As I prepared to face Danny Batten in Milton Keynes the following November, I told myself that this would be my last fight. Coaching was taking over and I just didn’t have sufficient time to invest in fighting. I simply couldn’t balance both commitments any longer. When you’re a competitive athlete, you have to be selfish with your own time, but almost all of mine was being spent on coaching. At the end of a session I’d have to take questions from my students instead of focusing on recovering in time for the next session, or doing a little bit of work on my own. My ability to compete was fading away, but more importantly so was the desire. I had never won with strikes before so, in the knowledge that I probably wouldn’t fight ever again, I really wanted to get a knockout against Batten. I went right after it and dominated the first round, but I couldn’t put him away. By the end of that round, I had completely emptied my gas tank, and he took full advantage, submitting me via keylock towards the end of the second round.
There was no shame in losing to Danny Batten – he was one of the top guys on the UK circuit and later went on to become the Cage Warriors featherweight champion – but I was still really disappointed after that defeat. I felt I was better than him, but I got tired and paid the price.
I felt I couldn’t sign off my fighting career on that note. Five months later I was back in Milton Keynes to face another top UK fighter, Robbie Olivier. The fact that coaching was gradually taking over for me was evident at that show. A few fights before my own, I was cornering one of my own students, Adrian Degorski, in his debut. Going into the fight with Robbie, I had to accept that – win or lose – this was definitely the end.
Perhaps I was looking for the fairytale ending to my career, and thankfully I got it. I submitted Robbie with an armbar in the first round. Now I could retire on a winning note.
Robbie Olivier ended up having a really good career in the UK. He beat several guys who were later signed by the UFC – Brad Pickett, for example – so it was a bit surprising that he never got a shot in the UFC himself. Having beaten Robbie, there was definitely a part of me that wondered how far I might have gone if I’d carried on competing, and I certainly got a kick out of it when I saw how successful he turned out to be. But it was still just a very small part of me that felt that way. Teaching was my passion. I knew from early on that fighting didn’t inspire me the same way coaching did. I look at the competitive nature of my own fighters down through the years and I recognize that that was never me. I didn’t have anything close to the passion for competition that they possess. For many years I still packed the gumshield when travelling with my fighters, just in case there was a pull-out and they needed someone to step in on the show. And I continued to compete occasionally in Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournaments. In 2005 I won a gold medal as a purple belt at the European Championships in Lisbon. That was a massive moment for me, and Matt Thornton rewarded me with a promotion to brown-belt status. But the MMA game was getting a lot more serious, and quickly. Any remnants of a desire to compete in MMA soon disappeared entirely.
I’ve always been a teacher and a mentor. By the time I was awarded my black belt in karate at the age of twelve, I was already helping out with teaching beginners, including some who were in their twenties and thirties. I wasn’t the boss, but I enjoyed being delegated a little bit of responsibility to assist the instructor. It was the same in other areas of life too. I taught my mother how to use a computer well. When I was in college, I regularly helped study partners with problems or questions they were struggling with.
Whenever I fought, in order to motivate myself I needed to do something that I always tell my fighters not to do, and that is to become emotionally invested in a contest. My friend Robbie Byrne would often have to make up some crazy stuff before a fight to get me interested: ‘John, I heard this guy saying terrible things about your sister earlier on. Make him pay for it.’ I’d then charge out from my corner and tear into my opponent. It didn’t matter that what Robbie was saying wasn’t true, it succeeded in getting me wound up.
Looking back, I can see that fighting – like working on the doors of bars and nightclubs – was also a way for me to get rid of the lingering demons I had from being bullied and scared to defend myself at school. But I didn’t care about belts or money. I wasn’t earning anything from it anyway. It actually cost me money to fight. And, unlike the majority of aspiring MMA athletes, I definitely didn’t see myself one day making it to the UFC. At least not as a fighter.
Kieran McGeeney, who captained Armagh to the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship in 2002, is now a coach at SBG Ireland. He often says that you need to have a darkness inside you to compete at a high level in any sport. If you can’t tap into that dark side, you’ll quickly come unstuck. I was an example of a fighter who didn’t have access to the dark side. I can recall being in control during fights and part of me would feel like telling my opponent what he needed to do to get out of a position or something: ‘No, move your hand here.’ Coaching and teaching always came more naturally to me than competing and winning.
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With my own fighting career a thing of the past, I was able to focus entirely on coaching. The challenge was to make SBG Ireland as successful as we could possibly be, and to put together a fight team to represent the gym accordingly. And we weren’t going to be able to achieve that from a shed down a back alley in Phibsboro.
After a couple of years, The Shed’s membership was steadily increasing and those four thin concrete walls were struggling to hold us all. If SBG was to grow, we needed more space.
In 2003 we relocated to Greenmount Avenue in Harold’s Cross. The place we found was like a palace in comparison to The Shed. It was much larger and brighter, and it even had a shower. With such luxuries, we really felt like we were moving up in the world. The unit had been a Thai boxing gym before we moved in, so it was fit for purpose. Upgrading to a facility like that was very exciting, and the fact that I could afford to do so was a good indication that things were heading in the right direction.
Still, there was more than a hint of sadness about leaving The Shed behind.
Sure, it was smelly, damp, cold and not at all suitable for elite athletes, which was what we were aspiring to be, but I had built up an enormous feeling of attachment to the place and the other guys felt the same. No matter what happened from here on in, regardless of the direction in which the journey was about to go, The Shed was where it all started. Because of that, it will always have a special place in my heart.
Having brought my own fighting career to an end, I was able to focus completely on putting together a competitive fight team and making sure that they were coached well. A few of the guys were making an impact on the UK scene. Mick Leonard was one of SBG’s top fighters at the time; Andy Ryan also had some good wins; and even though he didn’t compete very often, Dave Roche absolutely ran through his opponents whenever he fought.
Probably the most impressive athlete we had at the time, however, was Adrian Degorski. He was Polish, part of the large migration into Ireland from eastern Europe at the turn of the century, and he arrived with an extensive boxing background. Grappling never came easily to Adrian, but his striking was outstanding and he was a phenomenal athlete. Adrian had been a member of Poland’s national amateur boxing team and had a record of something like 50–1. He fought with a broken foot in the only bout he lost, which seemed less surprising as I got to know him a bit better, because the guy was as tough as a coffin nail. He had quite a short temper, too. I got him a job on the door of a pub and he knocked out the first guy who gave him hassle with one punch. I tried to explain to Adrian that he couldn’t hit everyone who caused a problem, but I’m pretty sure he thought I was joking.
Another member who joined SBG at The Shed was an eighteen-year-old street kid from Ballymun who came down one evening with Dave Roche.
‘John, this is Owen Roddy,’ Dave said to me. ‘He can’t afford the fees for now but if you allow him to train here he’ll clean the mats ever
y night.’
‘I clean the mats myself, Dave,’ I responded. ‘It only takes me thirty seconds.’ But I’m a bit of a sucker in those situations. Dave kept pushing me and Owen seemed like a really nice kid, too. He was both polite and enthusiastic – two essential characteristics for me – so I gave him a chance. And I’m glad I did. Owen would eventually prove to be worth his weight in gold to SBG.
For those of us who had been there from the beginning, 2003 was an exciting time for the sport, with promotions like Cage Warriors and Cage Rage having launched in the UK the previous year. The circuit was still very small. The promoters were shuffling a small deck of cards. If you were competing at an event, you’d keep a close eye on the other fights too because the likelihood was that you were studying a future opponent.
More often than not we were heading across the Irish Sea for fights, but there were occasionally events in Ireland too. The biggest regular show on the island was Cage Wars – the promotion which had used a cage in Europe for the first time in 2002. It was organized by Paddy Mooney and Tom Lamont, two promoters who put on some really good events at the King’s Hall in Belfast featuring fighters like Jess Liaudin and Samy Schiavo, who went on to appear in the UFC.
However, as my fight team expanded, there still weren’t enough events taking place to satisfy their appetite for competition. How did I find a solution to that? By doing what I had always done before: I decided to do something about it myself. I had no previous experience as a promoter, of course, but I thought: How hard can it be? Let’s get a ring, put it in a hall, have a bunch of guys fight each other and charge people to watch it all.
The venue was the Ringside Club, which is the small hall next to the National Boxing Stadium in Dublin. It held around 300 people, and while it wasn’t easy to shift all the tickets – social media hadn’t arrived yet so we couldn’t rely on Facebook and Twitter to put the word out – we still managed to sell out our two or three events a year. The show was also where most of Ireland’s future stars of the UFC got their first taste of competitive action. At €15 a ticket, I always felt the spectators got value for money. They were fun nights.
I called the promotion Ring of Truth, because the fights took place in a boxing ring and, as I saw it, this was truth in combat: two guys who weighed the same, blending a variety of fighting styles to see who was truly the better fighter. Later, when I could afford to hire a cage from the UK, it became Cage of Truth. It was the first regular show in the Republic of Ireland and it was also where many fans were first exposed to MMA, so it played an important role in the gradual growth of the sport.
The first event happened on 1 October 2004. It featured fighters from gyms around the country who had travelled to compete. Many of them – like John Donnelly, Francis Heagney, Micky Young and Greg Loughran – were laying the foundations for relatively successful careers.
As productions, the first shows couldn’t have been more basic. We put a ring in the middle of the Ringside Club and opened the doors to the punters. We didn’t have proper lighting and there certainly weren’t any TV cameras present, although there is a bit of dodgy footage available on YouTube if you fancy checking out how primitive it all was. It was proper spit-and-sawdust stuff. As both the promoter and a coach, it was sometimes tricky to make sure the show was running smoothly while cornering my fighters, but it was always enjoyable. As for the medical checks, a guy from St John Ambulance would basically ask: ‘Are ya all right? Grand, in ya go.’ That was all there was to it. That side of things would eventually become much more scrupulous, and rightly so, but back then we didn’t really know any better.
The shows didn’t generate a profit, but I never accumulated any debt from them either. The aim was to give my guys fights, not to earn money, so it was mission accomplished. The main difficulty we faced was that fighters often pulled out at short notice, so you’d spend the final days beforehand e-mailing gyms in the UK and France to see if anyone was available to step in. On one occasion we had ten bouts on the card, and six of them involved fighters who were travelling down in a convoy of cars from Northern Ireland. At 7 p.m. on the night of the show, with the doors open, the venue packed and the first fight about to start, there was still no sign of the guys from up north. In a state of panic, I phoned one of them and learned that after driving around Dublin for a while, unable to find the venue, they had just decided to head home. With only four fights left on the card and three hundred people having paid for a night of entertainment, I had to scramble around to fill the void. I was looking for anyone in the hall with a bit of martial arts experience to help me out. I ended up putting two guys into the ring to do a judo demonstration, as well as a little kid to show off some karate techniques. It was an absolute disaster, but we got through it without too many complaints.
MMA was never illegal in Ireland – and at that point the vast majority of Irish people weren’t even aware that it existed – but we weren’t sure how the authorities would react. Thankfully, we never ran into any difficulty on that front. I think that was partly down to how we advertised the shows. Even when we started using a cage, the posters referred to a martial arts event and not a cage-fighting show. Rightly or wrongly, the two seem to have very different connotations.
Another show that was being planned in Dublin around that time went down the opposite route. It was due to be held at the Red Cow Hotel and, as a one-off, I had actually agreed to fight on it. I was quite excited about this one because it was going to be me, in my Brazilian jiu-jitsu gi, against Jim Rock, a well-known Irish professional boxer. I pictured myself playing the part of Royce Gracie at UFC 1.
Unfortunately, it never got off the ground. A week out from the show, despite the fact that hundreds of tickets had been sold, it was shut down by South Dublin County Council. The promoters had put posters up that advertised ‘cage fights’, including a massive one at the Red Cow roundabout. I guess it attracted some unwanted attention from the authorities and they pulled the plug.
One afternoon in 2005, at the gym in Harold’s Cross, we were paid a visit by this Lithuanian guy. A year later, when Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat came out, we started referring to the Lithuanian by the same name: they were like the same person. The accent and the garish suits were almost identical.
‘Borat’ ran a popular promotion called Rings, which had staged nearly a hundred events around the world since 1995. He wanted to bring the show to Ireland and asked if some of SBG’s fighters would be interested in competing. The event was scheduled for 12 March 2005 at the Point Depot – later rechristened the O2 Arena and now known as the 3Arena. It would be the biggest MMA show ever seen in Ireland, so we were obviously on board. There were some really good fighters brought in from abroad to compete on the show, including Gegard Mousasi, who later became a Strikeforce champion and is a top contender in the UFC even now.
Matt Thornton travelled over from the US to be there and it felt like a big night for the gym. After building up a reputation as the top team in Ireland, with fighters who were capable of mixing it with the best in the UK, this was an opportunity to make a statement on an international stage. I was really keen to impress Matt, too, and was conscious of his presence as I took the guys through their warm-ups and guided them from the corner during their fights.
But it was a bad night for SBG. Some of my guys were slaughtered, and the show itself was a bit of a catastrophe. Occasionally, even at the very highest level, you get those nights when the fights don’t deliver, the crowd are restless and it’s a soundtrack of jeers instead of cheers. Rings was one of those. The low point of the night came with the main event. Rodney Moore from Northern Ireland was due to fight a guy called Jimmy Curran, who was a noted kick-boxer from Dublin, although he didn’t really have any MMA experience. Jimmy had sold a lot of tickets for the show, so in many ways he was the star attraction.
Rodney walked out first and went to his corner but when Jimmy’s name was announced, he didn’t appear. There was an awkward silence, before �
�Borat’ – who was also the announcer – gave it another go: ‘Let’s try that again. From Dublin, Ireland, Jimmy Curran!’ But there was still no sign of him. The crowd weren’t happy and bottles of beer started to rain down on top of those of us near the ring, so we all ran for cover.
When we got backstage, we found out that Jimmy had changed his mind about fighting and had climbed out the window before he was due to walk out to the ring. Unfortunately Jimmy soon had other, more serious problems to deal with. Three weeks later, in an unrelated incident, he was shot dead in a Dublin pub.
I was completely despondent for days after the Rings event. Not only had it been disappointing for SBG, it was a shambolic night for Irish MMA as a whole. I was upset, embarrassed and disillusioned. It was one of those nights when whatever could go wrong did go wrong. I took a lot of abuse from Irish MMA fans on internet forums as a result – ‘John Kavanagh embarrassed Ireland on the world stage’ – but I was even more concerned by what it might mean for the sport in the country overall. MMA was already struggling to get off the ground in terms of popularity and this was hardly going to help its cause. For many people at the Point Depot that night, it was their first taste of the sport. If they never wanted to experience it again they couldn’t have been blamed. It was that bad.
The aftermath was challenging, but in tough times you must persevere. It was a difficult period, but I never once considered throwing in the towel. Soon we were all back in the gym preparing for the next batch of fights. If there’s a perception that the growth of MMA in Ireland followed a constant upward curve, I can assure you that certainly wasn’t the case. There were almost as many downs as ups, particularly early on, and that was one of several setbacks. However, if you’re on the road to success, you cannot reach that destination without encountering some failures along the way. The people who matter, they don’t care whether you’ve won or lost. You lose on a Saturday night and start afresh on Sunday morning. That’s why I’ve never gotten carried away with celebrating when we win, just like I don’t get too down in the dumps after defeats. Winning and losing are two sides of the same coin. Win or learn is the SBG mantra, not win or lose.
Win or Learn: MMA, Conor McGregor and Me: A Trainer's Journey Page 4