by Mark Hunt
Nishijima is a very talented boxer so I ate a lot of punches in that fight, but I gave out even more. He fought like a warrior, but I slowed him down with heavy knees midway through the second round, so with his speed advantage gone, I battered him until he went to the floor after a left hook/straight right combination, and he didn’t get back up.
I was getting a little run together in Pride, feeling like myself again. I was regaining faith in my hands and my ability to drop whomever they put in front of me.
Unbeknown to me, when I’d fought Mirko I was in a title eliminator. Whoever took that fight was to be fighting Fedor for the Pride belt. After the Nishijima fight I was called to a hotel suite, and when I saw the Russian champ coming out of the room as I was about to go in, I started to glean what was going on. I had a little chit-chat with Fedor in the hallway and asked him what they had for me.
He shrugged and said, ‘They had this for me,’ nodding to his bag.
When I got into the room I found Sakakibara-san, a few guys who looked like muscle and a Korean guy who acted like he was in charge. Also in the room was a table struggling under the weight of many giant piles of crisp currency, stacked neatly.
‘How are you, Mark?’ Sakakibara-san asked.
‘I’d be doing better if I had some of that,’ I said, pointing to the table.
‘Do you want some? Would you like us to pay you in cash? We can if you like, Mark.’
No shit. They could have paid me for my next ten fights and it wouldn’t have made a dent in that pile. I declined, though. The Russians all liked to be paid in cash but I figured it would be a pain trying to explain to Aussie Customs why I was bringing a big bag of foreign currency home.
In that hotel room I got a little preview of the future downfall of Pride, but at the time I didn’t concern myself with any of the organisation’s shady, behind-the-scenes dealings. I only concerned myself with the guy in front of me, and in that hotel suite they told me that soon the guy in front of me was going to be exactly the right bloke – the world’s biggest badass. Well, second biggest anyway.
Before that fight Pride also asked me to fight in their first-ever Las Vegas card – part of a planned international expansion – against super heavyweight boxer Eric ‘Butterbean’ Esch. I was more than happy to take the fight. Not only would it get me back to Vegas – a place where I could revel in my sins – but I’d also be fighting a bloke who would almost certainly stand with me.
Sadly visa issues put paid to that fight, with my visa coming through three days after the event. I watched Butterbean quickly finish Sean O’Haire from the third row, with Dana and Lorenzo sitting behind me.
Instead of the Butterbean fight, it was mandated that I should compete in a sixteen-man Pride open weight tournament. I won my first fight, stopping a bloodied but very game Tsuyoshi Kohsaka in the second round, but I put in a pretty sub-par performance in my semifinal against Josh Barnett.
After the Barnett fight I realised how much I still had to learn about professional MMA. I’d never had any problem dispelling fear or anger when I fought – during street fights I’d always fought to win so I fought effectively and dispassionately – and there was no way anyone was going to get me particularly riled or upset in a fight, but Josh managed to get me the other way. He’s a funny dude, and he’d launched a charm arsenal in the lead-up to our fight. During the weigh-ins, during our press calls, even just moments before the bell rang, the jokes came thick and fast – but when the bell rang he was ready to fight and I was not.
That was a short fight. Barnett got on top of me quickly and locked me in a Kimura arm lock in less than five minutes, which forced me to tap or have my arm broken. As I walked back to the lockers I felt embarrassed and inexperienced. I’d slacked off working on my BJJ and ground game, and a bloke I should have knocked off had put me away pretty easily.
The greatest annoyance was I knew what I should have been doing, too. I decided to bring Steve Oliver over to live with me – I thought perhaps if he was hanging around the house I’d be shamed into training. It didn’t work.
Steve is a great bloke and a great trainer, but having another authority figure in my new house wasn’t ideal, especially considering what Steve’s work involved. Like Sam Marsters and my father, Steve was going to be physically dominating me. I was a rich man on a successful MMA run. Having Steve in my home ordering me around just wasn’t going to work.
At the time I believed that if I worked harder I could beat anyone in Pride, but I now realise there was another aspect of professional Japanese MMA that I hadn’t embraced, which probably put me at a disadvantage. When I first met with Sakakibara-san and the Pride officials in Japan after signing my contract they gave me a rundown of the guidelines the company expected me to stay within, but there was no mention of performance-enhancing drugs. When I asked what the story was with PEDs, they laughed uniformly.
‘Mark, you can take whatever you want,’ one of them said.
When I first started kickboxing in Sydney, I’d seen the effects of the anabolic steroid Stanozolol on fighters. Their bodies changed, their power changed, but also their temperaments. I didn’t want to mess with that stuff, mostly because I didn’t think I had to. I never doubted that I had enough power to put anyone away but I thought PEDs could actually affect my timing and my countenance, which might make things harder for me.
Looking at the number of Pride fighters who’ve moved over to the UFC (where there are stricter rules) and either disappeared ignominiously or copped a suspension (or suspensions) for a banned substance, it’s likely that the use of ’roids in Pride was pretty rampant, and there’s little doubt that I fought against juiced opponents. Whatever the case, though, I lost in Pride because I was fucking around, not because I wasn’t on the juice.
It was strange how wild and loose things could be in Japan. I remember one occasion when I’d broken my finger, I put a brace on my hand before I went to get it strapped. The guy who did the strapping – the Japanese version of a commission official – said he wouldn’t strap me with the brace on. I said I wasn’t fighting without it, so there we were, at an impasse. When one of the Pride functionaries who kept things ticking over backstage came and asked if I was ready, I pointed out the impediment.
After a stern word I was strapped, and not just that, while I was walking to the ring I saw the reluctant official getting the shit beaten out of him by some sketchy-looking Japanese gangsters. That’s just how it went at Pride.
My fight against Fedor was atop Pride’s big 2006 NYE card, Pride Shockwave, again with 50,000 in attendance. I dominated the first seven minutes of the fight, which ended up running eight minutes. After clipping Fedor with a left hook in the initial exchanges, the Russian took the fight to the ground where, to everyone including my corner’s surprise, I managed to take the top position. Eventually we got back on our feet before heading back to the ground again, and again I ended up in the advantageous position, going into a side mount.
At that point I’d never won a submission victory in MMA – in fact, I still haven’t – and Fedor had never been submitted, but I tried twice to grab his arm and finish him with an arm lock. I got close, too. I hadn’t really trained on submissions, I’d mostly just worked on escapes, but enough fighters had tried to put me in an arm lock for me to know how it worked. I got the hands in position, locked in his left arm, cranked it and … You know what, nearly getting a submission is like nearly winning the lottery: no one wants to hear about that shit.
I had two sub attempts and no joy – all I had to show for it was fatigue. Fedor dumped me on my back in the eighth minute and I was too shattered to defend myself properly. The Russian locked in his own arm lock and, on the first attempt, got me to tap. If there was one dude who knew how to finish a submission, it was Fedor.
After the fight, discontent set in. I’d lost and even though I was almost universally congratulated, I was embarrassed by how unprepared I’d been. I’d come so close to being recognised
as the best fighter in the world, but I let that opportunity go because I was still being lazy.
I had a talent for scrapping and I’d never been bad with my hands, but that wrestling and BJJ, that stuff is a grind, and I hadn’t embraced it yet. I’d carved out a lot of training time for ground fighting, displacing my striking or fitness stuff, but when the time came for a session I often blew it off, instead playing Counter-Strike or heading to the pub to play the pokies.
There was no other way around it, I’d been an asshole. As is often the case with me, when I’m pissed off with myself it channels itself somewhere – sometimes somewhere good, sometimes somewhere bad. After the Fedor loss I saw there was an opportunity for me to re-focus on my training. Like my first fights with Mirko and Jérôme, a rematch was going to be my motivation.
Fedor and I were among the biggest names in Pride at the time, so I knew our orbits would swing back to meet once again, sooner or later. When that happened, I was taking him out. His number was going to be punched. It was happening. I was going to get on that mat, get on that diet, lace up those running shoes and I was going to knock that big Russian blockhead off those shoulders.
Only that’s not how it went down.
I’d never have that rematch with Fedor, and for a while it looked as though I might never beat anyone again. Trouble was coming, all kinds of trouble. Scandal was coming, and legal issues, and debt, and a forced exclusion from the sport. A baby was coming also, a son. It was the boy Julie and I had always wanted, but he didn’t come into a happy house.
Darkness came over me, and rot. The spectre of my dead father would be cast over my house, and in the chill of his shadow I felt the possibility of my greatest and perhaps only real fear being realised – becoming like my dad.
Chapter 13
TOKYO, JAPAN
2008
I was living with Mark and I was eating what he was eating. Even though I couldn’t get him to train, I was losing all kinds of weight. He hadn’t shed a kilo. I went into his gaming room and said to him, ‘You’re a cheating motherfucker!’ I grabbed the bin and found Twix wrappers and chips wrappers and all kinds of shit. I said, ‘You’ve gotta tidy it up, bro. You’re becoming a joke.’ No matter who you are, on his best day, you’d be doing well to keep up with him, but Mark was just fucking around. He didn’t know yet, but he had a fucking journey ahead of him.
STEVE OLIVER, TRAINER
When I heard rumblings of stories in the Japanese media about links between Pride and the yakuza, I thought nothing of it. I thought everyone knew what was going on – I didn’t think it would be a surprise. I didn’t think it would end up crippling the organisation and sending me into a spiral of debt, idleness and anger.
I never dreamed those media reports would take me to such a dark place. It’s weird to think now that some enterprising Japanese journalism affected my life so significantly.
Let me explain. In professional kakutougi (roughly translated as ‘spectacular combat sports’ and shorthand for organisations like K-1 and Pride), the money was in free-to-air television rights. Not gambling or door tickets or endorsements or pay-per-view subscriptions or anything else, it was free-to-air TV.
The biggest live US television audience the UFC ever had was in 2011, when Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos fought for the heavyweight title in Anaheim, California, on Fox Sports. Around five and a half million viewers tuned in for that fight, but this was less than a third of the number of viewers Fuji TV regularly achieved with their Pride broadcasts.
Factor in the size of the Japanese population and, as a TV product, Pride was as big as baseball or basketball in the US or rugby league in Australia. Like K-1, Pride was a financial juggernaut propelled by a highly lucrative television deal. When that TV deal disappeared Pride was dead in the water.
It wasn’t a lack of popularity that killed the Pride TV deal, but scandal. It all started when the weekly news magazine Shūkan Gendai ran a series of pieces about the ties between Pride’s parent company, Dream Stage Entertainment, and a very powerful yakuza clan named the Yamaguchi-Gumi, which wasn’t just one of the most powerful criminal organisations in Japan, but in the world.
The magazine pieces suggested that until 2003 the clan only had a very minor involvement with Dream Stage, in which they may have been collecting a small ‘tax’ at each event and infrequently arranging favourable outcomes for certain fights. After 2003, however, and specifically after the suspicious death of Naoto Morishita, the president of Dream Stage Entertainment, the magazine claimed that the Yamaguchi-Gumi had cut themselves into the real Pride money, the television money, and had became a partner of, if not the owner of, the organisation.
Shūkan Gendai ran reams of stories about Pride’s supposed links to the yakuza, but the most damning was the reporting of a lawsuit that alleged ex-yakuza fixer and K-1 organiser Seiya Kawamata had been criminally extorted in 2003 by a man named ‘Mr I’ in the presence of a number of men, including Pride boss Sakakibara-san. Yep, the same man I’d threatened to chuck in Sydney Harbour.
This Mr I was later revealed to be Kim Dok-Soo, a man of Korean background who was a former loan shark and a high-ranking member of the Yamaguchi-Gumi. I’d bumped into him a number of times at Pride events and his importance in the organisation was obvious, if not his actual role.
My boys and I called him the ‘Diamond Guy’ because he liked to adorn himself with jewellery, and I remember one instance when I was coming out of a club and some of Mr I’s boys were out the front waiting for him, and looking after a couple of Lamborghinis. Tooks and I were admiring the cars when Mr I came out and said something to his guys.
‘You want to take a car, Hunto-san?’ one of the guys asked.
‘She’s right, mate.’ Nothing’s free in this life.
Sakakibara-san claimed the allegations made by Kawamata-san were false and malicious, but nonetheless the fabric of the organisation began to unravel. Perhaps the last straw was when Shūkan Gendai revealed that Kunio Kiyohara, the Fuji TV producer in charge of the Pride broadcasts, not to mention son of the CEO of Fuji TV’s parent company, was friendly with Yamaguchi-Gumi members and even lived in the same luxury apartment block as Mr I.
In June 2006 a lawyer from Fuji TV handed Sakakibara-san a termination notice, stating that the television company would no longer be showing Pride events. Furthermore, the company’s contracted talent – like myself – were blacklisted and would no longer be welcome on any Fuji TV shows. I remember thinking it was a pity I wouldn’t be able to do those Fuji shows anymore. I enjoyed my TV appearances in Japan, appearing on crazy game shows doing tug-of-war competitions or arm wrestling or whatever.
What I didn’t understand at the time, though, was that this was an existential crisis for Pride. A multi-billion-yen company, Fuji TV was gouging out a cancer as far as they were concerned, and no new free-to-air TV company was going to take on the potential liability of a yakuza-run organisation that had been publicly discredited in the way Pride had.
Pride arranged for their planned events to be shown via pay-per-view, but the revenue from those buys was insignificant compared with the money Fuji TV had been paying them. Dream Stage Entertainment limped on for a few more months (and in those few months, that’s when I fought Fedor) until they were acquired by Zuffa Inc., the parent company that owned the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which had recently (in fact, at the precise moment Sakakibara-san was handed the Fuji TV letter of termination) become the biggest and most profitable MMA organisation in the world.
When the UFC took over Pride I’d just signed a new deal with Pride, which still had a significant number of fights in it. UFC bosses Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White came to Japan and held a large televised media conference in which they announced that Pride would continue to operate as it had been, with the Pride champions sometimes crossing over to fight the UFC champions in what White described as the ‘Super Bowl of combat sports’.
American fans were excited at the
prospect of Pride versus UFC competitions and I was happy to hear business would continue as normal. When I did finally get over Fedor, I was sure I wouldn’t have any problems whupping whoever had the UFC belt at the time.
The Japanese fans, however, knew the prospect was doomed. The only way Pride could continue was with a free-to-air television deal, and there were simply too many impediments for that goal to be achievable.
The UFC planned to retain the managerial structure of Pride and while there was no legal proof of wrongdoings, the management team had lost face after the Shūkan Gendai articles. The overheads of the organisation had also become unmanageable and there were rumours of a great amount of shadowy debt hidden somewhere. Perhaps those issues could have been addressed, but the insurmountable problem was the fact that Pride was now owned by gaijin. After the deal, Pride was seen by the Japanese public only as an arm of the UFC, and they always had far less enthusiasm for American organisations than for homegrown products.
Zuffa finally admitted defeat in late 2007, with Dana declaring he and the company had done everything they could to arrange a new TV deal – but all they’d found was closed doors. They would have to shutter Pride.
While this all went on I proceeded to live as though I was going to earn the same as I had for the previous six years. With no fights on the horizon, my camp disbanded and for a while I stopped training altogether. I started gambling heavily again. There was a pub next to my house with a pokie room and staff who would sort me with free food and drinks, so I put tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars through those machines.
In 2007 I decided to try my hand at promoting. When I signed my first Pride deal they also gave me naming rights to Pride events in Oceania. Even though those rights had now become worthless, I’d always liked the idea of hosting MMA events in Sydney and promoting the sport that had given me so much, so I started an organisation called the Oceania Fighting Championships.