matt Serra. We all know what then transpired when Matt fought Georges, but it was also a turning point in Lytle’s own career. From that point onwards he decided he would just go out and brawl, force the pace, give the fans what they wanted and fight for bonuses. And he was hugely successful with his fresh approach, eventually accumulating ten of those bonus cheques and becoming the first man to win the Fight of the Night, Knockout of the Night, and Submission of the Night accolades. Fuck it, I decided, surprising myself a little with my gut reaction. Why not? I had already mentally checked out but it did bug me that my final minutes in the Octagon had been spent bored to death under the weight of Anthony Johnson. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fans that had paid a lot of money and travelled huge distances to watch that disappointment. Against Lytle, high-octane action was guaranteed so fuck it, yeah, I thought, let’s do it one more time and put on a show.
Despite the reservations I now held about the team I had surrounding me, I stuck with Papp and Nelson one more time. The call to fight had arrived much quicker than I had anticipated and I simply didn’t have time to start making massive changes concerning my fight preparation. But it wasn’t a good camp and I was over-trained and exhausted by the time fight week arrived. My mind was wandering to life beyond the UFC. I was already thinking about what was coming next, not like versus Condit in relation to getting another title shot, but in terms of a totally different life far removed from fighting. I’d investigated university courses and was pretty excited by the thought of signing up to the first semester in September. I viewed Lytle as my last hurrah, as the all-out war I was supposed to get with Johnson. I just wanted to brawl. I wanted a fight that the fans would come up after and say, ‘Wow that was wild, that was so much fun to watch, thank you, man.’ And so a crude and brutal war is all I trained for. There was no real game-plan. I didn’t think Chris was particularly outstanding in any specific range. I knew I was faster, younger, technically more rounded in striking and I believed that he didn’t have the wrestling game to take me down and hold me down. I was training to have a high cardiovascular output to stand in the pocket to throw bombs for fifteen minutes. I was training to fight, not to win. All I wanted was the adrenalin of violence coursing through my veins. I felt that, even if I did win, my UFC career would be short-lived anyway and I was ready for a new chapter. Lythe was in the same boat, actually announcing his retirement at the final press conference, and as a natural brawler it was clear what he was going to do. I just gave him the fight he wanted; he even said exactly that to me after when he thanked me. I could have fought at a longer range, could have used my footwork, could have kicked him, could have done anything else to win that fight. But I just stood toe to toe in a primitive shoot-out that he managed to get the better of after my lazy last-minute shot and attempted slam to break the rhythm of the fight and land some ground-and-pound. It was the most ignorant fight of my life. I had engaged in more astute and cerebral physical confrontations as a drunken seventeen-year-old on Saturday nights outside pubs in Nottingham than my performance in Wisconsin against Chris Lytle. With perhaps just my debut against Lee Doski aside, I had never fought so crudely in a professional fight. It was Plan C without even bothering with an A or B first.
I sat in the post-fight press conference with sore knuckles and a black eye, ready to say my goodbyes and do something else. I’d lost but I was smiling, and I never smile after I lose. But this smile was laced with a sense of resignation, it really was time to move on. Whether I wanted to or not, my ride on the UFC express was over. And then it all changed with one tweet from Lorenzo Fertitta. The journalists in the room picked it up and I was soon told what the UFC kingpin had said: ‘Will not cut Dan Hardy! I like guys that war!’ It was a small, yet massive gesture. It came from Lorenzo the individual rather than the overall UFC business, but it effectively amounted to the same thing. As far as I know, nobody before me had ever lost four in a row and kept their name on the UFC roster. It was a hell of a vote of confidence to receive and I guess I instinctively felt like I owed it to Lorenzo not to throw it back in his face by walking away. He had stuck his considerable neck out for me, if not financially at least in a reputational sense, and there was an instant spark of desire within me to repay and validate that faith. I definitely needed a break to reassess and recalibrate, but I knew my UFC journey hadn’t reached its final destination just yet.
7
MY REPTILIAN SELF
It was a full nine months before I stepped back into the Octagon, and when I did so I was a different man from before. I'd had some good people around me in Los Angeles in terms of training, but so many elements of living in that city weren’t working for me. I was trapped in an old routine and an outdated mind-set that wasn’t doing me any favours. It was actually causing me to disconnect from my natural and deep-rooted love of martial arts in a way I had never thought possible. Somewhere along the line it had become all about building my career and less about growing as a martial artist. With the losses mounting it was difficult to see any light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel. MMA is an all-consuming profession and when things are not going well, it negatively affects every single part of your life. For a while I woke up feeling like shit and went to bed feeling like shit and all my personal relationships suffered along the way. I felt like I couldn’t get away from the negativity either. I was in the public eye and a lot of the public had apparently decided that I wasn’t good at my job and should be sacked. With the likes of Twitter and Facebook in full flow, that meant every time I went online I was reading about how bad I was and why I didn’t deserve to be earning a living. There seemed to be a growing movement that wanted my UFC contract torn up and my head on a spike. Having thousands of people demanding in very public forums that the job I loved and had been dedicated to for over a decade be taken from me was tough to stomach to say the least. I equated happiness in life with my success as a martial artist back then so it was a horrible place to find myself in. I was angry and frustrated that all my hard work and sacrifices were being discounted, it was just, Get rid of him, he doesn’t belong any more. There were supportive voices in among the critics, of course, but for the first time in my career I suddenly had to search a little harder to find them. A lot of people look to live vicariously and be inspired by sports stars, but the flipside is that as soon as the star stops being successful, those people must move on and find a new athlete to feed off.
Basically, I felt very alone. I was rarely back in the UK now so I had lost the consistent support network of Rough House and the contagious positive energy that flows out of Steve Papp. They had always been there for me and provided a major source of strength at times when I may have been feeling a little sorry for myself. I had training partners and good friends in LA, but never that feeling of brotherhood that created such a strong bond within Rough House and made us feel like we had a team in an individual sport environment. In LA everyone had their own agenda and their own issues to deal with and a clear focus on themselves as individuals. Rough House, on the other hand, was always a genuine team. We worked towards a common goal and were there for each other when there was a need. If one of the boys back home lost a fight, all the others would be keeping in contact, saying we’re training here or there, and making sure the guy who needed it most at that moment was there in the thick of it. There was never any sense of abandonment like I felt after each loss when I was living in the US. Returning to England wasn’t really a viable option, but I decided I needed to wipe my slate clean, step out of where I currently was in my life, and continue with an entirely new chapter. I needed somethi
ng to refresh and recharge me and the only way I could see to do that was to change everything. With my mind made up, I packed all my possessions into the back of a U-Haul truck, loaded my old Pontiac Hot Rod onto a trailer, and set off in a north-easterly direction, destination Las Vegas, Nevada.
Now I was in a new location, it was time to change the nuts and bolts of what constitutes daily living. One element I knew I needed to revise was my interests outside of MMA. For a few years I had been getting bogged down in some really heavy and depressing issues. I’ve always enjoyed reading, but I found myself drawn to subjects like animal rights and political corruption. I was researching factory farming and the US dog-fighting subculture one week and then lost in books like Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins the next. As subject matter I knew it was all too dark to be immersing myself in while preparing to fight in the UFC, but I still struggled to walk away from it. I started becoming more outspoken on certain issues and this in turn led to a lot of people bringing more of humanity’s woes to my attention. After a while I couldn’t separate myself from the cruel, selfish and often ignorant actions of people all around the world, and it burdened me with negative thoughts that weighed heavily on my shoulders. So the move to Vegas was like drawing a line in the desert sand and I took the opportunity to put some distance between myself and massive, global issues I could do little to influence at this point in my life.
I found the likes of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky relatively light relief after years of unadulterated doom and gloom glaring out from every page. Chomsky is so intelligent and to the point with his ideas, but he’s amusing along with it. He reminded me of my grandad in many ways. Reading his thoughts actually made me quite positive about the human race again. I began appreciating how resilient we are as a species and saw that if we could just open our eyes a little wider and band together, we could stop a lot of the awful shit going on in the world. I felt like there were millions of people out there from different walks of life and distinct schools of thought who were all moving in the same direction. In a weird way it took a load off me as I realised that the stuff I thought I had been carrying on my shoulders alone was shared across the globe.
My old friend and training partner in LA, Mac Danzig, then recommended the work of Terence McKenna. I immediately connected with his outlook and really began to open my mind to new ways of viewing the world and my own consciousness within it. That led me on to other revolutionary thinkers such as Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman and, later, Dr Rick Strassman and Graham Hancock, who have all contributed immensely to my current operating system. I wouldn’t say they necessarily changed my thinking in any dramatic way, but they certainly enthused me about life at a time when I was in danger of losing interest. They also gave me back that feeling that there is something more to life, much like kung fu and the other traditional arts did for me back in my college days, and faith in religion does for millions of people around the world today. In terms of traditional religions, I’ve always been a little too questioning and cynical about the intangible and therefore find it hard to be satisfied without some evidence or a source that I can go to and see for myself, as I did with China and kung fu, for example. But as well as something that I was able to reach through meditation and natural substances, gaining a better understanding of consciousness involved a lot of scientific research. I was excited by the idea of going on a journey of self-discovery and, although I’d been pursuing it for a number of years with the martial arts, this seemed to be all-encompassing and far more powerful on a personal basis. That excitement carried over into my training camp, and I used that positive energy to drive me through my fight preparations. Often when I got back from training in the evening I was just too tired to keep my eyes open and read a book, so I started listening to McKenna’s audio recordings. He has such a gentle voice and a comedic way of putting things that it’s perfect for relaxing and absorbing simultaneously. I would fall asleep listening to him talk about the benefits of psychedelic plants and his theories on their impact on our evolutionary journey. Those lectures lifted me out of a hole: here was something I could really explore, I thought.
One of the more depressing thoughts that would drag me down in those days was the realisation that man has totally taken over the Earth and there is nowhere you can go to be free. I have always had a real struggle with not feeling free. It partly explains my love of pirates dating back to when I was a kid. I was always very jealous of that lifestyle, not the raping and plundering and pillaging, but the anarchy and absolute freedom of a group of outlaws banding together and living under no monarchic or governmental rule. There were captains, of course, but they tended to be elected and agreed upon by the crew and would never stay in control for very long if they weren’t fair and just in their leadership role. Freedom today is an illusion. There is nowhere you can make money legally and not be required by law to hand over a portion of what you have earned to someone else. And there is nowhere you can go where you won’t be standing on land owned and controlled by someone else. That inescapable fact, that there are no frontiers for man left on Earth, is a real killer to me. Bar the depths of the ocean or launching into outer space, there is nowhere on my planet to explore, nowhere undiscovered and unmapped. I really identified with Kevin Costner’s character in Dances with Wolves when he arrives at the last outpost and tells the general he wants to go to the abandoned frontier outpost and rebuild it. ‘Why?’ the general asks. ‘Because I want to see the frontier while it still exists.’ It also explains why I’ve always been fascinated by famous explorers like Sir Francis Drake, Captain James Cook and Sir Ernest Shackleton. Imagine setting off in a ship and believing there is every chance you’ll sail off the edge of the world. What a perspective on life they must have had. Or imagine taking a pack of dogs and going to the South Pole, in an attempt to reach a destination or make a crossing that had never been done before. I loved reading about Alexander the Great marching his armies into Asia and describing tribes of little men living in trees. He meant monkeys, of course, but they had no concept whatsoever of what a monkey was until they saw it. It was depressing to admit that, visits from alien life forms aside, there is nothing left like that for me to discover. Even if I saw a T-Rex crossing Shepherd’s Bush Green in London tomorrow, although I’d be equally amazed and terrified, I’d instantly recognise it for what it is.
Listening to McKenna speak, however, I realised that he had found something that worked for him and I was eager to know if I could reap similar benefits. Psilocybin could offer me the means to be an explorer. Psilocybin could take me to places and show me things that my mind was as yet unable to imagine or fathom. It would provide access to my own subconscious which, like everyone else’s, is unique and personal to me and would help me find ways to better myself and improve my human experience. It wasn’t long before I grew convinced that psychedelic experiences were what I needed to emerge from the pit I had been languishing in, and get back to a state of constant evolution. I also heeded McKenna’s words on the importance of ‘set and setting’, and was determined to follow the respectful method he employs when working with psilocybin. It is crucial to appreciate that this is an organic substance that grows in nature and can be somewhat unpredictable. This means that even the most seasoned veteran of the psychedelic realm can find these experiences difficult or challenging and should approach each ceremony with great care.
• • •
In my new home on the fringes of Vegas close to Red Rock Canyon, I created the MushRoom. This was my own personal and private space, a room in which I could stretch, meditate, smoke joints and, most weekends, have a dose of psilocybin in a ceremonial setting, in the hope of having a powerful psychedelic experience. With friends growing the raw material in California and Colorado and topping up my supply every time they passed through Nevada, I was able to consume as much as I liked, but as the body builds up a resistance to the toxins that cause the psychedelic experience, more than once a week i
s pretty pointless. On a very basic level, the ceremonies became my escape from the pressure I was under in my career. Where others turn to alcohol or prescription painkillers or gambling or another vice, I had mushrooms to break the monotony of training camp. But unlike the vast majority of consciousness-altering substances, they were massively more beneficial to me than simple escapism for a couple of hours. The common misconception that so-called magic mushrooms are for a crazy party experience has always seemed a little ridiculous to me, especially in the amounts that I work with. The correct dose for a deep psychedelic experience will not make you act a fool and dance to music that you would usually hate, but will take your pineal gland and fire it off into the stratosphere with your consciousness still attached. It is not always an easy or enjoyable process, but it is always a helpful one, allowing me to explore problem areas in my behaviour and issues in daily life and find the clarity I need to move past them.
My relationship with marijuana, something I introduced into my lifestyle a couple of fights before I signed with the UFC, can be thought of in similar terms. It began when I was having trouble sleeping and maintaining an appetite throughout training camps, mainly due to being uncomfortable, sore or injured after a day in the gym. Other than myself, a chiropractor friend in LA was the only person regularly monitoring my health and physical condition at that time and, aware that it had been a long time since I had used any pharmaceutically produced medicine, he suggested I try marijuana.
