Win or Learn: MMA, Conor McGregor and Me: A Trainer's Journey

by John Kavanagh

  On the way back home, all I kept thinking was that if I was going to make progress with jiu-jitsu, I needed to train with John Machado again. So I spent over a year saving every penny I made from teaching classes and working on the doors. In the summer of 2001, just after I had graduated from DIT, Dave Roche and I travelled to Los Angeles and spent three weeks training in Machado’s academy. It was an amazing experience. All day, every day, we trained with and learned from elite jiu-jitsu practitioners, including various members of the Gracie clan. At the end of our time there, we didn’t want to leave. By now, mixed martial arts had completely taken over my life. If I wasn’t doing MMA, I was thinking about it. By the time I returned home from LA, I had already decided what my next step would be. It was time to find a place to open my own gym.

  3

  My first gym probably looked like a place to keep tins of paint and an old lawnmower, but that’s not how I saw it. In my eyes, it was perfect.

  It was basically a shed at the back of a house, located down a narrow lane in Phibsboro. It was old, it was cold and it was dusty. But it was mine – a gym I could call my own. Well, at least it was as long as I paid £400 every month to the owner – a nice man from Mayo who was always trying to get me to move into one of the rooms in the house at the front ‘for an extra £100 a month’.

  Picture a concrete shell, with a sink and a toilet bowl in one corner and twelve flimsy mats on the floor. That was the gym. The walls were thin, so it was always freezing. Part of the roof fell in one rainy evening while we were training. We used to light an old Superser Calor-gas heater, but it never made much of a difference.

  Dave Roche and many other people from our training group at Loreto joined me at the place we called The Shed, and I also attracted some new members after placing an ad in Irish Fighter magazine. I spent nearly every waking hour there. I had dabbled in a lot of different disciplines; now, with my own gym, I wanted to cater for them all – kick-boxing, wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, the lot. We trained in small groups, but to this day it’s difficult to find anyone involved in the Irish MMA scene who doesn’t have some kind of connection to that gym. If they didn’t train there themselves, their coach probably did at one point. Our group included Andy Ryan, who went on to form Team Ryano, and Dave Jones, who later set up Next Generation. I suppose you could say the gym was ground zero for Irish MMA.

  Initially the gym was called The Real Fight Club. We even had these awful T-shirts made up with the name on the front, which is terribly embarrassing in hindsight. But at the time we thought they were very cool.

  I was really enthusiastic about bringing my parents to see the gym. They had started to worry about the direction in which my life was heading, and understandably so. After graduating, I spent a lot of time on martial arts and almost none on finding a job to put my degree to use. I thought they’d be proud and that it would put their minds at ease when they saw that I had opened my own gym.

  When they first paid a visit, the reaction wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. My dad just shook his head. My mam cried.

  ‘What the hell are you doing with your life?’ she asked. ‘You spent five years in college getting a degree and now you’re going to waste your time by playing around with your friends in this place?’

  While their support would have been important to me, I couldn’t really complain about their position. At the turn of the century, the UFC was still very small and hardly anyone in Ireland had heard of it. In my parents’ eyes, I was chasing a dream that didn’t exist. Actually, I’m pretty sure they thought their son was insane.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I have a lot of sympathy for my parents regarding that situation. They were just concerned for their child’s future. My mother, in particular, was terrified. Her son was pursuing a career that was very unlikely to yield success. Not only that, but it would also involve fighting other men in a cage. Nowadays it’s not quite so unusual for a young Irish kid to talk about being a professional MMA fighter, because the path has been laid for them to follow. But that wasn’t the case in 2001. I was basically telling my parents that I was going to spend my time grappling with a bunch of guys in a shed, and after that I’d see how things turned out. It wasn’t the most reassuring thing for a mother and father to hear.

  I did actually apply for a job after I graduated – again, to appease my mam – and I very nearly got it too. It was with Boston Scientific and the role would have required me to move to Boston. I made it to the final stage as one of ten remaining candidates. I recall being in the middle of the last interview when I realized that I had spent the entire time tilting back and forth in my chair, like you’d do in school. In my head I said to myself, What the hell are you doing? This is a job interview, sit up straight, you clown.

  I can’t say for certain if my poor chair etiquette played a part, but I didn’t get the job. That wasn’t actually the plan, but perhaps subconsciously I behaved like that in the interview as a means of sabotaging my chances. Having finally gotten the degree out of the way and having recently come back from studying under John Machado in LA, there was only one thing I wanted to do with my life.

  Making a career in MMA was my aim but I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it. Bewildered, my mam and dad spent months and years trying to talk me out of it. But I wasn’t for turning. If I had followed up on my engineering degree and found a job in that field, I know I wouldn’t have been happy. What brought joy and satisfaction to my life was martial arts. It might all end in failure, I knew that, but at least I was being true to myself by remaining loyal to my passion. If it didn’t work out, I could walk away knowing that I’d given it my all.

  I was nearly twenty-five when the gym opened but I didn’t have a mortgage or a car or a family to support: in other words, no significant financial outgoings. Nevertheless, I was always broke. All the money I earned was spent on training or travelling to England for seminars and fights.

  Fighters often still ask me how I got by in those days and the answer is simple: I had something called ‘a job’. I receive a lot of messages from people telling me they can’t afford the gym fees. The truth is that gym membership is essentially a luxury item. You need to be employed in order to pay for it. That’s how life works. The current generation of up-and-coming fighters seem to feel it’s necessary to give up their jobs in order to pursue a full-time career in MMA, but I’ve always felt there’s room for both. For the first ten years of my life in MMA, every penny I made was ploughed back in.

  By the time I got the gym up and running, I had already competed in a few fights. On visits to the UK for seminars, I’d built up a useful network of contacts. Paying for flights to the UK was already a big enough expense for me so I’d usually ask whoever owned the gym where the seminar was taking place if I could sleep on the mats. I’d throw myself down at night and use my gear bag as a pillow.

  The first fight I was offered was on a show in a little hall in Milton Keynes, promoted by a guy called Lee Hasdell. He was a successful fighter himself and promoted the first events in the UK, so he’s regarded as the godfather of UK MMA. Lee was running an eight-man grappling tournament, with the winner taking home £1,000, and wanted to put on an MMA fight during an interval after the semi-finals to give the two winners a break before the final. That’s where I came in.

  I travelled over with Robbie Byrne – at my own expense, as always, because you didn’t get paid for fights on the regional circuit back in those days. There was no real distinction between professional and amateur fights, like there is now. A fight was a fight.

  Just as I was finishing my warm-up, someone came into the changing room and said there was a bit of a problem. My opponent hadn’t shown up. After coming over from Ireland, I was pretty pissed off that it appeared to have been a complete waste of time. But all was not lost. The guy on the PA put out an announcement and asked if there was anyone in attendance interested in fighting. One of the guys who had been eliminated in the first round of the grappling tourn
ament gamely put his hand up, and my fight was back on. It ended quite quickly as I caught him in a triangle choke to win by a first-round submission.

  My next opportunity to compete came in September 1999, in the first MMA event ever to take place in Ireland. The venue was the Moyross Community Centre in Limerick, and the organizer was Dermot McGrath, a kick-boxing coach who was another key figure from the early days of Irish MMA. There was a four-man lightweight tournament on the bill and I won that thanks to two armbar submissions. There weren’t really any spectators in the hall, just fighters, coaches and teammates. A few of the guys from our training group had travelled down to compete so we booked a minibus for the journey. The vehicle was pelted with stones as we drove off afterwards, although I can’t remember exactly why. One of our guys may have beaten somebody from Limerick, or maybe it was just because we were from Dublin.

  I didn’t fight again until the following summer, when I went back over to the UK and submitted Leighton Hill with a triangle choke inside a minute at a leisure-centre hall in Worcester. The event was headlined by Mark Weir, who went on to fight a few times in the UFC.

  After winning those first few fights I had built up a good reputation, and for my next fight, which was against Andy Burrows in Belfast, my face was on the posters which were put up all over the city. That was a first for me and kind of a big deal. For the shoot, I tried to strike a pose that made me look menacing, but failed miserably.

  My fighting career may have yielded some good results early on, but my parents’ stance still hadn’t changed. Each time I returned home after a win, they’d ask: ‘Is that it? Are you finished now?’ I remember before I travelled to England for one fight, my dad said to me: ‘Wouldn’t it be an awful shame if you broke your back? What would you do then?’ It was another attempt to convince me to give up fighting and get a normal job, but I had passed the point of no return long before then.

  I was still studying in DIT when I had my first few fights, and my classmates were a bit freaked out. On Monday mornings they’d be chatting about all the fun they’d had in pubs and nightclubs on the previous Saturday night, then I’d arrive in with a black eye and a shaved head after being away fighting for the weekend. I was often cutting weight too, so I never really went on any college nights out. I mostly fought at featherweight (145lb) and lightweight (155lb), although I could definitely have made bantamweight (135lb) too. Still, I was always watching what I ate and drank. The only time I’d see any of my classmates in town at night was when I was working as a doorman while they were all out having fun.

  One of the guys who had been training at The Shed was a chap named Terry. He was from Dublin but had been living in South Africa for years. Terry trained with us for a few months after the gym opened in 2001, but he then returned to South Africa. Shortly after he left Dublin, Terry called me with an offer of a fight. The event was happening in Johannesburg that November and it was being run by the coach at the gym he was training in. I knew nothing about the opponent or the show, but I jumped at the chance. I was probably more interested in the trip itself. While I wouldn’t be receiving any money directly, the week-long trip was all expenses paid. It sounded like a once in a lifetime opportunity, particularly for the nature lover in me. A visit to Africa was on my bucket list. They weren’t paying for me to bring a corner man, but my friend Derek Clarke decided to follow for a holiday.

  When I got to South Africa, I knew almost immediately that I was in over my head. I was actually using my opponent’s gym for training. I was in there, alone, and his teammates kept coming over to let me know how much trouble I was in. You couldn’t research your opponent on YouTube in those days, so I didn’t even know what he looked like until we met at the weigh-in the day before the fight. I weighed about 150lb and he was around 165. His name was Bobby Karagiannidis and he was a South African wrestling champion. I knew I was up against it. It was a pretty big event in a large arena in the Carnival City Casino, where Lennox Lewis had lost his world title to Hasim Rahman just a few months earlier. Until then I had been fighting in small halls, but there would be thousands of people in attendance for this one.

  The event was also being broadcast on South African TV. Before my fight, the cameras came into the changing rooms to interview me and the presenter couldn’t believe that I had come all the way from Ireland on my own. When he asked me what type of training I had been doing, I tried to crack a joke because I was so nervous. I said: ‘I’ve been spending a lot of time playing the new UFC video game so I think that has prepared me well.’ Unfortunately, he didn’t really get the joke so we both ended up looking a bit silly.

  When the time came to fight, it was like walking out in the MGM Grand. Alone and thousands of miles from home, it was pretty intimidating. My game plan was to take Bobby down and look for a submission, but he was a far better wrestler so he was able to fend off my attempts quite easily. I ended up pulling guard and going for a leg-lock. As I did, he was standing over me and raining down punches on my head. I was taking a fair bit of damage, and I should have let go and adjusted my position, but I was emotionally attached to completing the technique. It’s a lesson I’ve since learned, but my mistake cost me dearly that night. As he was landing punch after punch, I persisted with the leg-lock, searching for the submission, thinking I had him in trouble … then all of a sudden I woke up in the changing room. ‘Did I win?’ I asked. Not quite. I was knocked out in the first round.

  Seven years before he became a UFC champion, Forrest Griffin actually fought in the main event that night. Another future UFC fighter who was on that bill was Rory Singer. We all went out together after the show and had a good time. Having been knocked out and concussed, I very stupidly got quite drunk. The hotel I was staying in was in a nature reserve, and I somehow came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to go streaking around the vicinity at 2 a.m. I found out the following day that I was lucky not to have been some lion’s breakfast.

  I might not have picked up the result I was hoping for in that fight, but that crazy night turned out to be one of the most important of my life. One of my fellow drinkers was Bobby Karagiannidis’s coach – a big American fella named Matt Thornton. Matt and I chatted for a long time. I was fascinated by what he had to say about coaching and we really clicked. He was able to verbalize exactly how I felt about coaching. Matt had a long history with mixed martial arts and was well known in the US, having founded his own MMA academy – Straight Blast Gym – in Oregon.

  The following day, Matt was holding a seminar in Johannesburg and I managed to fight through my hangover in time to head along. There, I learned about his ‘aliveness’ approach, which really struck a chord with me. Consisting of three core principles – movement, energy and timing – the concept was based around recreating the actualities of a fight situation in training instead of your sessions becoming a rehearsal of dead patterns; challenging instead of demonstrating; honing your skills against an uncooperative opponent. Matt’s approach created a distinction between live and dead training, and I knew which one I preferred. It may sound like common sense, but the approach was very original at the time.

  After I returned home, Matt and I stayed in touch by e-mail. I was eager to work more closely with him, so I invited him to come to Dublin the following summer. Paying for him to come over cost me a fortune, but to say it was a worthwhile investment would be an understatement.

  At that stage I had already trained under John Machado, the Gracies and Geoff Thompson, and they were all fantastic in their own ways. But there was something different about Matt that made him stand out. For a start, he was clearly a very intelligent guy. He was also the first proper MMA coach I encountered – a mentor who was adept in all the disciplines, from boxing to Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Matt was a BJJ black belt, so he gave me my first ever grading while he was in Dublin. He determined that my first belt would be purple.

  But certainly the most interesting thing about Matt was his ‘aliveness’ methodology. I wasn’t in
a position to be able to move my life to the US to work with Matt on a permanent basis, but if he gave me his formula I knew I could put it into practice.

  I was full of admiration for Matt, and he obviously saw something in me too. I was officially welcomed into the Straight Blast Gym family, and in 2002 The Shed became SBG Ireland.

  Balancing my commitments as a coach and a fighter was always a challenge. The more time I spent on coaching, the less scope I had to train for my own fights. I carried on regardless, beating a Frenchman called Tamel Hasar by first-round submission (rear naked choke) in Portsmouth in February 2002. That event was the first in Europe to feature a cage instead of a boxing ring. For some reason, a lot of people seem to find MMA in a cage barbaric, yet they don’t have the same problem when it’s in a ring – in spite of the fact that the cage actually provides a safer environment for the competitors by preventing them from falling through the ropes and sustaining serious injuries.

  Even though the rules are the same, there’s something very different about competing in a cage instead of a ring. When you hear that door being bolted shut, it can suddenly feel very claustrophobic in there. You’re literally caged in. At first, you tend to think: Shit! This is insane. What the hell am I doing in here? There are also technical differences: for example it can be much harder to back your opponent up and corner him in an octagonal cage. However, it can also be easier to take him down, as there are no ropes for him to grab on to. I was excited about fighting in a cage, because a part of me felt like Royce Gracie, stepping into the cage to represent Brazilian jiu-jitsu just as he had done at UFC 1 back in 1993.

  Just two weeks later, I was back in England to face Leigh Remedios in Salisbury. He managed to beat me by unanimous decision. His next fight, a few months later, was in the UFC.