At that point they turned on me. They held me down and beat me up quite badly. I still remember hearing my girlfriend’s screams as they smashed my face into the cold concrete. I was hit by a brick at one point and they even tried to throw me in front of a bus.
Thankfully we got away when my friend Kevin McGinley – who had left the bar after us – came up the road, saw what was happening and bulldozed in to give me some help. We managed to make our way to the police station nearby. I was in a bad way – unrecognizable; I later learned that my orbital socket and my cheekbone had both been broken – but the police just thought I was some scumbag who had been up to no good and they kicked me out of the station. My girlfriend and I got a taxi home.
My parents were going away for the weekend. My mam popped her head around the door the following morning and said, ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’ I just hid my face under the covers and mumbled, ‘I’ll see you then.’ Those guys had done so much damage that I looked like the Elephant Man, and I didn’t want her to see it.
The physical wounds mostly healed after a few days, but it was a long time before I was right mentally. Being beaten up in front of a girlfriend is a big fear for a lot of young men. It’s very demeaning. It makes you feel completely worthless. I suppose there’s that romantic fantasy of beating up the bad guys and walking away with the girl on your arm.
I was really embarrassed in front of her parents when I saw them for the first time after the incident, but they were great about it. When her father saw me he gave me a hug and told me that I had done the right thing. I was mainly glad that nothing had happened to my girlfriend, because that would have destroyed me.
For about a year after that I barely left the house. I went into a depression and was in a constant state of fear. Whenever I did go out, I was always looking over my shoulder in case somebody attacked me from behind. By the time that incident took place I had started to trail away from karate. I had been an All-Ireland champion, but what was that really worth if I was incapable of defending myself? I gradually resolved that if I ever found myself in that kind of situation again, I needed to know how to get myself out of it.
2
Geoff Thompson entered my life at just the right time. I first came across him in Martial Arts Illustrated magazine, which I read every month. He was an English doorman who’d recently published the first of what would become a number of books about self-defence and life working on the doors of bars and nightclubs. He had a background in karate, but pure karate wasn’t really working for him, so he had to develop a more effective system of defence. I couldn’t get enough of what Geoff had to say and I studied his writings meticulously. I attended some of Geoff’s seminars, mostly in the UK. He and I then started a correspondence. He was the first person to whom I ever spoke openly about being terrified. That was one of the key principles with him: that it was okay to be afraid. He was an intimidating guy to look at, whereas I thought I was a wimp who just didn’t have it in him to stand up to people.
I learned a couple of important things from Geoff when it came to technique and body language, particularly his concept of the ‘fence’. This involved putting your palms out in front of you, facing forward, in order to force a potential attacker to keep his distance. Using your hands like that didn’t send the same aggressive message as clenching them, but it let the other person know that you were ready to repel an attack. Geoff’s theory was that if a person made contact with the fence more than once, then it was time for you to make a move.
However, the primary thing I took away from working with Geoff was an understanding of fear and how to handle it. Fear was the main reason I thought I was unable to fight. In my mind, anybody who felt fear – like me – was a coward. And I assumed that big, strong, tough men like my dad and Geoff Thompson never experienced fear like I did. Geoff taught me how wrong I was. Fear was familiar to him too, but he explained that experiencing fear before a confrontation is the body’s way of releasing adrenaline in anticipation of the conflict. Those feelings of weakness in my arms and legs were completely normal, he said. My body was simply preparing itself.
Some friends and I got together and organized our own self-defence classes in the hall at my old secondary school in Rathfarnham. Just a small group of us on some padded mats, with myself as the instructor – my first coaching role, I suppose – based on what I’d been learning from Geoff Thompson, with some karate and fitness stuff thrown in as well. It was a weird concoction of lots of different things, but we generally tried to recreate an altercation on the street – using stuff like the fence, as well as some basic grappling techniques and headlocks I had picked up from Geoff. It was very much novice stuff, but we were enjoying it and, most importantly, I felt I was developing a greater understanding of how to defend myself.
In late 1996, shortly before my twentieth birthday, I was hanging around in town one Friday afternoon with a friend of mine, Robbie Byrne, when we decided to head to Laser video store on George’s Street. I loved that shop: they had a great selection of really obscure videos that you didn’t find anywhere else. While we were browsing, I came across a video of what appeared to be some sort of crazy martial arts movie. A bunch of guys taking each other on in no-holds-barred fighting inside a cage. This can’t be real, I thought. But I was intrigued nevertheless. Robbie and I went back to my place that evening with our newly acquired rental copy of Ultimate Fighting Championship: The Beginning.
It turned out to be a documentary marking the birth in 1993 of what is now the dominant organization in the sport of mixed martial arts – the UFC. When Robbie and I discovered the video, very few people – especially in Ireland – had heard of the sport. The inaugural UFC event had taken place on 12 November 1993 in front of just over 7,000 people in an arena in Denver, Colorado. Nowadays, over 350 events later, the UFC is a slick production with no expense spared, and the contests are governed by a strict set of rules. But for that inaugural show, there was simply an eight-sided cage in the centre of a dimly lit arena. As long as the fighters didn’t bite or eye-gouge, they could do as they wished.
The concept of the event was that eight fighters from a variety of fighting disciplines would compete in a knockout-tournament format. There were no weight classes, and as I watched the video the first thing that struck me was that one of the fighters, a Brazilian guy, was quite a bit smaller than the others. His name was Royce Gracie. He didn’t look particularly intimidating or athletic, and with his size disadvantage Robbie and I assumed he’d be eliminated pretty quickly. In a bare-knuckle fight, size meant everything … or so we thought.
Robbie and I sat in my living room watching in awe as Royce defeated all three of his opponents – Art Jimmerson, Ken Shamrock and Gerard Gordeau – to be the last man standing. He simply took them down and used his jiu-jitsu technique to force them to submit to chokes. The three fights lasted under five minutes combined. I was blown away by what Royce had done. Absolutely astonished. This little guy had the courage to step into a cage with these monstrous opponents and seconds later he had them begging for mercy.
I barely slept that night. I couldn’t get what Royce Gracie had been able to do out of my head. As a small kid who had been bullied by others who were bigger and older, it really resonated with me. It might sound a little bit ridiculous, but I was close to tears. There was a sense of relief too, as if a lightbulb had been switched on inside my head. Royce seemed like a quiet, gentle guy. He came from a background in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a form of grappling – something I had never heard of before.
I thought, If Royce Gracie can do that, why can’t I? These were physical moves he was demonstrating, not magic tricks. It was all about technique. Physical strength and aggression didn’t really come into it, which was a good thing for me because I had neither at the time. For a long time I had hoped that martial arts could be a vehicle for defending yourself against someone bigger than you, but this was the first time I had actually seen it being done. This was possible. These techniqu
es allowed you to overcome opponents swiftly and effectively, and without having to injure them, which was also a significant part of the attraction.
The following morning, when we met up for our self-defence class in De La Salle, instead of doing push-ups and pad work we were rolling around the floor trying to work out how to choke each other. I had no idea how or where, but I knew I had to find someone to teach me how to do the things I’d seen Royce Gracie do.
There was nobody practising Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or BJJ, in Ireland in 1996, so I had to expand my search. I found out that Geoff Thompson had actually travelled to the USA and done some training with members of the Gracie family – a dynasty that dated back to the origins of BJJ in the early twentieth century. Geoff also demonstrated a few grappling sequences in MAI magazine; when first I came across these pieces, I didn’t even realize that the methods he was demonstrating came from BJJ. I cut out all his articles and organized them into a file. I kept separate folders for each element – armbars, chokes, escapes and so on. I consumed as much information as I could from other magazines, books and videos. It all went into those folders, which soon became the basis of our classes. Before I showed the techniques to everyone in the training group, I practised them on my mother and my brother. Needless to say, there was a lot of trial and error involved.
The classes eventually moved to the Educate Together school on Loreto Avenue – which was where I’d gone to primary school. Even though I was still just in my early twenties, things got more serious and the classes became quite popular. I was teaching several times a week, a mixture of kick-boxing and grappling, despite the fact that I was still figuring it out myself.
Although the classes were progressing and my confidence was growing as a result, I was still concerned by the fact that I hadn’t encountered a proper street fight since the beating I had taken in Rathmines. That was a good thing, of course, as I never went looking for trouble. I had learned a lot more about fighting in the meantime and I definitely felt that I would be better equipped if a similar situation arose again, but I couldn’t know that for certain until it happened. I felt I needed to be in a real-life scenario which involved genuine danger.
Here again, Geoff Thompson was my guide. Working on the doors of bars and nightclubs, as Geoff had done, would give me the opportunity to confront my fears directly. I was still carrying the memories of being bullied and beaten up in front of my girlfriend and I didn’t know if I would ever be able to simply let go of those demons – I felt I had to defeat them. By getting a job as a doorman, I’d be putting myself into situations where refusing to defend myself wouldn’t be an option.
I had just moved out of my parents’ place and, coincidentally, the guy I was sharing an apartment with happened to be a doorman, which also helped put the idea in my head. I was nearly twenty-one at the time, but I looked like I was fifteen. I was short, thin and had a boyish, innocent face. The makings of quite an intimidating doorman, right? I’d always looked much younger than I was, but particularly so at that stage. Still, my flatmate knew I had done a lot of martial arts and some self-defence training, and he was able to get me a job.
So here I was, a young man who had never been in a proper fight, trying to maintain order on the doors of some of the busiest bars and nightclubs in Dublin. I worked in various places, but most often in a big pub in Temple Bar called the Turk’s Head and a nightclub near O’Connell Bridge called Redz. From the very start I constantly got abuse, night after night. I wasn’t on the door watching out for the school principal during a playful game of Royal Rumble any more. This was the real thing.
If I refused someone admission, they’d always put it up to me because I looked so young and unintimidating. But this was my time to face the demons. These were the exact kind of guys I was scared of in school and who had smashed me to pieces in Rathmines. Faced with them while they were angry, aggressive and drunk, shouting into my face, here was my chance to deal with the fight-or-flight syndrome. The Geoff Thompson books I had read really prepared me for that onslaught. Of course, I felt fear and apprehension, but I had learned to accept that as a natural thing.
When the altercations eventually came, what amazed me at first was how easy it was to defeat someone physically. I thought of my favourite childhood superhero, Spider-Man. Before he got bitten he was a complete pushover, but the next day, to his surprise, he was suddenly able to overcome his enemies. That’s exactly how it was for me when I started working as a doorman.
While I initially found the psychological side of the challenge very tough, the physical aspect was pretty straightforward. I was sober and, even though I lacked experience, I knew how to fight. The punters were drunk and generally didn’t, so when they’d swing at you it was quite easy to subdue them.
The arguments – having someone shouting in your face – were difficult to handle at first, but once it became physical I never had a problem. That ended up giving me confidence for a lot of things in life – negotiating a lease with an intimidating landlord, for example. That’s something that would have been daunting for me before. When you have confidence in the physical side of things, you become more confident in the non-physical. You become confident that if it did happen to escalate into a fight, you could handle it. That’s how I dealt with the impact bullying and being beaten up had on me. I went face-to-face with that representation of the bullies instead of bottling it up. If they threatened to climb my fence, I made sure they’d never consider doing so again.
I could probably write an entire book based on my memories of my years as a doorman. One night I was working in the basement bar of the Turk’s Head while a friend of mine was on the front door upstairs. He refused entry to someone, but the guy had a glass in his hand. He smashed the glass in my friend’s face – cutting him badly – and then made a run for it. The first I heard of the situation was over my radio: Front door! Front door now!
I ran upstairs and someone pointed me in the direction the guy had run, so I took off after him. Eventually I caught him outside Bad Bob’s pub, but as I was closing in on him he turned to me and it suddenly dawned on me how big he was. Fuck! The guy was massive. By now I was thinking: Oh shit. What have I done? But I had no choice at that stage.
In my own way, I managed to communicate to the gentleman in question that smashing a glass in somebody’s face isn’t something that was tolerated at the Turk’s Head, and I’m pretty certain that he got the message.
The guy who was on the door outside Bad Bob’s was somebody I knew, and in the middle of the whole thing he walked over and went: ‘John, how are things?’
‘Yeah, pretty good,’ I said. ‘But I’m a bit busy right now.’
I’m struggling with a guy who’s twice my size and this fella comes over for a friendly chat. Who says doormen aren’t pleasant and amicable?
When the police arrived, it turned out that they were quite familiar with the big fella – and not because he had been in trouble before. Let’s just say that his behaviour didn’t exactly befit a guardian of the peace, and that he probably ended up being hauled in for a chat with his boss the following morning.
My nights were taken up by door duty back then, but during the day I was studying at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). I had lots of different ideas about what I wanted to do with my life but I had never really settled on anything. I actually started a little landscaping company, doing some fencing and stuff like that. About halfway through that first year after finishing school, my mother suggested that I do a mechanical engineering course. I’m not sure why, because I wasn’t particularly leaning towards maths or science at that stage, but I thought it sounded interesting. I ended up really enjoying it and graduated with a 2.1 degree.
Between the certificate and degree courses that were involved, I spent five years at DIT in Bolton Street. I studied hard during the day, trained in the evening and worked late as a doorman. It was exhausting at times but I was quickly becoming obsessed with training, I needed to earn money t
o live, and my mam insisted that I finish my degree. This was in spite of the fact that with each passing day, I started to accept that nothing really grabbed my attention the way mixed martial arts did. If I’d had my way I would have quit the engineering course and invested all my time in training. But going against my mam’s wishes wasn’t an option!
Eventually, word started to get around town that there was a guy in Rathfarnham doing this Ultimate Fighting stuff – me. That was when I met Dave Roche, who remains one of my closest friends today. I suppose you could say Dave was a well-known street fighter at the time. He was training in a bare-knuckle boxing club in Ballymun and it was generally accepted that he was unbeatable. Dave came down to join our training group at the school hall on Loreto Avenue and put himself to the test. By now I was learning more about grappling and I was involved in scuffles almost every night in my job as a doorman, so my confidence as a fighter was higher than it had ever been before.
Dave and I had a bit of a battle, but I was eventually able to do my Royce Gracie impression, catching him in an armbar submission. Just as I had been after watching UFC 1, Dave was blown away. That fight was the start of a lasting friendship – we just had to take a few lumps out of each other first. About fifteen years earlier I had been in a school play in the very same hall; now here I was in a scrap with a bare-knuckle boxer. Looking back, it was all a bit mad.
The first time I experienced hands-on contact with a proper Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach was in 1999, with John Machado in London. Machado was a cousin of the Gracie family and one of the most respected figures in BJJ. The chance to train with him was a massive deal because I had basically been teaching myself up until that point. He was a high-level black belt and he had a Brazilian accent too, which made him seem even more authentic. Robbie Byrne and I travelled over for the seminar and we were captivated. When Machado demonstrated some of his techniques, I thought: Okay, that’s almost impossible, I’ll never be able to do that. But when he showed you how it was done, it was as if he had put you under a spell. Your body was doing things you didn’t think you were capable of.
Win or Learn: MMA, Conor McGregor and Me: A Trainer's Journey Page 2