One of the many benefits of being a part of Straight Blast Gym has been meeting and getting to know other members of the SBG family worldwide, some of whom have become close friends. Karl Tanswell in Manchester, for example. Karl is an outstanding coach and a great man to have on your side. Travelling the world for the sport we love, we’ve shared some great experiences.
Ireland will always be my home but there’s a big place in my heart for Iceland too. I first went there in 2005 following a request from Matt Thornton to travel over to do some seminars and coaching at a gym called Mjölnir in Reykjavik. Matt had been going there once a year, but in 2005 he asked me to stand in for him. More than anything I saw it as a holiday in an interesting part of the world; I certainly didn’t think it would turn out to be the first of many trips to Iceland. It was also quite an honour that Matt felt he could place his trust in me to that extent.
Mjölnir was full of enthusiastic athletes, but two guys immediately stood out. One was Arni Isaksson, a pretty intense character who was always looking to test himself. His nickname, ‘The Ice Viking’, was appropriate. The other was a sixteen-year-old kid called Gunnar Nelson. I had been told about Gunni before I left Dublin. He had very high-level karate and, while grappling was still new to him, he was taking to it like a duck to water.
When I arrived, Gunni asked me for a private lesson, and his potential was very evident when we rolled. Still, just to remind him who the coach was, I held him down for a while and tickled him at the end of the lesson.
My first encounter with Arni wasn’t quite as good natured. Wearing just a pair of Thai shorts and sweating from head to toe after a training session, he walked up to me with a crazed look in his eye and said, in his broken English: ‘You do stand-up?’
I thought he was looking to fight me, so I just responded: ‘Not with you, I don’t.’
But what he was actually asking was if I coached stand-up fighting as well as ground fighting. After that initial hiccup, Arni and I really hit it off. Just twenty-one years old, he was a good kick-boxer who was eager to make an impact in MMA. When I returned to Dublin, Arni came with me to train at SBG.
The initial plan was for him to stay at my apartment in Ranelagh for a couple of weeks, before finding a place of his own. Three months later he was still living with me. Every day I scanned newspapers and websites, looking for a room for him to rent somewhere in Dublin. I’d send him off with the addresses, but every time he came back with bad news.
‘Didn’t get it.’
What’s going on here? I wondered. Arni was a nice guy, and it seemed strange that nobody would rent him a room. The next time Arni went out to look at a place, I went along too. And then I realized why nobody wanted to rent to him.
When we arrived at the house, a young woman answered the door and Arni just barked: ‘I want room!’ He had a black eye – as he usually did – and wore his hood up. Slightly terrified by this angry foreigner with a busted-up eye who had arrived at her front door, the girl just said ‘It’s gone’ and slammed the door.
Confused, Arni turned to me and said: ‘This happen every time.’
Arni made his MMA debut in Dublin later in 2005, and it marked the beginning of a good professional career that would yield big wins against guys like Greg Loughran and Dennis Siver, as well as a Cage Warriors welterweight title shot.
Another of the promising youngsters in the gym at Harold’s Cross was a very exciting seventeen-year-old named Tom Egan. Tom was really slick on his feet, he had a lot of charisma and was a superb athlete. As far as SBG’s younger generation was concerned, he was the main man in the gym at the time. There was also my very first female fighter, Aisling Daly. When she first showed up at the gym I was apprehensive about a teenage girl training with a load of guys, and she seemed like a quiet, nerdy person who wouldn’t be cut out for that environment. I had to give Aisling the same treatment as any of the lads, so I put her through hell in order to see if she had what it took to fight. Every time I did, she kept coming back for more.
As the gym continued to expand, we were welcoming a wide array of new members through the doors, from young kids to retired adults. With the summer of 2006 approaching, I was in a position to upgrade the home of SBG Ireland once again. After agreeing a lease on a really nice unit in Tallaght, I notified the landlord at the Harold’s Cross facility that we’d be vacating the building.
However, three weeks before we were due to relocate, it all fell apart. The owner of the place in Tallaght called and said he’d had a change of heart, despite the fact that we had shaken hands on the deal months earlier. According to him, the planning permission to house a mixed martial arts gym in his building was too complicated, so he was backing out. By now it was too late to salvage the Harold’s Cross lease, so I was left completely in limbo.
The four months we spent looking for a new premises were extremely tough. In the meantime I had to run classes on a part-time basis from a school hall in Crumlin. I was painfully aware that the longer the wait for a new gym rumbled on, the more detrimental it would be for the future of SBG Ireland. How could we be taken seriously as an international fight team if we were training only a few times a week on mats that were supposed to be for children to use during PE class?
Operating on a part-time basis took a toll on my income, and as a consequence I resumed working on the doors of bars and nightclubs several nights a week. A couple of years earlier, when the gym was growing and I was able to drift away from door work, I had told myself that if I ever ended up having to rely on that job again, it was probably a sign that it was time to give up on the dream of making a successful career in martial arts. I was starting to feel the pressure to get what my parents would call ‘a real job’. At one stage I locked myself in the bathroom at home, curled up on the floor and just cried for a couple of hours. It all stemmed from the fear that I might have wasted years of my life going down a dead-end when I could have been taking advantage of my education.
Then, as the summer ended, we finally found a new home. It was in an industrial estate in Rathcoole, about fifteen kilometres from Dublin city centre. The location was by no means ideal: it required at least two bus journeys to get there from the centre of town. But it was a nice building for a gym, and we hadn’t lost a single member during the fallow period. The dream was still alive.
5
One afternoon late in 2006, a scrawny eighteen-year-old lad with a shaved head walked into the gym in Rathcoole. He had been at school with Tom Egan. Tom introduced us.
‘This is a friend of mine, Conor McGregor. He’s been boxing for a few years but he’d like to train with us here as he’s looking to take up MMA.’
I can’t remember exactly what Conor said to me during our first exchange, but I do know that he referred to himself as a future UFC champion. It was immediately obvious that if it wasn’t going to work out for this guy, it wouldn’t be due to a lack of confidence.
Conor was very eager to make an impression in his first sparring session at SBG. As a result, he dropped Owen Roddy with a big body-shot. That wasn’t the way we did things in sparring at SBG, but I decided to let it slide. I understood his enthusiasm as it was his first session and Owen was doing really well at the time, having already fought professionally on several occasions. Conor wanted to make a statement against one of our top fighters. I also knew that Owen would get his own back before long.
What happened next, though, was definitely unacceptable. I was sitting in my office when I heard someone outside say, ‘That fella is after dropping Ais.’ I knew straight away it was Conor, because Aisling Daly had stepped in with him after Owen. I came out of the office and saw Ais keeled over in the ring. She was in tears. Conor had hurt her with a body-shot.
Okay, I thought, I let you away with that once, but you’ve got another thing coming if you think you can come in here and bully people.
‘Right, Conor, I’m next,’ I said. After strapping on a pair of gloves and stepping into the ring, I took Cono
r down and beat him up until he received the message loud and clear: These people are your teammates, not your opponents.
When we finished, Conor looked at me and said: ‘Yeah, I deserved that.’
He was a scrapper when he walked into the gym at first. An old-school scrapper, plain and simple. Crumlin Boxing Club, where Conor had been training, is a fight gym. When you walk in there, what you see in front of you is fights, fights and more fights. SBG, on the other hand, is about learning.
After I’d delivered my little message, Conor and I hit it off. He was back again the next day and he settled in quickly. He still sometimes let his competitive side get the better of him, but it was difficult to be angry with Conor because he was always funny and entertaining. At one stage we were doing a winner-stays-on wrestling drill, in which the person who’s taken down first is eliminated and a new person comes in. But when Conor was taken down, he’d just keep on fighting.
‘Conor,’ I said, ‘did you see when your back hit the mat? That was the end of the round.’
In every training session he was exceptionally intense and competitive. There were always a lot of questions afterwards, too. I’d be at home watching TV late in the evening and the text messages would come through: ‘That escape you demonstrated tonight, can we go through that again tomorrow?’ He had an obsessive mind when it came to learning. I don’t think he ever switched off.
The following week we were going through the same wrestling drill again and Conor managed to slam me down. Before I could get back to my feet, he stood over me and said: ‘Did you see when your back hit the mat? That was the end of the round.’ It wasn’t the first time he’d made me laugh and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. It was the same with his teammates. His personality kept us all amused and he had a bit of charm about him too. His teammates knew he was cocky, but he never expressed that brashness at their expense. The other fighters in the gym afforded him respect and he repaid them in kind. Conor loved being part of the team.
From the start, looking at Conor, I found myself thinking: That’s a world champion. Between his personality and his athleticism, it was evident that the raw materials were there. Fighters can sharpen their skills to an elite level with the right amount of investment in their training, but developing that golden touch necessary to rise above the crowd and become a champion? I’ve yet to see someone who has managed to do so: it’s something you need to have inside you from the start. Conor had it.
It was clear that there was enormous potential there, and his striking was exceptional, but there were huge cracks in his ground-game that would need to be filled in. And that wouldn’t be an overnight job.
Another concern was that he seemed to have a lot of distractions away from the gym. Dublin isn’t a massive town, and I soon discovered that Conor was hanging around with the kind of people who were best avoided by anyone wanting to become a successful professional athlete. Conor would be in the gym for hours every day for weeks at a time – and then he’d suddenly be gone, and you wouldn’t see him for a few weeks. He was especially good at disappearing when it was time to pay his membership fees.
But as soon as Conor was back in the gym, he gave you his undivided attention. He and Tom would often train together at home too. Tom helped Conor with his Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Conor passed on some of his boxing expertise in return. When Conor first came to SBG he was still boxing as well, and I had no issue with him doing both. However, I’m not sure if his boxing coaches felt the same way. Eventually, Conor made a choice between the two. His future was in MMA.
During our time in Rathcoole I was working with some very promising young fighters who were in the early stages of their development, so I look back on those days with fond memories. But it was also a period of significant personal achievement for me.
In 2007 I went to Turkey to compete in the World Grappling Championships, which were being staged under the jurisdiction of FILA, the international governing body for wrestling. There was an abundance of elite competitors there from around the world, and when I looked at some of the names I began to worry that I’d be exposed in such prestigious company. But I guess I shouldn’t have been concerned.
I made it all the way to the final, where I was beaten via footlock by Ricky Lundell, who has since coached top UFC fighters like Jon Jones and Frank Mir. Having reached the last hurdle, I was extremely disappointed not to have won, but it was a major milestone for me and one that I can appreciate even more with the benefit of hindsight. Standing on the podium to receive my silver medal, with the Irish tricolour ascending behind me and the national anthem being played, was a very proud moment. The vast majority of the flags being raised at the tournament were for the USA, so it was satisfying to see Ireland in amongst them.
It was also in Rathcoole where I reached the top of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu ladder. A BJJ black belt is extremely difficult to attain. I’m a lover of all martial arts, but if someone tells you they’re a black belt in karate, it can mean two very different things. It could be an eight-year-old girl performing dance-type sequences, like I was doing when I started out. Or it can be Lyoto Machida, who’s been using karate to brutally knock people out for years in MMA. The point is that if someone tells you they’re a black belt in karate, it’s impossible to know if they can actually fight or not until you see them in action. However, if someone has a black belt in BJJ, it’s safe to assume that they’re a pretty tough dude.
In order to become the first Irish person to achieve black-belt status in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, after so many years of training, I had to overcome one final massive hurdle. Matt Thornton came to the gym in Rathcoole to grade me in the last challenge. It is called an ‘iron man’ and it requires you to spar with every person in the gym to submission. There were seventy people in the gym that night.
It was a huge task and it took absolutely everything out of me, both physically and emotionally. When it finally came to an end and Matt wrapped the black belt around my waist, I was struggling to hold back the tears. I was completely overwhelmed. The first time I’d encountered BJJ was on my TV screen at home when I watched Royce Gracie at UFC 1. I had no idea what he was doing or how he did it, but I knew I wanted to learn. Just over ten years later, here I was being acknowledged as an elite practitioner of that very art. Being awarded a BJJ black belt had long been an objective of mine, but most of the time it seemed more like a pipe dream. Nobody in my country had ever reached that level, but I suppose I’ve never been deterred by things like that.
The funny thing about Brazilian jiu-jitsu is that reaching the top tier doesn’t mean you’ve completed the journey. Far from it. BJJ is so complex that you can’t perfect every single aspect of it. You never reach the finish line. So while there was great satisfaction in receiving my black belt, I soon reverted to the mindset I had always approached the game with: Okay, there’s still a lot to learn here so let’s get back on the mats and resume that process.
While that was a landmark moment for me, it was also significant for BJJ and MMA in Ireland as a whole. The country now had its first black belt and there were many others, such as Andy Ryan, making progress up the ladder. It was another indication that the Irish MMA scene was heading in the right direction.
By 2007, SBG Ireland was known as a team to be reckoned with. Owen Roddy, Aisling Daly and Tom Egan were all winning regularly. So too was Gunnar Nelson. Gunni first came to Dublin to train in 2006, a year after we had initially met in Iceland. The improvements he had made in that short period of time were remarkable. Gunni had a lot of support from his family, particularly his father Halli, and they were always willing to get behind his pursuit of success in MMA, whether that required travelling to Ireland, the US or anywhere else for training. While Gunni was in Dublin he stayed in my apartment. He was obsessive about improving. Sometimes there would be a knock on the door of my bedroom at 1 a.m. It would be Gunni with a question about technique that had been keeping him awake.
‘Gunni, go to sleep. We can talk abo
ut this tomorrow,’ I’d sleepily respond.
He fought five times in 2007, picking up four first-round wins after a draw in his debut. It was clear, even at the age of nineteen, that there were big things on the horizon for Gunni. One of his greatest assets was his relaxed mindset. Whether he was watching TV or about to walk out for a fight, Gunni always seemed as though he didn’t have a care in the world. He managed to stay completely calm every time, which is quite rare. After a victory, there wouldn’t be any wild celebrations. His only concern would be where to go to eat. Then he’d immediately turn his attention to the next fight.
Gunni’s rate of progress was almost unprecedented. As well as MMA, he was having a lot of success in Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournaments. Just three years after meeting him I awarded him his brown belt. This was a very proud moment for me – we’d grown close when he stayed with me during his trips to Dublin, almost like brothers. And four years after beginning his BJJ journey, he was awarded a BJJ black belt. The only other person who could rival that achievement at the time was legendary former UFC champion BJ Penn.
Conor McGregor also joined the fight team as an amateur in 2007, before making his professional debut the following March. He cut through his first couple of opponents like a hot knife through butter because the quality of his striking was just so advanced at domestic level. After his first win, I did have to call Conor into my office the following Monday morning. He got a little bit carried away with the celebrations and fired his gumshield into the crowd. It hit a guy in the face and he wasn’t too happy. I could understand Conor’s elation, given that it was his very first fight, but I wanted him to know that he needed to keep himself under control. ‘Don’t ever celebrate like that again,’ I said. ‘That’s not what this gym is about.’
Win or Learn: MMA, Conor McGregor and Me: A Trainer's Journey Page 5