by Mark Hunt
‘Mark, please go with Tarik,’ Ishii-san said to me. ‘It would be in your best interests, trust me. You have signed nothing. You can go with Tarik very easily,’ he said.
That was all true, but my team was my team and I’d given Dixon my word. I knew very little about Japan and Japanese culture, but I did know one thing that might speak to the Japanese men.
‘Mr Ishii, I know you’re trying to look out for my interests, but I gave Dixon my word. I can’t break my word.’
They weren’t happy, but that was the end of the conversation. The next day, Dixon sat down with Ken Imai, Kazuyoshi Ishii’s right-hand man, to hammer out my contract. I really only got one decent concession out of those negotiations – that I would be bound to K-1 for two years, not the five they wanted – but I now know the money was verging on insulting.
K-1 was one of the hottest properties on Japanese TV; tens of millions had watched me win the Grand Prix and I was the new champion, but I ended up signing for US$60,000 a fight.
‘Is this the best contract I can get?’ I asked Dixon after he presented it to me.
‘Mark, that’s as good as it gets.’
I’m not sure what happened with that contract. Maybe the K-1 were still trying to get me to deal with Tarik, or maybe Dixon never had a chance of getting any more than that, but either way I left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table that day – maybe even millions – but I signed anyway. I was still being paid US$60,000 a fight, which was twice as much as most people I knew earned in a year, and I’d just won the biggest single cash payout in kickboxing history. I thought I’d never have to think about money again.
With the contract signed, I had two public appearances to make before I could head home. The first was a photo op with Royce Gracie, the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu scion who had won the first four UFC events.
The UFC was first conceived by Californian ad man Art Davie, screenwriter John Milius and Rorion Gracie, Royce’s brother and eldest son of Hélio Gracie, the originator of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. The idea came to Art Davie after he saw some Gracie family videos, in which it was claimed that their martial art, BJJ, could be overwhelmingly effective against any other martial art discipline, be it boxing, kickboxing, kung fu, tae kwon do, wrestling or savate. Davie proposed an eight-man, full-contact tournament to test that claim. When the Gracie family were brought on board, Rorion chose Royce, the skinniest of the brothers, for the tournament, purportedly because it would look more impressive when the Brazilian finished off the other, much larger fighters.
Royce and the Gracie family had become synonymous with mixed martial arts, with their style of fighting spreading to Japan in 1997 when Rickson Gracie, another of Hélio’s sons, fought famed Japanese wrestler Nobuhiko Takada in the first Pride Fighting Championship, which took place in front of 50,000 people at the Tokyo Dome.
By 2001, K-1 and Pride shared space on the Fuji TV roster, so there I was, being rear-naked choked by a smiling Royce in front of a wall of laughing journalists and flashing cameras. I hated being choked like that, just like I’d hated being grappled into submission by Sam Marsters. The feeling of powerlessness took me back to the house in South Auckland and the overpowering control of the man of the house.
I was more enthusiastic about my second obligation – an ad for Maccas. I don’t know whether they’d arranged the ad because it was me who had taken the Grand Prix and not one of the calorie-counting Euro supermen who normally won, but the Japanese lapped up the image of me with a giant tray of hamburgers and a goofy, excited look on my face.
With all those burgers under my nose, I started to feel the old hunger. I hadn’t exactly lived monastically in the lead-up to the Grand Prix, but I’d limited my vices in a way I never had before, and wouldn’t again until I got to the UFC.
After a short stop in Australia and a few nice, quiet dinners with Julie, I flew to Auckland and went fairly nuts. I was young, rich and ready to party. In Japan I’d become an instant celebrity, with crowds forming as I walked down the street, but in Australia and New Zealand no one besides a small group of dedicated fans knew who I was. I was free to do whatever the hell I wanted.
During that trip to Auckland I mostly lived in hotels; I even had a stint at the penthouse at the Carlton Hotel. I had good times up there, holding court with my mates, racking up on the baby grand piano, before telling the concierge we needed a car to get back down to South Auckland so we could hit the clubs.
Some of my mates were in the same rut I’d left them in, but some had found changes of fortune. My return to NZ coincided with the rise of a new drug that would rot Kiwi brains and teeth for the next decade, which was locally known as P but better known around the world as crystal methamphetamine, or ice. A sugary-looking amphetamine which, when smoked, gives a high that makes cocaine feel like drip coffee, P was starting to bring in serious boom times for some of the shadier characters in Auckland, including a couple of mates of mine – Tommy, an industrious street-level dealer who was working his way up in the drug game, and Porter, who was happy where he was and carried a shitty-looking thirty-eight revolver. As he’d slap it on the counter at the penthouse we’d make endless jokes about it.
‘Bro, the only person in danger with that gun is you. Just sell it and hire Mark. Much more efficient, much more intimidating,’ Tommy said once.
‘He can’t afford me,’ I said.
One night we went to one of my favourite joints down south, a place called Shakers. With an almost exclusively Polynesian crowd, the club was heaving with punters shaking to all the old favourites – Dr Dre, Snoop, Boyz II Men, Aaliyah, Mary J Blige and then … my jam – the LL Cool J song that I’d had playing while I walked into the Tokyo Dome.
I thought about the journey I’d made from Auckland to Sydney to Tokyo. I thought about where I was and where I’d come from. I had a drink. I thought about my family. I had another drink. I thought about my family. I drank some more. I thought about that house, just a short jog from the club, and that old fucking bastard. Then I hit Tommy up for some P and enjoyed the rest of the night, footloose and care-fucking-free.
In the morning, I drove south to where Mum and Dad were living. They were renting a dingy, sparsely appointed apartment, but at least they had a VHS so we could watch my Grand Prix fights. Dad kept pausing the video to point out everything I was doing wrong. I shouldn’t have been dropping my hands. I shouldn’t have stood toe-to-toe with Ray. I really shouldn’t have been smiling in the ring. Every time he pressed the pause button it felt like I was going back in time.
I wanted my parents out of my head. I thought perhaps I’d be able to do that by fulfilling my obligations as a son with some cash, so I’d buy them a place where they could fuck off and leave me alone. My old man pretty much laughed at the first few apartments we viewed. Those places were a vast improvement on what they were then living in, but none of them were good enough. Soon it became apparent that they were only going to accept a house. I went to an estate agent and described what I needed: a nice, stand-alone place with a garden and enough bedrooms for other family members if they needed a place to live. When we found a spot that ticked all the boxes, my parents were still less than impressed. After looking around the place my old man only had one thing to say. ‘Where’s the second floor?’
In Samoan culture there is an obligation to look after your parents as best you can when you grow older and have your own means. In my mind that obligation had been battling with the memories of beatings and rape, but I thought with the purchase of the house I could put the whole mess somewhere over there, inaccessible from the regular mental paths and passages of my everyday life.
I bought the place in cash. I thought I’d done what I had to do. My parents had never had anything in their life, and now I was buying them a loan-free house, a palace compared to where they’d been living. That would do.
As I drove away, I thought that my dad could stay there and rot – which he eventually did – away from me, away from my thought
s and memories. I felt angry and proud, but also sad and belittled. I was a boy again. I was destroyed.
I’m excellent at compartmentalising my life – banishing any thoughts or memories I choose not to have – but it turned out I couldn’t just wash my hands of my dad like that. That bastard was like rotten fish in that regard.
I’d dumped a pile of cash out of my newly bulked-up bank account, and it had given me no real pleasure. I attacked the rest of that money with gusto. If anyone wanted to eat, we ate like sumos; if anyone wanted to drink, the first few dozen rounds were on me. I was also open to business propositions.
I’d been given a Jeep Wrangler after the win, but when one of my friends was trying to shift a late-model BMW I bought it in cash. Dixon tried to remind me that I didn’t need to own two luxury vehicles in a city I didn’t live in, but everything worked itself out when I ended up totalling the Jeep. I left it on the side of the road and went on with my life.
I was a man on a tear. I was in a city that, as a young man, had offered only small channels to live my life in – but now the whole horizon was open to me. I was, once again, susceptible to suggestion.
One of those suggestions was from Tommy, asking if I’d like to buy some P. Not a small, usable amount – a large, sellable amount. Tommy suggested that if I could get twenty grand together, he could help me turn it into sixty grand in a few weeks.
Obviously I didn’t need money, but I wasn’t saying no to very much at the time, so I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it. Let’s sell some crystal meth.’
Thankfully I never ended up selling any of the P. Any decent drug dealer knows you don’t get high on your own supply, but I wasn’t going to be any decent drug dealer.
I had plenty to do at night but little to do during the day, so one morning I started smoking the P, then walked over to the Sky City Casino and sat down at the highest stakes pokie machine I could find. For the next three days my ass rarely left that seat. I took a break only to piss and get stuck back into my giant bag of meth.
I spent twenty grand on the first day, regularly sending my mates off to get more sheaves of cash so I could cram the notes into the mouth of that beast. I blew twenty grand on the second day, too, and by then I was a dribbling automaton, existing just to press that button, over and over and over, and in one drug-buzzed haze I’d pissed away a yearly salary for most of my mates, ending up in the pockets of who-the-hell-knows. On that second day I became obsessed by the jackpot – a slowly increasing number illuminated above the row of machines where I was sitting.
On the third day, a few times my fortunes danced up to the line of success, before retreating and taking with them thousands more dollars. In the afternoon, with at least another twenty grand invested, I won – possibly the worst thing that could have happened to me. The lights lit, the noise sounded and the credits started to tick over – into the hundreds, into the thousands, into the tens of thousands. It wasn’t the jackpot but it was pretty close: I’d won $54,000. Seeing those credits on the machine felt strange. I didn’t feel like I’d won – after all I hadn’t – nor did I feel like I’d lost. As far as I was concerned I didn’t need any cash, I just felt like I had at the end of any other drug-fucked day.
I guess one good take-away from this bender was at the end of the week we’d managed to smoke all of the crystal meth and I wasn’t going to be a drug dealer. When we got to the end of the last bag, I actually felt relieved. Maybe subconsciously that’s why we smoked it all.
Finally the party ended – or more correctly paused – when I had to go to Japan for the first fight of my new contract. I’d be facing Tsuyoshi Nakasako, a journeyman Japanese fighter, atop the card at a smaller annual event in Shizuoka, southwest of Tokyo.
When I went up against Nakasako I hadn’t thrown a punch or raised much of a sweat (except maybe the sweats) since the K-1 victory, and I was heavier than I’d ever been before. I didn’t have any real problems with Nakasako, though I did lean into one of his head kicks and it floored me. That flushed me with embarrassment. I got the finish in that fight near the end of the third round.
I’d taken Tokoa with me again, and after the fight we ended up talking about what life would be like if we didn’t go home. The Japanese loved me – I was treated like a king as soon as I arrived at Narita Aiport. There was no reason not to stay. I had no family I wanted to see, no job outside of throwing leather and more than enough money coming in. The idea was an exciting one, but it also made me feel oddly sad. It took me a little while to realise the thought of leaving Julie was making me melancholy. This realisation was unusual and uplifting, but also terrifying. I’d never been tied to anyone in my life before like this. My mates were my mates, but they’d come and go depending on the circumstances – there was no one else I thought about in the context of years, or maybe a whole lifetime.
When I returned to Sydney, I took Julie out for dinner and told her I wanted to buy a house with her, in Western Sydney. That was her home, and it would be my home. Who knows, maybe we’d even raise some kids in Sydney – some little Samoan–Scottish Australians one day.
It was around this time that Dixon asked me if he could borrow three hundred grand. He’d come across a great business opportunity and was selling a nightclub he owned in England to make it all possible, but the sale of the nightclub wasn’t going through quickly enough to act so he needed a little bridging cash. It was to be a very short term loan, and I had faith in Dixon the businessman. He spoke like a siren, so off the money went, out the door.
Shortly after that, Dixon arranged another fight for me, this time in an event in Nagoya against Cro Cop. This was another fight I barely trained for, and one I got through because of my natural resilience to blunt trauma. Mirko was (and, at the time of writing, is still) famed for his head kicks, saying once in a press conference that his right leg was for putting you in the hospital, but his left leg was for putting you in the cemetery.
In that fight I ate what I reckon was one of the biggest left kicks the Croat ever dished out, and I ate it whole, ducking under a punch that never came, multiplying the force of my movement towards his leg by the velocity of his kick. It didn’t put me in the cemetery but it did send me momentarily unconscious, with my hands raised as I fell.
I got up and continued the fight, but lost on points. The Japanese media went to town over Mirko’s kick. I’d never been dropped in my K-1 career up to that point – I was a juggernaut, the immovable object, always moving forward. That was no longer the case.
When the journalists asked me what was wrong I told them he just got me – more power to Mirko. That was the end of the story. Only it wasn’t the end of the story for me. I knew I was a better fighter than Mirko and I was deeply annoyed at being fat and unfit when I’d rolled into that fight against a quality opponent.
When I returned to Oz I started doing some fitness training but couldn’t get back into striking sessions because I’d aggravated an old hand injury from my street-fighting days. I’d sustained it when a guy I was busting fell into me and was biting chunks out of my stomach and chest. I started throwing punches into the top of this dude’s head until I split my hand between the first and second knuckles, separating the skin and exposing the bone. My hand swelled up in the same place after the Mirko fight and soon it gave me too much grief to punch.
Shortly after I returned from Japan, Dixon called saying that K-1 wanted me to fight again in a couple of months. They were looking for the rubber match between Jérôme Le Banner and me to be the headline for an event they were mounting in the capital of his home nation, France.
I told Dixon I was injured, so they’d have to schedule something for me a little later in the year. Not long afterwards Dixon came to me again, saying Ishii-san really wanted me to take the fight. This was a key event for the company, in a new region, and they very much wanted to have the local hero face off against the man who’d knocked him out in the Grand Prix in which he’d been the heavy favourite to win.
&nbs
p; I told Dixon it didn’t really matter what they wanted, my ass wouldn’t be ready until later in the year. I probably could’ve fought through the hand injury if I absolutely had to, but I’d just taken a fight against a real foe and I’d rolled in fat and unready. I’d rather not do it against Jérôme frickin’ Le Banner.
Two weeks before the Paris event, I was in New Zealand doing fitness training when I got a message from Hape saying he really wanted me to meet him at Dixon’s new house. As I walked through my manager’s place I imagined those cash flow problems he’d been having must have been over, and said as much.
‘Yeah, things are okay,’ he said.
‘Can I get my money back then?’
‘Not just yet. But there is something I have to talk to you about. They still want you to fight Le Banner.’
‘When and where?’
‘Same time, same place.’
Now, I don’t know if he hadn’t told the Japanese I wasn’t fighting, or he hadn’t been telling them with the necessary insistence, but either way I was pissed.
‘I told you Dixon, I can’t. I’m injured.’
‘They wanted me to tell you that if you don’t take this fight they’ll be pretty upset.’
I didn’t want the fight, so I started making demands. ‘Okay, tell them this. I want to fly first class to Paris. Not business, but first. I also want two hundred and fifty grand for the fight.’
It was a number that just popped into my head. I thought I was highballing those guys, but knowing what I do now about K-1 fighters’ pay, I was probably underselling myself.
‘Mate, they won’t go for it,’ Dixon said in a small voice.
‘Mate, then I’m not fucking fighting.’
‘Is that it?’
‘That’s it.’
Dixon went away, presumably to call Ken Imai, and returned with a frown plastered across his face. ‘Well, they’re not going to give you the money. And not just that, if you don’t take the fight your career may be over.’