Born to Fight (8 page)

I was told to go to the office to meet one of the bosses, but I figured I’d be meeting the cops there so I took off. When someone finally found me, it was the boss I was supposed to meet. He told me the bouncer I slugged had been hazing new guys for a while and they weren’t unhappy with the situation.

The Aussie bouncer quit when he heard I wasn’t punished, and I was given more and more work. I worked all across Sydney, in clubs and bars from the outer west to Kings Cross. I also picked up a lot of work at RSLs, and there I developed a very Australian habit, later to become a very Australian addiction.

Over the years I’ve lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the pokies, maybe even more, not to mention losing my mind from time to time. I took to poker machines like a duck to water. I was a kid in a new town, with few friends, no family and a lot of time on my hands. I’m not sure if you can draw a straight line between that feeling of escape I got when I first played video games as a kid, and me slumped on a pokie, pissing away my rent money, but both were similarly seductive.

I don’t know, pokies just made sense to me, like video games had. I understood the parameters. I felt at home when I sat down. The difference between the two, though, was that I could usually stop playing video games when I wanted to. When I was playing video games, if I got hungry, I would eat, thirsty, I would drink; if I got tired, I stopped. That wasn’t the case with the pokies.

I used to think I liked the pokies, but I know now I never liked them. I mean, how could I really like them? They never did anything for me except waste my time and empty my pockets. I don’t know, maybe I did like them at the beginning, but after a few weeks I was just addicted.

Addiction is like a type of current that runs through your body, juicing you up, giving you a buzz, an energy. Energy you end up really loving. The only issue is, this current can’t run under its own power, it can only run
from energy stolen from other parts of your life. That all seems okay at the time – take a little from here, a little from there – everything’s still running fine.

Don’t worry about it. Everything else will work itself out.
You might tell yourself that your addiction is starting to fuck with your life. You’re drinking a bit too much, smoking too much, it’s costing you too much coin. You might say you’ll be paring that shit back – you might even mean it in that moment – but you’ll be back. It’s easy to get angry with an addiction, but it’s pretty hard to stay angry with one. Then, pretty soon, it’s rent day.

I managed to keep up the gigs working doors, but the pokies meant I rarely kept up with the rent. After a few months George got sick of my broke ass and told his brother to kick me out. I had no place to go. I told Dave that, but his hands were tied. I understood; I was a shitty friend. It wasn’t like Dave and his bro were flush with cash either, and someone had to get money to the landlord.

I left George’s place with all that I owned in a bag across my shoulder, and wondered what would happen next. I walked to the local shops and, while people walked past me, I thought about how there was cash in the pockets of every one of those fuckers. There was also cash in every store. If I wanted it, I could just go and grab it.

I looked at an Indian man in his curry shop, stirring some bain-maries of food. I could be in and out of that shop in a flash, and there’d be money in my pockets. I’d been there before and I could easily go there again.

What the fuck did this guy mean to me?
I realised then that he did mean something. Not a lot – I wasn’t yet well practised in the whole empathy thing – but he meant something. He did, and so did all those people walking past. They didn’t deserve me.

I stuck my hands into my pockets and felt coins – two of them. Turns out I wasn’t completely broke: I still had two twenty-cent coins.

I could see a phone booth. I picked up the receiver … who to call? I couldn’t think of anyone. I picked up the
White Pages
, opening it somewhere in the middle, where I found a listing for a halfway house. I phoned them before I knew what I was going to say. It was an Indian dude who answered.

‘Do you have any beds?’

‘Yes we do.’

‘I don’t have any money but … I really need a place to stay. I can give you the money in a week …’

Of course he is going to tell me to go fuck myself. Of course he is
.

‘You can give it in one week?’

‘Yeah man, yeah. A week.’

That was true, or at least it would be true if I could avoid chucking my wages into the pokies before getting them to this guy. He gave me the address and told me to come round when I could.

It was a good moment for me, a learning moment. I know no one ever deserves a medal for just deciding
not
to rob someone, but you have your battles, and I have mine.

I moved around a lot in my first couple of years in Sydney, usually leaving a rent debt in my wake, until I found some digs that suited my station and budget. I’d lived in some shitholes, but this particular place took the urinal cake. A dilapidated, falling-down old warren of peeling paint, suspicious stains and nocturnal noises, the place on Chalmers Street in Surry Hills was almost exclusively populated by junkies, except for me and Dave, who I shared a room with.

There were a lot of cons about living at that place, but the absolute worst thing about it was that even the junkies managed to move on. Not Dave and me, though.

It was while I was living there that I first went back to New Zealand. I thought a trip home might clear my head and give me some relief from the pokies. While I did manage to keep away from gambling while I was there, the old demons returned to haunt me.

I went back to see the girl I’d had a child with – not to see my baby, but for more sex. I drank and smoked, and even did P (crystal meth), which was becoming as popular as rugby in Auckland.

I hit the clubs, places where I used to scrap. On the last night of my trip, my fists flew again, which nearly got me back at The Rock for a long-ass stretch.

We were coming out of a club in South Auckland when it happened. I can’t remember if it was closing time because I was pretty fucked-up by then, but that sounds about right. I remember jostling and shouting – the type that usually fringed a scrap – and I remember surging forward. It had been a while since I’d been in a scrap, and soon I was balls-deep in one. I copped one on the chin then retaliated, and then some. There were a lot of bodies in this fight – maybe dozens – so there was no shortage of people ready to throw their fist at me. When they did, I gave it to them.

The last guy who fronted me was a Pakeha dude. He didn’t hit me, but tried to put me in an armlock. He got the same the rest did. As he fell to the ground, a shitload of police came into view and it seemed that all of them were running for me. As it turned out, a few plain-clothed cops had arrived on the scene to break up the fight, and one of them now lay on the ground doing an inventory of his teeth.

They cuffed me and put me in the back of a car with the cop I’d slugged. As we drove to the lock-up, he relished peppering me with gut punches.

‘You like that, nigger?’ he said as he was getting into my ribs.

‘Come on bro. You can’t just pop up on a brother like that,’ I told him. This only made him angrier and wound him up a little more on the punches. I didn’t blame him at all. I probably would have done the exact same thing if I were a copper.

After I was processed and chucked in a cell, I sat there stewing.
What the hell was wrong with me?
It wasn’t like the old days before I left for Australia. Then I didn’t give a shit what I did, I just acted on impulse, not caring in the slightest about the repercussions. I thought I was done with this stuff, though. Unlike the two previous instances, I really feared another stint in a Kiwi jail.

For the first time in my life I woke up in a cell feeling repentant. When I was called to court, I spoke sincerely with my state-appointed lawyer about how I was trying to mend my ways, and that all I wanted to do was get on my flight, get back to Australia, and stay right.

When that story was related – via my lawyer – to the judge I was amused to find it sounded exactly like the
bullshit I’d spouted in court in previous years. What could I add, that I really meant it now?

The judge spared me, but probably not because he believed my story.

‘When is your flight Mr Hunt?’ he asked.

‘This afternoon, Sir.’

‘Do you promise to be on that flight?’ he asked.

‘Hundred per cent.’

‘OK, you can be Australia’s problem. I’m giving you two years, suspended, but if I ever see you again, you’re doing every single day. I don’t care what happens in Australia, but if you turn up in a New Zealand court again, you’re doing the years. You hear me? Years.’

I thanked the judge, and I meant it. Going straight from the courthouse to the airport, I flew back to Sydney. I felt relief when I touched down. I’d acted like a maniac again in Auckland, but I’d gotten away without any consequences.

Turns out, though, that wasn’t the case. I wouldn’t know for some time, but I was going to be a dad again, a son this time, with the mother being the same girl as last time. I wouldn’t meet him for a few years, but I would fall in love with Caleb, as I have with all my kids, and I’d do anything for him. He’d take my name, and he’d be my son and my mate, and he’d even help me out in my UFC fights. That time was still a few years away, though.

When I got back to Sydney, I realised I needed work that wasn’t ten feet from a row of pokies or with blokes who wanted me to commit armed robberies with them. I pared back my bouncing shifts and took a gig sandblasting, which was easy work but could turn your arms and mind to mush if you did it for too long. The bulk of that sandblasting money still ended up being pissed away on pokies, but I’d like to think the intent meant something.

The big change that would end up shifting my life’s trajectory altogether wasn’t a change of work, but a change of recreation. While we’d been in Sydney Dave had become a big fella. Huge. The guy wasn’t small when we arrived in Australia, but by the time I came back from New Zealand he was enormous. Unless he made some radical changes, he was going to be 200 kilograms pretty soon.

A Kiwi mate of his – a bloke called Denver Matthews – started getting stuck into Dave. He explained to Dave, in no uncertain terms, that he was becoming a giant waste of space. That was no way to live this life and Dave owed it to himself to change things. Denver was no angel, but he was right. If Dave wanted to make a change in his life, Denver said he was happy to help.

‘How are you going to do that?’ Dave asked.

‘Well, if you’re going to be a waste of space, you might as well be a waste of less space,’ Denver said.

Denver suggested Dave should head down to Tony Mundine’s gym, where he was training as a kickboxer. This sounded like it could work for me too. I’d really enjoyed training with Sam, and I thought perhaps a little bit of gym structure could do me good.

Dave and I started a routine, getting up most mornings at dawn, regardless of what had gone on the night before, rolling into the gym and getting in at least an hour’s work to start pretty much every day.

These morning workouts felt good. They also reminded me how much I enjoyed the slap and snap of a fist or foot hitting the bag with power. As I started to get fitter and better, I’d recall that K-1 video, and I’d start to see Hoost or Cikatić at the end of those strikes.

I wasn’t planning on doing anything more in Tony’s gym than keeping myself fit and entertained until, one day, Alex Tui, a guy who worked there noticed me. He was a Tongan in an Aboriginal suburb whom, to this day, you’ll still find at the gym morning and night. He told me he thought I could be a world-beater in the fight game. I wouldn’t believe him until we were in a Japanese stadium, with tens of thousands of fight fans cheering for the latest K-1 acquisition, ‘Marko Hunto’.

They were happy mornings, at the Mundine gym. When I’d arrive in Redfern, the suburb would be cold, dark and silent, but while I pounded away at one of the faded old heavy bags, sweat dropping onto the parquet floor, the sun would start to fill the large windows and I’d hear the sounds of the suburb waking. That place got me going.

Tony Mundine bought it in 1984, the year he retired from a long boxing career. Tony’s idea was that his gym
could be a centre for the inner-city community, not just Aboriginal people – of whom there were plenty nearby as it was smack-bang in the middle of an Aboriginal housing area known as The Block – but people of all races who could benefit from a good workout and the discipline required to stand against another man or woman with your hands raised. His idea wasn’t a million miles away from what Sam Marsters was doing.

Tony Mundine is a legend in Australian boxing circles, but I only knew him as the old man of Anthony ‘Choc’ Mundine, a league player of rare speed and style who used to train alongside me, and who was about to start his own professional fighting career.

I went to Tony’s gym not because of its pedigree, but because it was close, it was easy and cheap – no contracts, no addresses, no premium memberships, it was just a dollar a session, and even when I didn’t have a dollar they’d never turn me away. I also liked it because it was often peppered with Islanders. I always felt more comfortable when there were other Islanders around.

An Islander who was almost always in that place was Alex Tui, a small, wiry, softly spoken man who’d managed the place since the eighties, and still does to this day. You’d never know unless you got him talking – which is no small feat – that Alex is an Australian kickboxing pioneer. One
of the first Australasian fighters to train and compete in Thailand, he held a World Kickboxing Association world title, and, by sheer fate, was the cousin of Lolo Heimuli, the man who’d trained the Sefo and Auimatagi boys back in Auckland.