Born to Fight (18 page)

Well past midnight, the lady at our table started trying to say something to me. She really had something to get off her chest and even though I couldn’t understand her, she was going to get her piece out. When she finished, neither Glenn, Tokoa, Dave nor I had any understanding of what she’d said, but the man she was with apparently did, jumping up furiously and trying to throw his sake at her.

It didn’t land on her, it landed on Tokoa, with the glass also escaping his hand and smashing on the ground. It took about three seconds for the small restaurant to descend into a scene of madness.

Tokoa was battling with the man who’d thrown sake in his face; the chef, who had come out to voice his displeasure over the broken glass, was being ridden like a horse by the man’s wife; Dave was trying to usher me out onto the street; and Glenn was hiding in the toilets.

When the police arrived, the Japanese man who’d thrown the sake had given up on Tokoa and was attacking a cylindrical marble fountain at the entrance of the restaurant, trying to kick it over. Tokoa apparently wasn’t done with him, though, so it was those two who were nabbed and frog-marched out of the restaurant by the cops.

As we walked up the stairs, I whispered to Tokoa, ‘On the count of three, we’ll all scarper up the street.’

There was a slight nod.

‘Okay … one … two …’

Tooks was off, cutting a very wonky line through the Roppongi night, wheezing like the asthmatic he is, with the police in pursuit. It looked like he was going to make it, too, until he ran straight into a light pole.

DOOOOONNNNNNNG

‘You boys go back to the hotel. I’ll sort this out,’ Dave said, hailing us a cab.

As we drove back to the hotel, I couldn’t stop laughing, and I felt energised. All this negotiation and Japanese
double-talk was exhausting, and I actually felt more comfortable where there were fewer rules, rather than more.

I would try out Pride and MMA. I was ready for something new.

When I arrived at the hotel, I got a call from Tokoa asking me to come and pick him up from the police station, as they didn’t believe he was in Japan with me. When we got there, two funny things happened. The first was that we found the woman we’d been drinking with running out of the police station with a sheaf of papers, being hotly pursued by a group of cops like a scene from
Benny Hill
. The second was that Tokoa was released with no charge after I posed for photos with a seemingly endless line of cops.

When we returned home from Japan Glenn was served with a Japanese lawsuit for $750,000 by K-1’s parent company. Even though it seemed the suit had no basis, we’d feared it might have been coming. It wasn’t unusual for such a suit to be issued by a fighting organisation to a truant fighter, as they knew it could lead to an injunction to stop the fighter from fighting (and earning) until the suit was resolved.

It was a standover tactic, a threat. I don’t respond well to threats. I told Glenn to tell the K-1 to go fuck themselves, and I told him to use those exact words. I’m not sure if
he did, but either way, some K-1 representatives turned up in Auckland wishing to speak to him. Glenn took them to Tanuki’s Cave, a Japanese restaurant and sake bar on Queen Street. They tried to get him into their confidence, explaining that he didn’t understand how it all worked, and that things could be very good for him if he arranged for me to sign a new K-1 contract.

I’d never signed any contract with Glenn and therefore he wasn’t really my manager, and even if he was, he certainly wasn’t in a position to give away a couple of hundred grand a fight. He told them that without a huge bump-up in pay there was no way to proceed. That’s when they threatened to bump him off. It was no idle threat, either, but Glenn told them it would probably be easier and safer to survive in Japan with the
yakuza
trying to kill you than it was to try to get me to change my mind when it had been well and truly made up.

A couple of months later Pride invited me to go to Japan to meet people from their organisation and officially sign my contract. When I arrived, they treated me the way I wanted to be treated. The new boss of Pride, Nobuyuki Sakakibara, invited me to dine with him and his lieutenants at a private dining room in some super-fancy hotel in Tokyo. When I arrived in sandals and shorts, the suited
Sakakibara-san didn’t even bat an eyelid, welcoming me warmly and telling me I was now part of his family.

Well, now that we’re family …

‘Are you Japanese mafia or something?’ I asked Sakakibara-san.

There was no answer, but there was a lot of uncomfortable ass-puckering and blank stares. When the conversation finally resumed, Sakakibara-san was at pains to explain that a meeting had taken place between himself and the K-1, and that the lawsuit had been resolved. I was now free to sign without any impediment.

When Glenn said he’d sought legal advice and he was pretty confident he could take this lawsuit on in court and maybe even counter-sue, Sakakibara-san went white.

‘No, no, you must not! This has been resolved. This whole matter has been resolved,’ he said.

That was that. I was a Pride fighter. After signing a four-fight contract, they gave me forty grand to go to California to train with legendary Dutch MMA fighter, former UFC champion and Pride colour commentator Bas Rutten, so I could learn how to fight on the ground. But I couldn’t be bothered to go to California, so I pocketed the money and set out to find someone in New Zealand or Australia who could teach me all this MMA stuff Pride wanted me to know about.

When I got back to Sydney from Japan, a guy I used to play league with named Brendon, who knew I was about to fight in Pride, said I should check out a Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu
(BJJ) competition in Manly. At that tournament I saw a couple of Kiwi kids I knew, Jamie and Tama Te Huna, beasting at this new type of fighting. It was there that I also met BJJ professor Marcelo Rezende, a Brazilian everyone seemed to know and respect, and one of his top black-belt students, Steve Oliver, who to this day is my trainer, and has been one of the most important figures in my fighting career.

I actually thought this kind of fighting was a pile of rubbish – a few good punches and these guys wouldn’t be wriggling around quite so much anymore, grabbing feet and necks and whatnot. I didn’t really respect them.

I was heading back to Auckland for a bit so Brendon suggested I visit Steve Oliver, who ran a martial arts facility there. I weighed more than 140 kilograms at the time, and when I met up with Steve he gave me a good look up and down. Sensing my disdain, he suggested we have a little bit of a throwdown. I had no problem with that idea. Steve weighed just over 90 kilograms and I was confident I could easily handle anything this bloke could throw at me.

I was wrong.

We had a good, hard grind and more than once Steve ended up on top of me, with me unable to do anything about it. When he was on me, he showed me a number of ways a man on top can hurt a man on the bottom – with fists, with feet and with knees, the latter he managed to grind into my face and neck a number of times in that first session.

When I walked away I had a much greater understanding of why so few kickboxers or boxers had ever made a successful transition into MMA. I had my work cut out for me.

Steve was a very good fighter, but he wasn’t Pride good. He was a guy with a gym in the suburbs of Auckland. If he could grind me down, what kind of beating could Fedor give me? As was often the case, I thought about all this intellectually, but not viscerally. I was the best fighter in the world and it didn’t matter what the rules were. I felt confident that I’d figure it all out once I was in the ring. This mantra was stamped across my mind like a brand.

In the lead-up to my first Pride fight, Steve and I flew to Sydney to train with Steve’s professor, Marcelo. It was a hard, draining, confusing grind. I had an instinct for ground fighting, as I’d had a lot of experience with the street version in Auckland – but while my instincts were sometimes right, they were more often wrong. As Marcelo
kept pointing out, the men I’d be fighting in Pride would be the best ground fighters in the world, not big South Auckland thugs. I needed to learn, I needed discipline and I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, Marcelo would say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The more I trained with Steve and Marcelo, the more Hape disliked them. Hape saw me as his guy, and he didn’t want to share. He either couldn’t or wouldn’t understand that if I was going to succeed in Pride, I needed a lot of ground-fighting help.

Over the previous year I’d been feeling increasingly annoyed by Hape’s attitude. He’d been bringing other Australasian fighters to K-1 events with a view to developing a little team, and while I was all for developing the Aussie and Kiwi fight scene, I’d have preferred it not to be while I was paying him. All the little issues started to pile up – per diems, fan gifts that never made it past Hape’s hands, and the final nail in the coffin, finding out that Hape had been planning on training Olympic gold medal judoka and Pride fighter Hidehiko Yoshida in his stand-up fighting. Yoshida was to be my first opponent in Pride.

‘Mark, it’s just business,’ Hape said.

It’s just a conflict of interest, mate.

At the end of 2002 Pride invited me over to Japan to one of their biggest events of the year, Pride Final Conflict, where they were going to announce my signing. I checked in to the hotel as ‘Mr X’ (to keep the integrity of their surprise) and when I was finally brought into the ring and introduced, I saw my fighting future ahead of me.

The Pride-contracted heavyweights were introduced one by one after me, many of whom I would end up facing. When they introduced Russian fighter Fedor Emelianenko, the crowd roared and I could hear Cro Cop, who was standing next to me, muttering to himself. I didn’t know exactly what he was saying – he was probably speaking in Croatian – but I got the gist.

This fucking guy
.

Fedor was obviously the boss, the top of the pile, and Mirko wanted to knock him off it. I instantly wanted the same thing.

At that tournament I also encountered for the first time two American businessmen with whom I’d have my own, very different battles. Their names were Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White, the two executives who now ran the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and they were in attendance because they’d lent one of their top fighters, Chuck Liddell, to Pride so he could compete against Pride favourite Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson.

Fittingly at the time, Liddell was stopped in the second round. It was an eye-opening experience, that night. Those Pride fighters were a completely different breed from the K-1 guys. They just seemed more intense. The fighting also looked very different. I probably understood what was going on in those fights less than most of the people in the crowd did, what with all the technical BJJ and wrestling. Passing guard, full mount, sprawls, arm bars, rear-naked chokes – none of it really meant anything to me yet.

A few months later I returned for my first Pride fight, which was to be part of an event called Critical Countdown at the 50,000-seat Saitama Super Arena. I would end up fighting more than half of my MMA fights at this arena.

In the press conference preceding the fight I was asked how much time I’d had fighting on the ground, and I replied honestly.

‘About eight hours.’

There was a ripple of laughter through the crowd, and also from my fellow fighters up on stage. The one who was really giving out a good old belly laugh was Fedor.

‘It was a good eight hours though,’ I said. That was the moment I realised eight hours probably wasn’t enough.

When Steve, Marcelo and I walked into the Super Arena, I didn’t feel trepidation, I felt the same curiosity I’d felt when I had my first kickboxing fight back at DTMs, and
also when that judge told me I was going away for my first stretch in prison.

‘I wonder,’ I thought as I walked through the crowd. ‘I wonder.’ I honestly didn’t know what to expect.

An Olympic hero, a two-time gold medallist and a guy who was strongest where I was weakest, Yoshida was one of the biggest draws in Pride at that time, and when he came out in his judo
gi
the crowd gave huge cheers. They weren’t silent when I came out in my kickboxing shorts either. Pride didn’t give out charity money.

I was supposed to get a beating that night; it was supposed to be a baptism of fire. That’s how the Japanese liked to do it. That’s how they liked to bring people into the organisation.

After the referee’s instructions we tried to touch gloves, but doing it with these MMA gloves for the first time, I botched it up and we sort of ended up holding hands. I really was as green as a lime spider.

When Goldy and Rogan call UFC fights these days, they sometimes call them ‘striker versus grappler’ contests, usually meaning that the fighters have a preference, rather than a complete disability. Nowadays it’s almost impossible for someone to get into the UFC, let alone the upper echelons, with an almost complete lack of ground-fighting experience.

It wasn’t like that then. I was going into this fight with less ground-fighting experience than most white belts, and Yoshida had more than 1000 judo matches as well as five Pride fights under his black belt.

I wonder. I wonder.

When the bell sounded we danced around for twenty seconds before Yoshida ran in for a single leg takedown. As I went to the ground, I managed to spin the Japanese fighter onto his back. I ended up in Yoshida’s guard, which would be a preferable position for most fighters, but I had no idea where to go from there. Steve and Marcelo were yelling at me, but when I looked over at them in my corner, I couldn’t understand a thing they were saying.

Yoshida locked in one of my arms and it looked like he was going to get me in an arm bar, but I managed, with pure instinct, to get my knee on his face and out of that position. There was more yelling from my corner, but it was like having Ikea instructions read to you in the original Swedish. As it turns out, it’s pretty much impossible to undertake high-level Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu
remotely.