Quitters Never Win

by Michael Bisping

  That’s how my first year as a mixed martial artist ended, 5–0, with all five wins coming inside the distance. I’d not seen any life-changing money yet, but everything else Paul Davies had predicted before the previous Christmas was coming true. I now looked and felt like a real professional athlete. I had miles to go in terms of development, but at least I knew I was on the right road. I couldn’t wait for 2005.

  My left leg took a while to heal from the leg kicks. I watched the Epstein rematch back on tape TV over and over, partly because it was cool seeing myself on a Sky Sports broadcast but mainly because this was my first opportunity to take a detailed inventory of my progress as a mixed martial artist.

  Each time I put the DVD in, I underlined the same conclusion in my mental notebook: I needed to improve my defence against leg kicks.

  ‘We got to get you to Thailand,’ Paul said. ‘That’s where the best strikers in the world are. That’s where you are going next.’

  The hotel I stayed in when I arrived two weeks later in the Ramkhamhaeng region of Thailand was next to a river that churned up the stench of human faeces whenever motor boats went by. There are many incredibly nice parts of Thailand – this wasn’t one of them.

  My small room had a low-laying bed, a table, a light bulb hanging by a wire and a tiny bathroom with bright blue tiles. All 12 square feet of it was infested with unreasonably sized insects. These bugs looked at you with eyes that took up half of each side of their face while waving these antennae around in the air as if they planned to lasso you. Some of these creeps had bodies the size of rounders bats. My skin crawled at the first sight of them but by the second week I was brushing them off my toothpaste in the morning like it was normal.

  Thai food has become one of my favourites, but back then my palate hadn’t travelled too far outside of England. I was okay eating dishes made with rice and eggs but I steered well clear of the food I dubbed ‘dead things in water’. Some of the local favourites were dead scorpions in water, dead toads in water and – for snobs who insisted in messing around with a classic – dead spiders floating on water.

  The training I received at a hardcore traditional Thai boxing gym made it all worthwhile. At first the trainers treated me like just another martial arts tourist acting out his Jean-Claude Van Damme fantasies, but after a day or so they realised this farang (‘person from the white race’) was actually a genuine fighter. From then on, the training they gave me was amazing.

  The gym was exactly how Van Damme’s movies portrayed, a huge space where 40 or 50 leather-skinned Thais sparred and whipped their shins into rows of sun-bleached heavy bags.

  While other traditional martial arts had grown overly codified and isolated in their dojos, the techniques used in Muay Thai (literally ‘boxing from Thailand’) had been continuously sharpened in actual combat for at least 300 years. Thai fighters were typically trained from a young age, drilling twice a day – morning and evening – to avoid the worst of the wet heat. Unless the event was rained off, there were fights almost every day in the major towns. It was literally everyday entertainment, a place to go and gamble like people in England go to the bookies. Boxing-style gloves were only introduced in the twentieth century, although the bareknuckle variety was still widely practised just across the western border in Myanmar as Lethwei.

  Having been accepted by the coaches and fighters, I began making significant progress not just on defending and countering leg kicks, but also everything else I could take from these masters of the ‘Art of the Eight Limbs’.

  Nobody spoke much English – not the fighters, the trainers or even the hotel staff – so I spent a lot of time inside my own head, reflecting on these people who had quickly accepted me into their community. I was impossibly wealthy in comparison to all of them. I was training so I could fight to get a bigger house, a better car and a better future for myself and my family. These guys kicking the bag next to me were fighting literally to win enough prize money to eat, to provide one meal for a loved one or maybe put a roof over their heads before the rainy season struck.

  I’m sorry that I don’t know their names to put down in this book. Thai names are hard to pronounce and even harder to spell. I do know I left Thailand a better fighter and humbled by the experience. Every young fighter should travel to Thailand and learn from these people. When I got home, I couldn’t wait to use my new armaments. I took a K-1 rules kickboxing fight and a cage kickboxing bout and won them both by knockout.

  My sixth MMA fight came in the Cage Warriors promotion on 30 April 2005. They, too, had created a light heavyweight championship and invited me to compete for it at their event at the Xscape Centre, Castleford. Opposing me for the inaugural title would be 35-year-old boxer Dave Radford.

  Radford had once fought legendary boxer Roberto Duran on a few hours’ notice. His eyes and cheeks were permanently puffy from years of bareknuckle fights. He was obviously a tough bastard. What he was not was a mixed martial artist. I knocked him out in 2 minutes and 46 seconds.

  As the champion of Cage Rage and Cage Warriors, it was getting harder for the naysayers to deny I was the best light heavyweight fighter in Britain.

  Paul casually mentioned to me that he’d been offered a good opportunity in sports science in New Zealand that he intended to pursue. He began selling the idea of me moving down there with him. I didn’t know what to say. I still had this student/master relationship with him, just like I had since I was eight years old, so didn’t feel it was appropriate to point out that I had a family, was the champion of several UK-based promotions and that there was no MMA scene at all in New Zealand. I found it easier to say, ‘I’ll talk to Rebecca about it,’ rather than give him the obvious ‘no’.

  I knew something had to change but I was looking for Paul – my mentor and the man who had a sixth sense about martial arts – to suggest what that looked like.

  Instead, a way forward sort of presented itself. There was a thread on the CageWarriors.com forum from a big new gym in Liverpool asking for sparring partners. ‘Big guys only need apply’ was written at the bottom of the post.

  They replied to my message quickly and I drove down towards Liverpool a few days later. The building the new gym was housed in was a bland factory unit on an industrial estate directly next to the M62. Its windows were shuttered in metal and the painted door, reinforced with metal plating, looked like it could keep Robocop out.

  I stepped inside and to the immediate left a door was open to a makeshift office. I introduced myself to the woman in there and said I was here for the sparring. Within a few minutes I had met Tony Quigley, a Sherman tank of a man with ginger hair and a well-groomed beard (also ginger). He was the boxing coach and I liked him immediately. He showed me the changing room opposite the office and, when I was gloved up, he took me into the gym to get warmed up.

  The gym space was basically a 4,000-square-foot cube with training mats on the ground. A row of heavy bags hung from brackets in the wall on the right, and behind and to the left was a lonely weights bench and a few barbells. Music with a little too much bass was getting forced though stereo speakers mounted here and there. At the far side of the gym there was a decent-sized cage and full-sized boxing ring. The cage and ring were packed tightly next to each other. That far-left corner that the cage was pressed against had a rolling shutter door, a reminder this building had once been used as a sausage factory.

  The place was one of the best-equipped MMA facilities in the UK, but in 2005 that was a pretty low bar to clear. The sparring I was there for was against an undefeated Brazilian super-heavyweight named Antonio Silva, a karateka and judoka whose size had, inevitably, resulted in him earning the name ‘Bigfoot’.

  Sharing a cage with the 6ft 6in, 20-stone future UFC heavyweight title challenger wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience, but by then I had mad cardio and I’d always been a scrapper. I’d barely made the drive back home when the owner of the gym called me up. The charm offensive that came down that phone would have m
ade Pepé Le Pew blush, if only he could have understood the thickest Scouse accent I’d ever heard.

  There were appeals to my patriotism – did I want to be the British fighter who went on to fight and beat the Brazilians and Americans? There were appeals to my ego – I’m already the best in the UK, with better regular sparring I would be the best in the world. And, finally, an appeal to my wallet and common sense – did I really like being away from my family all week, sleeping in my car and on sofas? Wouldn’t it be better to drive to this gym in the morning and be home in time to see my kids before they were in bed?

  He also slipped in enough seemingly random information about his other businesses for me to receive the impression he was both a successful businessman and a passionate investor in the future of MMA.

  What the Liverpool gym offered was a one-stop shop for all my training. After more than a year of ploughing up and down motorways going from gym to dojo, the idea of having boxing, kickboxing, grappling, a cage to practise in and quality sparring all in one place was very appealing. Especially as not only Freeman, but also Hardy and Daley were gone from the roster of training partners in Nottingham.

  It turned out Hardy leaving (and Daley following him) had been on the cards since the moment I’d begun training in Nottingham. Dan is a smart guy with a lot of pride and, unbeknown to me, before I’d even arrived for my first training session with them, Paul Davies had been sermonising to all his students that ‘the most naturally talented fighter in the country’ would soon be joining them ‘as the leader of the team’.

  To their credit, none of them blamed me personally, but they all must have been pissed off that I got the lion’s share of Davies’s tuition. (I found a similar situation during The Ultimate Fighter season three infuriating – and said so after about one week.) Eventually, Dan had enough and informed Paul that he and Daley were moving on to train elsewhere.

  Davies called up everyone in his extensive contacts book and told them not to train with Hardy or Daley. He infamously used the phrase that they’d been ‘outlawed’. Hilariously, and so typical of him, Hardy adopted it as his official nickname as a ‘fuck you’ to Paul. Dan ‘The Outlaw’ Hardy would go all the way to challenge for a UFC world title while Paul ‘Semtex’ Daley would also fight in the UFC and other top promotions in the US.

  I had no intention of leaving Paul – but I did need more training and better sparring than he could provide in Nottingham for now. Especially with his looming emigration to the other side of the planet, something had to change now. Basing my training in Liverpool seemed like the obvious move, and Davies was open to the idea. He drove up to see the gym, met the coaches and from there we all sat down together and worked out an arrangement. I’d train day-to-day in Liverpool, but Paul would still be the head coach and the Liverpool gym and Paul would split the commission.

  ‘I’ll still be your manager and coach, though,’ Paul warned. ‘I will still be in regular contact checking on your progress and you’ll adhere to my training methods on a day-to-day basis. I will email you your workout regimes and what you are to do. Follow those instructions exactly. I will also be your chief cornerman during all your fights.’

  As has been reported in the media, the relationship with the Liverpool gym ended bitterly and with lawsuits. I’ve no wish to be associated with these people, who I mistakenly trusted with managing my career from late 2005 to 2011. Nor do I want to give them undue credit for my success as a mixed martial artist. So, you’ll have to forgive me when I refer to the gym and the owners/management generically.

  There was a honeymoon period in Liverpool, for sure. Some of the coaches were glorified pad holders, but Tony Quigley was an outstanding boxing coach. When the place was full it was good training, especially as I had the chance to spar and roll with several different professional-level mixed martial artists and had a cage to practise in. I’d already met Bigfoot, of course, and there were several other Brazilians who lived and trained in the gym including José Nindo, Choco Nogueira and Mario ‘Sukata’ Neto. The character member of the place, and someone I immediately liked, was a chubby, freckled Scouser with a wicked sense of humour named Paul Kelly.

  It was a relief to be able to spend less time on the motorway and more time with my kids, but I quickly noted the disconnect between what I’d been told the Liverpool gym would be and what it was in reality. For example, one of the resident coaches spent most of his time sat down reading newspapers.

  One morning I saw him roll and do a superb escape and sweep. When I asked him to show me how to do it later that morning, he point-blank refused.

  ‘You don’t pay me,’ he said, picking up his newspaper.

  ‘But, the gym takes a percentage from my purses and sponsors,’ I said. ‘Then the gym pays you from that.’

  He shook his head and mumbled something. He never showed me that sweep and this was one of many issues I encountered while training at this place. On more than one occasion, I’d make the hour-plus drive from home only to be told (in person or by an unopened metal door) that the gym was closed for the day. There were many other occasions where I’d be the only guy working out, my punches on the heavy bag sending echoes around an empty gym.

  Nevertheless, Liverpool was a better option than Nottingham.

  Maybe we were both naive thinking the physical distance wouldn’t result in an emotional distance, too, but my relationship with Paul Davies began to decline. That was really difficult for me. I’d looked up to Paul since I was a child. I don’t want to use the word ‘love’ because that’s not quite it, but I had a ton of respect for him. I wanted him to be proud of me and to reward his belief in me.

  We should have had a proper adult conversation about it – especially about the whole moving to New Zealand thing – but I was young, inexperienced in managing my own career and deferential to Paul. To be fair to Paul, I think maybe he felt he was losing me to the Liverpool people and didn’t want to come out and have the talk we needed to have. Instead, we kept up a forced politeness as things became more and more tense.

  I was getting dismayed by the lack of support during fight weeks. I was left to do my weight-cut and travel to whatever town I was competing in by myself. I wouldn’t see Paul until a few hours before I actually fought.

  Things came to a bit of a head for my 18 June challenge for Alex Cook’s FX3 organisational title on a show in Reading. Not knowing any better – and with no one to teach me any better – I did the weight-cut at home in Clitheroe and then made the drive to Reading for the weigh-in by myself. Anyone who knows anything about weight-making will understand how crazy it was for me to get behind the wheel of a car at all, much less for a six-hour drive down the M6.

  Back then, my week-to-week weight hovered around 15 stone. I would then subject my body to a combination of extreme sweating and starvation, dehydrating it until I weighed the 14st 4lb maximum allowed for light heavyweights. The dehydration plays havoc with body and mind.

  I was so weight-drained during the six-hour drive I actually slammed on the brakes on the M6 to avoid a pack of dogs I hallucinated. I shudder at the memory.

  I weighed in, ate alone and went to bed in the Reading hotel. The next day I ate breakfast and a light lunch alone too. Neither Paul nor the Liverpool group were anywhere to be seen. Finally, about an hour before I was due to travel to the fight venue in the late afternoon, I clocked Paul sipping a pint at the bar with a random mate.

  ‘You got handwraps?’ Paul asked me.

  No, I hadn’t brought handwraps. I easily could have but that wasn’t how we’d operated for the previous six fights. Our separation of responsibilities placed Paul, as head coach, in charge of my training and equipment needs.

  I said, ‘Sorry, I didn’t think I needed to bring any.’

  ‘It’s okay, I forgot to bring any with me also. Don’t worry – I’ll go speak to the front desk. They’ll have some sort of bandages in the hotel’s first-aid kit.’

  Wrapping hands in combat sports is an
art form. Like the gloves used in boxing, kickboxing or MMA, the purpose of the wraps is to protect your hands, not your opponent’s face. With the fingerless style of gloves used in MMA weighing only 4 ounces, there’s only so much wrapping that is allowed or even practical but all 27 bones in your hand have to be equally well fortified. Damage to any one of them renders a pro-fighter unable to use one of his main weapons during a fight and, if the injury is serious, potentially unable to work.

  With only cheap first-aid bandages available I asked Tony Quigley, who’d bound thousands of fists in his boxing career, to wrap my hands once we got to the fight venue. That pushed Paul further into a dark mood in the dressing room, but I had a fight to win. Paul’s ego wasn’t something I had the luxury of worrying about at that time.

  I beat Alex Cook in 3 minutes 21 seconds of the first round. I softened him up with strikes and then choked him to take the FX3 light heavyweight title. It was my third championship belt in my short MMA career.

  The win didn’t cheer Paul up. I’d looked up to this man since I was eight years old but it was now impossible to ignore the fact that, visionary though he was, Paul was learning about professional combat sports just like I was.

  My first defence of my Cage Warriors title was up next, less than a month later in Coventry. The opponent was Miika Mehmet, a polar-bear-sized European buzzcut. A few weeks before the 16 July 2005 event, Paul called, insisting I drive down to see him.

  I drove the familiar M62–M1 route from Clitheroe to Nottingham without nostalgia. When I pulled up outside Paul’s semi-detached house, he was in the front window waiting for me. His family was out somewhere. My childhood mentor and I spoke over his kitchen table. He got right into why we couldn’t have had this conversation over the phone.