‘That’s the blueprint,’ I told Rebecca when she got in from work. She got it immediately and was on board, even if it meant moving our family to live on a base somewhere in the world. Her father was an ex-serviceman, and he’d left the Australian Air Force with a degree, a pilot’s licence and a secure future.
‘Let’s go for it,’ she said. ‘I’m with you.’
Literally the next day, I was stood in the British Army Recruitment Services office in Blackburn, filling in paperwork to join up.
There are a lot of empty words thrown around – particularly in America – about ‘supporting the troops’ but, having signed my name on those papers, I got a new appreciation for the men and women who volunteer. When I handed my signature over, neither me nor Rebecca had any idea what the next few years would look like – we’d waived all say in where we’d live and how much time we’d be able to spend together.
What our servicemen do is essentially hand our country a blank cheque, to be cashed in at any time, anywhere in the world, for a sum up to and including their lives. It is an incredibly generous thing to do, I realised in that moment, which is why whenever I’ve been asked to visit soldiers the answer has always been ‘yes’.
I was proud of myself. I felt the pride of my family, my dad, my brothers and Rebecca. I had a mission, a purpose, and I began attacking it with a determination I hadn’t felt in a long time. And while I was waiting for the paperwork to come through I pushed myself in weight-lifting, running, and also started training at an amateur boxing club.
Assessing my fitness levels from an athlete’s perspective, the four years away from competition had left me out of shape. I’d made some efforts to trim the beer belly around my waist but, stood next to guys who trained even four times a week, I looked a little soft.
Still, after my first night of sparring, three things were obvious to me:
First, I was still fast. (Faster than these boxers, anyway.)
Second, I was still good. (Good enough for a beginner, anyway.)
And, finally, I had badly, badly missed competition fighting.
This was my direction – the one I was always heading in but didn’t realise it.
I was at the upholstery place, helping Mick and another lad carry a sofa from one side of the workshop to another. Work now had a last-week-of-school feel to it. From my brothers, I knew it would be a matter of days until I was interviewed by the army and then it would be a two-day stay at an assessment centre and, maybe three weeks after that, I’d be ordered to report for basic training.
The army had assigned me a CSM – a Candidate Support Manager – who was my point of contact during the wider enrolment process.
He had my mobile, home and work numbers. He called me at work.
‘Mikey – phone!’ said Mick. I walked over to the phone that was mounted on the wall next to the ladies’ bathroom. There were people using hammers all around me so I pressed the handset hard against my ear and turned my back to the noise. The CSM got right to the point.
‘I regret it is my duty to inform you, you are not a candidate for recruitment into the British Army at this time.’
Wha?
‘Background check …’
Wha— No!
‘… this type of conviction …’
Fuck, no, no, no.
‘… encouraged to reapply in five years.’
No. Please, just … no.
At some point the CSM was gone and I was still pressing the phone against my ear with my back turned to everyone. There were tears in my eyes and I didn’t want anyone to see. I was at rock bottom. I had no options in life. Not even the Army. I was going nowhere. I stood facing the wall and pressing the phone against my ear for over ten minutes. I pretended to talk until the tears were gone.
‘I don’t know what to do next,’ I said to Rebecca at home. ‘The army was Plan B – and they don’t want me. My entire family is in the forces, but they don’t want me. I’ve fucked everything up.’
This was a real low point for me. I felt very sorry for myself and angry against myself. The two emotions would roll together like in a barrel, one was on top, then the other, then the first one would be back and then they’d mix together and I’d feel just … I dunno, despair maybe. I was stuck, trapped. Every negative thought I’d ever had was churned up. Rebecca is too good for me. I don’t deserve to be happy. I didn’t deserve to go to prison. I did it, though. I fucked up and went to prison. I did all this – it is my fault. There’s nothing in front of me but 50 years of dead ends.
Whenever I was at my lowest, Rebecca was at her best. She was amazing; solid as a rock and twice as tough. Let’s go one step at a time, together, she said. As bad as one aspect of my life was, she quickly reminded me that we were lucky in others. We were very happy together in our terraced house in Nelson Street. We had a home, we had each other and we had Callum.
Those doubts and negative thoughts sunk beneath the surface again, and I starting gathering myself to search for something else to do. One night I was on the computer in the kitchen and, as a last resort, I googled Paul Davies’s name. I found he was still lecturing sports science at Nottingham University. There was an email listed and I clicked on it. I poured my heart out a little to my childhood guru.
A week later, Rebecca told me someone was on the phone for me. It was Paul, and it was the most important phone call of my life. We caught up, and he raved about how sad he’d been when I drifted away from competing.
‘You’re still the best fighter I’ve every trained,’ he said. ‘You made a mistake quitting, but it’s not too late. In fact, there’s never been a better time to come back because big things are happening.’
Paul had always said that martial arts would become like boxing – big business and sold-out arenas and TV-rights fees. Kickboxing promoters had been saying that, too, for decades. It never happened. The only ‘fights’ anyone bought a ticket or turned on a TV to see was boxing.
‘Things have changed since you’ve been away from martial arts,’ Paul insisted. ‘It is already happening – just like I said. Have you seen what’s been happening with the UFC in America?’
I hadn’t a clue. Unless the term had been used in the two minutes of that early event I saw, this conversation could literally have been the first time I’d heard the words ‘Ultimate’, ‘Fighting’ and ‘Championship’ strung together in a sentence.
Paul went on for hours, describing this whole other world. The UFC was taking over America, he said, doing pay-per-view events and creating champion millionaires who guest-starred in movies and drove sports cars. It was owned by two of the richest men in the US; a pair of Las Vegas casino owners. It was run by a friend of theirs. And in Japan, the sport of mixed martial arts was even bigger – crowds of 40,000 people and half the country watching on TV.
‘Mixed martial arts is a sport that combines striking and grappling,’ Paul said. Then he paused, dramatically, before adding, ‘I prepared you for a sport which combines striking and grappling since you were six years old! You can kickbox. You know submissions and how to defend submissions. You know elbow strikes. Knees. You have a head-start on most fighters in the UK.’
My head started buzzing with where this was obviously going.
Paul informed me, ‘I’m putting a squad of the best fighters in the country together. I want you on it … if you can still fight?’
‘I can still fight,’ shot out of my mouth.
Paul didn’t take my word for it. He arranged for me to attend a training camp in Wales. I went about my business that weekend like a man possessed. I wasn’t in shape, but I squeezed every drop of effort out of my body. My skills were dull from lack of use, but they were exactly where I’d left them. Paul liked what he saw.
The deal I worked out with Paul was that he’d provide me with food, accommodation and 25 quid towards my petrol money while training me four days a week in Nottingham. I would have to quit my job at the upholstery place, of course, but if I could m
ake it to the top five MMA fighters in the UK, he would pay me a weekly wage.
‘It will take four to six months to get you ready for your first MMA fight,’ he said. ‘I’ll take a percentage of your earnings from fights, but don’t worry, I won’t put you in a pro-fight unless a) you are ready and b) it is for life-changing money!’
It wasn’t boxing but, with respect to Nigel Benn and Frank Bruno, it was better than boxing. I didn’t have to learn a new style of fighting; I’d take the style that I’d used to great success for over a decade and build on its foundation.
Again, the support from my partner was absolute. Rebecca and I sat down with a notepad and figured out a budget. It cut to the bone but it was manageable if I continued to get 200 quid or so cash every weekend. So that was the plan – I’d drive to Nottingham early Monday and train during the week. Then I’d drive home Fridays to be with my family and on Saturday I’d DJ for money.
Rebecca bought me a UFC DVD, Ultimate Submissions. We couldn’t believe the size of the spectacle, the celebrities in the front row. It was all rock music and lights and money. It was a million miles away, in Las Vegas and exotic places with open-top cars and palm trees. It was something I knew I could do.
‘You are going to be great at this,’ Rebecca said. ‘This is what you were supposed to be doing all along. This is the beginning of something big for you.’
I shook my head. ‘For us. I’m doing this for us.’
CHAPTER THREE
THE BEGINNING
Just after teatime on Sunday, 4 January 2004, I threw two bags of clothes, a small mattress and a sleeping bag into my dad’s Peugeot 306 estate. It was bitter cold and dark, and I appreciated him driving me to Nottingham to begin training. ‘It’s been a while since we did this,’ he said.
It had been years.
It was pitch-black down the M1 and there was little traffic all the way to Junction 25. We were on the road to Nottingham, but my real destination was Las Vegas.
Paul Davies was very connected not only in martial arts but with gyms, sports halls and venues. He knew the right people to get a good rate on hiring a sports hall on Nottingham University campus and taught Yawara Ryu jiu-jitsu there on weeknights. I recognised the others there from the training camp I’d attended in Wales. Like me, they stood out in a room full of martial arts hobbyists.
This smaller group also trained together during the day at Sherwood Community Centre, where Davies was well known, and also in a makeshift MMA gym, which was little more than a room with a punching bag and mats set up in an unused space in an industrial unit owned by, you guessed it, someone Paul knew.
My new colleagues included a Thai boxer called Mark Ferron and a hairy-backed heavyweight named Andy Harby, who was at least ten years older than the rest of us but had developed scary physical strength working on the farm he owned. Then there was Freddy, who claimed to be an Olympic wrestler originally from Iran (he was from Iran), a hard-hitting kickboxer, Paul Daley, and finally a prickly 21-year-old local lad named Dan Hardy.
At first glance, I figured Dan was pursuing fighting as just another part of his counter-culture experimentation, like with his tattoos, Eastern philosophy books and punk rock music. In fact, despite having a university place waiting for him, Dan was just as determined to fight as I was. He was also the most talented guy in our team of rivals (except for me, of course, ha!) and was a great partner during those early months of my MMA training.
Davies was a taskmaster as a trainer. I knew that already, but from my first day in Nottingham he worked me like I was a professional athlete and with the expectation I would knuckle down like a pro-athlete. And that’s what I did. Every week was a blur of classes with Paul and our elite group: weight-lifting sessions, submission lessons, cardio training. Afterwards, Paul would take me and occasionally Dan to the specialist stores to get whey protein, creatine, fish oils and other nutrients vital for building the body of a professional fighter. He was light years ahead of the game in terms of nutrition and strength and conditioning.
‘You can’t out-exercise a poor diet,’ he’d say over and over.
We did pad work together but much of my striking practice was done at a boxing gym twice a week and a Thai boxing club, both in Nottingham and on the schedule Paul had packed back-to-back for me. It was a crash course; I was getting information dumped into me like a first-year law student. This sport wasn’t fully formed. We were all pioneers, making shit up as we went along, cobbling together drills from trial and error and copying techniques we’d seen on UFC tapes or instructional videos mail-ordered from America.
And I absolutely loved it. I was happier than I’d ever been in any job I’d had. I felt fulfilled. MMA was strategic, athletic and it required strength, speed, stamina and – most of all – imagination. There were infinite ways to combine the martial arts forms – grappling, striking and wrestling – and the most unexpected amalgamations, the fastest transitions from one to the other, were what separated tough-guy ‘cage fighters’ from a true mixed martial artist.
Spending so much time away from my family was very tough, though. Paul set me up with a job as a lifeguard at a local swimming baths but I quit after a day of learning CPR. I made better money DJing and if I wasn’t training, I wanted to be with my family.
Paul would use his contacts to either bring in or have us travel to train with combat sports specialists. When he did, he’d always seek to test my progress with these little challenges: like, one day, he offered me an extra 50 quid if I could last ten minutes grappling with four-time BJJ world champion Braulio Estima (he got me just after nine minutes, dammit).
As much as I loved the training in the days, I sort of dreaded the evenings. My accommodation from Monday nights to Friday mornings was a sleeping bag laid out in the living room of, all together now, some bloke Paul knew. Where Paul had met this guy … I couldn’t begin to guess. It wasn’t from martial arts or fitness training, that’s for sure.
My host was about 32, nerdy and dressed as though his mum still had the final say on what clothes he bought. He was monosyllabic and made zero effort to make me feel welcome. Any attempt by me to make conversation was met with an exasperated gesture towards the always-on TV and two words: ‘Watching telly!’
That fucking TV was on until at least midnight – every single night – and I was supposed to sleep in that very same room. My sleeping bag was rolled out in a crawl space behind a wooden cabinet. Getting any rest was impossible.
Proving the theory that there’s someone out there for everyone, my host had a girlfriend. On the nights she visited I had two of them telling me ‘Shhh! Watching telly!’ if I made a sound from my cubby-hole. I felt like a red-headed step-child.
These were the strangest humans I’d ever come across. The only thing worse than getting shushed by them (‘Shhhh! Telly!’) was getting falsely accused of the most mental of transgressions.
A lot of the time, I had my evening meals at Paul’s house. It was awkward, gate-crashing his family’s evenings together. Whenever I had some spare money from DJing at the weekends, I’d treat myself to a room in a twenty-quid-a-night B&B. I also started sleeping in my car – a banged up Volvo that Paul loaned me – outside the Sherwood Leisure Centre; anything but stay in that room with that TV.
There was a snowstorm one of those nights. The swirling flakes were orange in the street lamppost’s light, and when they began sticking to the windscreen the temperature in the car plummeted.
I reclined the seat as far as it would go and climbed into my sleeping bag (I may have left my trainers on, it was that bloody cold). The palm trees and flashing lights of a big fight day in Las Vegas felt a like a long way away at that moment, but I had no doubt this was the path I was supposed to be on.
That’s when Rebecca called. Another bill had come in. We’d already borrowed money from our parents.
‘We will be okay,’ I said. ‘I’m going to book a fight. I’m going to tell Paul tomorrow that – fuck more training –
I’m ready to fight. Time to earn some money from the sport.’
I got paid literally nothing for my first professional fight.
No, that’s not quite right. When I fought Steve Mathews on 10 April 2004, I actually paid the promoter 25 quid because – despite me bringing over 40 family and friends up to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the promoter wouldn’t comp me a single ticket for Rebecca.
The cheap so-and-so in question was a promoter/fighter/referee/MC named Ian Freeman. Freeman, I’d learned by now, was British MMA royalty.
Known as ‘The Machine’, the sawn-off Sunderland heavyweight had turned professional before there really was a profession. In the 1990s Ian had gotten hold of early UFC and PRIDE FC videotapes and, God knows what possessed him, off he flew to cramped dojos in Tokyo and sweatboxes in the United States to learn ground-fighting. In March 2000 Freeman became the first Brit to compete in the UFC – but his legacy is more than just the answer to a trivia question.
When the UFC first brought the Octagon to the UK in the summer of 2002, Freeman stood in front of the Fleet Street press as a passionate advocate for the sport. Then, in the most publicised fight on the 13 July UFC 38 event at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Freeman wrecked the undefeated reputation of heavyweight-champ-in-waiting Frank Mir.
It was the first major British success in the UFC. What’s so heart-breaking about it is when Ian got back to the dressing room; he was informed his father had passed away two days before. As a former boxer himself, his dad’s dying wish was that no one say a word to Ian, so he could fight his best.
Like all British fighters who followed him should, I tip my hat to the Machine … even though he paid me fuck-all for my first fight. Ha!
A few days before my pro-debut in Newcastle, Davies informed me that there wouldn’t actually be any pay.
‘That is … not life-changing money,’ I said.
‘Let’s just get the ball rolling,’ Davies answered. ‘Freeman’s well known and a lot of the bigger promoters attend his shows. This is a chance to get your name out into the British MMA community.’
Quitters Never Win Page 5