Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me

by Dan Hardy

  About a week into the race, we began experiencing technical problems with our navigational and communication equipment. We resorted to using old-school maps and had no idea of our position in relation to the other yachts, giving the impression we were competing against phantoms. We also had to make do with just one twenty-four-hour weather forecast each morning. Not knowing what we were sailing into put us at a considerable disadvantage and led to us hitting squalls, storms and swells that other boats could foresee and avoid. Then one morning we woke up to a total media blackout with no emails going back and forth from Clipper HQ to the boats. That was very strange and put everyone on edge. Rumours began circulating and there were a few hours of uncertainty before the tragic news we all dreaded came through. A man named Andy on the South African boat had been hit on the head by the 500kg boom and killed. It was incredibly sad and, although we were removed from it, it was easy to imagine the pain of sailing with the dead body of a crewmate stored in the back of the vessel. It was also the starkest possible reminder that there are plenty of potentially fatal dangers every time you make a move on these boats. Later on, during the sixth leg of the race, there was another fatality on the same yacht when a woman, Sarah Young, was washed overboard between Qingdao and Seattle. Her lifeless body was recovered but at 1,000 miles from land there was nothing they could do but bury her at sea. If we didn’t have the respect due for Mother Nature before, then this was a reminder that every adventure comes with risk. We had all embarked on this journey to experience the world and hoped to learn about ourselves in the process, but the oceans can be indiscriminately hostile and demanded our undivided attention at all times.

  I thought of my own family, particularly my mum and sister, who I knew were already anxious about me taking part, when I heard of the tragedies. Part of the experience for me was the isolation and so I wasn’t communicating with the outside world until I reached Rio. But I worried about their worry and so when a crewmate came up on deck, excited that she had a weak phone signal as we sailed within range of Cape Verde, I decided to make one quick call to my wife, Lacey. After what just happened to Andy, I wanted someone I loved to hear my voice and know that I was okay.

  The worst injury I received arrived not long after that call but it was a mercifully minor incident. There was a problem with a jammed pulley at the top of the mast and its carabiner was beginning to wear. I put a helmet on and was winched up to transfer the sail onto another pulley. Up there, 100 feet high, every gust of wind and sway of the boat is magnified. The furthest I’d been from land in a boat was midway between Holland and the UK in the English Channel, but now I could only see ocean all around. You also get to see the curvature of the Earth from that lofty perspective, which is pretty cool. I loved being there, looking down at what appeared a toy yacht but was also my whole world. The Octagon is a dangerous and unpredictable space to be in, but you are always ready by the time you have to enter, and can always step out of it whenever you please, twenty-five minutes later at the very worst. I couldn’t help thinking that I was trapped on this little boat for a month and there were things happening every day that would be impossible to prepare for. I was then snapped out of my temporary reverie by the pain of my finger being caught in the pulley. It took a lot of shouting and screaming into the wind before my crewmates below understood my cries and released the winch so I could extract the precious digit. It was numb and blue but basically all right so I completed the changeover and descended for a well-earned rest.

  The most serious situation we faced on our leg took place as we approached the Doldrums, where everything begins to calm down, and our skipper decided to take advantage of the relatively pleasant weather and order a full rig check. As one of the youngest and fittest on board, I normally did that type of thing with another guy called Dhruv who was like a hyperactive spider monkey and always a huge source of energy and entertainment. On this occasion though, we had just finished our shift and retired to bed so someone else volunteered to scale the main mast. Just as I was nodding off, I heard a lot of commotion considering the benign conditions and got out of bed to take a look. I walked to the galley hatch but found it closed, something that only happens in an emergency. So I walked on to the sail locker and peered through the Perspex hatch there to see if I could find out what was happening. Looking up towards the sky I saw the watch leader, John Charles, dangling helplessly from the mast. He was wearing all white and blood was seeping through and quickly dying his shirt a deep scarlet colour. He had been unhooking and rehooking his carabiner from the mast to get over the second set of spreaders, metal arms that stretch out and attach to the shrouds which stabilise the mast, when a freak gust sent him spinning around the mast on the pulley, seventy feet up. As he swung round, he hit the shroud, broke both bones in his forearm, and tore his flesh right down to the muscle tissue under his arm. Such was the impact, both his shoes were also flung off. One was never seen again but I later recovered the other and attached it to the A-Frame at the back of the boat after John had written ouch! and signed it with the date and location of where the accident took place.

  I sprinted onto deck, where the skipper Peter was already climbing the mast to get John down safely. Others were down below preparing the medical bay in the galley. I helped lower John onto the deck, took his lifejacket off and began to cut through his shirt to see the damage.

  ‘Oh, do you have to?’ the battered and bloodied casualty joked with me as I made the first snip. ‘It’s the first time I’ve worn this.’

  His humour and bravery were unreal considering he was in a pretty bad way. At 1,200 miles from the nearest coast there was no chance of rescue, so we got the paramedics on the phone and they guided us through what needed to be done. Peter was ex-military and trained in field medicine so he stitched John up under the arm with seventeen big ugly crosses and zero cosmetic concern. Meanwhile, I was focused on holding his broken forearm as still as possible and trying to keep him conversational and the mood light. Blood loss was the major fear at this stage and, even if there was something severed inside, there was nothing we could do about it in our crude operating theatre. Once the torn flesh was clamped shut, John got a morphine shot for the pain, but he was remarkably calm and in good spirits throughout the entire harrowing ordeal. Even when Peter and I were trying to realign his snapped radius and ulna and fix a mouldable cast around his arm, he was chatting away, saying, ‘Nice job, boys, that looks pretty straight from my angle.’ Had it been any other member of the crew, myself included, it would have been a total disaster. I later asked John how he remained so composed. He was a professional sailor, which helped a little, but he confessed to me at the end of the race that he presumed he was dead when he was first dangling seve feet up with blood flowing freely. When we got him down he knew he wouldn’t die and that made it easier to put whatever damage was done into perspective. He spent the next two weeks on antibiotics and painkillers sitting at the back of the boat and was at the helm to take control as we crossed the finishing line in Brazil. In hospital in Rio, surgeons opened him up to check everything and said he was millimetres from a major artery that, had it been nicked, would have meant certain death. They put a metal plate in his arm to hold his fractured bones together and just a few weeks later he was back on board, ready to continue his circumnavigation of the globe.

  The month on ‘Grace’ wasn’t easy. Every little issue or annoyance is exaggerated when twenty-five strangers are trapped together in a small space for a long period of time. Everything is exacerbated, especially when fatigue, homesickness, seasickness, and the lack of creature comforts set in. Tempers tend to fray quickly, and accusing fingers are pointed even quicker. It was a big test for me and the whole experience was exhausting, but all the times that I was down and wished I was home were easily made up for by just one of the moments when I was so grateful to be where I was. The night sky over the Atlantic where there is zero light pollution is truly awesome. We could see shooting stars every cou
ple of minutes and you could follow them across the sky for five or ten seconds. I had sneaked a couple of joints on board and I had a smoke one night in the stillness of the Doldrums. Looking heavenwards, there was more light than darkness. It was overwhelming. The phosphorescence in the water was beautiful too. I watched the churning, fluorescent water glowing in the boat’s wake and realised that the scene in Life of Pi is only slightly exaggerated. A pod of dolphins began following, performing for my attention. They dived under the boat and jumped up the other side to splash down in a multi-coloured explosion of ocean. On another night at the back of the boat I had an almost ceremonial moment, one that had echoes of a ceremony in the MushRoom. It was about not being present in the moment, not living the exact minute I am currently experiencing. I’d spent the first part of the race thinking always about the finishing line, viewing everything through that lens. It was always about how far had we gone, or how many days until Rio. It was just like how I punctuate my life with fight dates, making one year effectively just two or three days. I realised that for too long I had been all about preparing for something in the future and thinking about just getting through days until the goal is reached, when I just needed to relax and enjoy every second as it passes.

  We broached twice on the approach into Rio, meaning the boom got snagged by a wave as the mainsail was out at an angle to make the most of the wind direction. This acted as an anchor digging into the sea and caused the boat to turn in a tight circle and drag us onto our side. It is crazy when that happens, everyone on the high side hanging on while the skipper tried to right it. We were a high-tech seventy-foot yacht but we may as well have been a splinter off a match as far as the power of Mother Nature is concerned. Rio de Janeiro was a very cool place to sail into, weaving through the islands, passing the coves and bays, while Christ the Redeemer peered down from on high. I looked back and saw the Irish boat just a mile behind us. A month at sea and 5,200 miles covered, and we end up so close together with our destination in sight, both waiting for a breeze to push us over the finish line first. It was an agonising final hour as the two boats sailed neck and neck the whole way in, but we managed to edge it on this occasion as we gave one of the outlying islands a wider approach and didn’t get caught in the wind hole that the peak on the outcrop of land had created on the leeward side. There is a tradition to write something on the sail locker wall upon arrival, and I was first up with the pen in my hand. I had known exactly what I was going to write ever since that night I smoked my joint on the back of the boat in the Doldrums. ‘Life is hard at 45,’ I scribbled. ‘But don’t forget to enjoy the ride.’

  In Rio we had to hang about for a few days to do a deep clean of the boat and complete any repairs before the next leg. I also had media obligations, going to see Jose Aldo and doing a few TV shows to talk about MMA and my race experience. There was then an awards ceremony and at it they announced that a memorial would take place for Andy. There were a lot of Andrews in the race, at least one on every boat more or less, and we never really learnt each other’s surnames. So when we were originally told about Andy’s death, no face sprang to mind and I had no recollection of whether I had ever met or spoken with him. It was still incredibly sad, of course, but I felt no direct personal connection. It was only at the awards night that I saw his face on the front of a leaflet giving details of the memorial. He was Andrew Ashman, a paramedic, and I knew him. I had spoken to him several times during training because he was an MMA fan and loved chatting about my fight with St-Pierre. As we were leaving St Katherines Docks in London his boat went past and he pointed over and waved and shouted that we’ll have a drink in Rio. Andy was such a nice, friendly and enthusiastic guy. This was his adventure of a lifetime and it ended so tragically for him and his family. It hit me harder then than it had out at sea.

  • • •

  ‘Grace’ may have carried me from London to Rio, but over the past couple of years the good ship UFC has taken me on a truly global journey. I’ve worked in ten countries across four continents, pit-stopping in Abu Dhabi, Berlin, Dublin, Sydney, Stockholm, Krakow, London, Zagreb, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Manchester, Belfast, Las Vegas, California and Melbourne along the way. The whole UFC package is so polished that it can be transported into any city on the planet for a weekend and run like a well-oiled machine. And now that the vast majority of the mindless opposition to mixed martial arts is dead and buried, we are an accepted and welcomed visitor wherever we go. It is as if stage one, that MMA is a legitimate sport and not some anachronistic freak show of barbarity, of the evolution is complete and we are working through stage two, an educational phase to ensure everyone interested understands the terms and disciplines, and what is going on inside the Octagon. We have made great strides but I can’t wait for stage three, when everyone involved is ready for a deeper analysis and appreciation of our great sport.

  In the meantime, I just feel lucky to have been embedded in the sport during one of the most dramatic periods in the UFC’s history. I’ve been there to see the end of greatness as Anderson Silva’s incredible career limps through its twilight. The Spider is, for me, the pound-for-pound best ever, and it will take a long time for someone to seize that accolade from him. It is always a subjective and rather whimsical debate, but I give him the nod in part because of the overall impact he has had on the sport. I rate the likes of GSP, Jose Aldo, Fedor Emelianenko and Jon Jones very highly too, but I’m not convinced they did as much to truly change the game the way someone like Silva did. The impressive flyweight kingpin Demetrius Johnson is another good example. Mighty Mouse is currently regarded by many as the P4P best, at least in Jones’s enforced absence, and I can agree that he is probably the most well-rounded fighter. But I see him taking what has been known to work and perfecting it rather than bringing something totally new to the table. Someone like Randy Couture, on the other hand, most certainly was a revolutionary. He made dirty boxing and clinch work so important, as well as developing the art of ground-and-pound in the modern day. As was B.J. Penn, revolutionising what can be done on your back and proving that the lighter weight classes can be just as big a draw as the heavier fighters. Anderson Silva tops the pile for me because, not only did he change things up, but he did so while winning and dominating the middleweight division for over seven years in a fashion never seen before. The Brazilian was the first to truly highlight how elementary striking was in MMA when he made his UFC debut in 2006 and he then proceeded to use an incredibly languid and fluid style to take advantage of that fact. Many fighters, myself included, invest too much in what works for them but Silva was gifted enough to trust himself to win in so many distinct ways, inspiring other great fighters to try and mimic his spectacular finishes. He never became predictable, and was an expert in using his opponents’ predictability against themselves. In my opinion, the Spider is the main man when it comes to the individuals who have been instrumental in raising standards across the board and making the modern-day UFC fighter a genuine master of all trades.

  I have also been a cageside witness as two phenomena have become the first mixed martial artists to transcend the sport. My commentating trial run at UFC 170 was only Ronda Rousey’s third appearance in the Octagon, but she was already established as a bona fide superstar in American life. Women’s MMA had a couple of big names in Gina Carano and Cristiane ‘Cyborg’ Justino before Ronda, but when Cyborg brutalised MMA’s sweetheart Carano inside a round in 2009, the spectacle turned many fans off. Gina shifted her focus into movies and Cristiane fought only three times in the next three and a half years, so it wasn’t until the Ronda Rousey–Meisha Tate rivalry kicked off in 2012 that the women’s game received the shot in the arm it so badly needed. Unfortunately for Meisha, her arm took a battering in the process as Rousey nearly ripped it off to claim the Strikeforce bantamweight title. I remember watching it and thinking that if Rousey doesn’t bring women to the UFC, then nobody ever will. She burst onto the scene a year later and was just so aggressive
and dominant from the off. In winning her first seven inside a round, and five of those inside sixty seconds, there were echoes of Royce Gracie’s phenomenal dominance back at the outset of the UFC.

  She was untouchable inside the Octagon, but it was what went on outside that made her special. The big thing about Ronda was that she was always so real and it was easy for so many people to connect with her. She reached demographics previously unimaginable for a UFC fighter as, in the only example I can think of, a female athlete who became the first to break through as the trailblazing, mainstream star of a sport. Teenage girls found her inspirational, while soccer moms saw her on Oprah and loved her. The fathers and husbands of that fan base then watched her on Jimmy Kimmel and couldn’t help falling for Rowdy Rousey too, while the established MMA fans simply appreciated what an astonishing fighter she was. She appealed to entire families in a way that had never been done before by any sportsperson, and that is the key to taking over America. Stardom and Hollywood fame may have changed her, I have no idea, but in the early years at least there was absolutely nothing dislikeable in her character. Lacey and I called in to visit her in Venice Beach one day about a month out from a fight and she was sprawled on the sofa in her PJs watching South Park and Pro Wrestling. There was no pretence about her, she was a normal cool person to be around, very girly and a little awkward if anything. It just so happened that she had ready access to a full-reptile switch inside her mind and could maul you as soon as look at you. Millions of women worldwide connected with those two sides of her. Both the insecure teenager getting bullied in school and the woman being belittled by an ignorant boss at work identified with Ronda and wished they could tap into their reptiles as she did. It is impossible to overstate how massive she became in such a short space of time. I remember walking past shops in international airports and if there was a rack of ten magazines, Ronda’s smiling face could easily be on the front of six or seven of them. Little kids all over the world were begging their mums to dress them up as Ronda for fancy dress parties, and the mums couldn’t have been happier to do it. It was all unprecedented for an MMA fighter and, for a year or two, Ronda Rousey basically was the UFC.