by Dan Hardy
Title
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Dan Hardy
The right of Dan Hardy to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2017
by Headline Publishing Group
First published as an Ebook in Great Britain
by Headline Publishing Group in 2017
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Every effort has been made to fulfil requirements with regard to reproducing copyright material. The author and publisher will be glad to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
Cover photograph: © Larry Rostant
eISBN: 978 1 4722 4380 5
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Contents
Title
Copyright
About the Author
About the Book
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
PREFACE
1 THE ORIGINS OF A FIGHTER
2 THE PATH TO MMA
3 THE OUTLAW GROWS
4 THE PROMISED LAND
5 THE RISE
6 THE FALL
7 MY REPTILIAN SELF
8 WOLF HEART
PICTURE SECTION
PICTURE CREDITS
About the Author
DAN ‘THE OUTLAW’ HARDY is an MMA and UFC competitor and now commentator and analyst. Part Reptile is his first book. He lives in Leicestershire.
About the Book
DAN HARDY has been in the world of Mixed Martial Arts for the best part of thirty years, first as a fighter, and now by covering fights in the media. In Part Reptile, he takes the key fights from his career and explores the sport with the unparalleled insight that has made him the best analyst working today.
From training in China with Shaolin monks, to how MMA helped him channel his rage, to psychedelics and the ceremony in Peru that changed his life, to tapping into his ‘reptilian brain’ and the psychological warfare of UFC, this is a book for anyone interested in what it takes to be a fighter at the highest level.
Hardy also explores the heart condition that forced him to stop fighting, the road to UFC recovery, and the evolution of a sport that flies in the face of mainstream disapproval to entertain and thrill millions of obsessives around the globe.
Dedication
For Grandad Derek
Acknowledgements
It’s hard to know where to begin when thanking people for a lifetime of help and support. Right at the beginning I had a mother and father willing to set everything aside and make me their priority. I had a waiting room full of people anxiously standing by for news of my arrival and every one of them has played an integral role in my development as a person. I have also encountered a lot of awesome people on my journey so far, and they too have helped me, guided me, lead me, and at times carried me in the right direction, and this book would need twice as much paper if I were to thank every one of them individually. I have made an attempt to name a few of the key people below, yet there are many, many people that may go unthanked in these pages, but they are far from unappreciated.
My family are amazing. I couldn’t have wished for better parents and grandparents, they have been a constant and consistent support network from my first breath and I will be eternally grateful. My little sister, Gemma, has been a ray of light since she was born and continues to inspire me every day with her talents and work ethic. Aunties, uncles and cousins were always close by and have given tremendous support in a variety of ways, and have added to the foundation that is my family. I couldn’t have had such a beautiful life so far without these people around me.
As I have travelled around the world training with some of the best martial arts teachers available, I have been equally as blessed to meet people generous with their time and expertise. They have shared knowledge with me and invested hours into my development, often for little or nothing in return, other than the satisfaction that they were a part of the chain that keeps the martial arts alive. I have to begin with Mick Rowley. The first person to really teach me what it is to be a martial artist. Hours of each week for years of my life were spent learning from and training with Mick, at Eagle Taekwondo. His obsession with combat was infectious, and his questioning mindset kept me realistic in my training, preparing me for many cage, ring, and, ultimately, Octagon confrontations. I owe him a lot and will always hold him in the highest regard for all he has done for me throughout my life.
Continuing along my martial arts journey chronologically, Master Lec is the next teacher I would like to mention. Never would I leave a training session without being as exhausted as I was exhilarated by his Muay Thai training. He also guided me to my first Thai boxing fight, and I have loved the sport ever since.
That leads me onto Owen Comrie.
Much like my training with Mick, Owen and I spent many hours working together over several years of competition. A lot of late night pad and bag sessions, and too many early morning circuit sessions, including the tradition of Christmas morning before everyone else is awake. He traveled around the world to corner me and we enjoyed a lot of success together. His singing along to the music in his headphones whilst working his way through the travel-stash of Ritz crackers and peanuts, was the soundtrack to many a fight week. Falling out with people in the crowd while cornering was his specialty, as was trying to steal something from the hotel or venue, sometimes with my Nanna Barbara as an accomplice! Regarding training though, Owen was exceptional. His skill at all ranges as well as his conditioning always set a high bar for his fighters to reach, even at half his age.
Nathan Leverton comes next. Still one of my go-to guys if I have questions or want a high fight IQ to bounce ideas off. It must have been a nightmare trying to get through to us at times, but I recall many instances on fight day or before my way out where he would say exactly the right thing to focus my mind.
Furthering my knowledge of the striking arts, I have to thank Steve Papp. He joined me at a very difficult time in my career and was a source of strength and enthusiasm when I couldn’t muster any myself. I still enjoy working with Steve and his commitment to teaching, patience and humility and absolute love of the martial arts allows him to reach many people and be a positive influence in their lives.
Thanks to Eddie Bravo for many enjoyable and mind-opening sessions at 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu, and for encouraging creativity in martial arts practise. To my new team in Vegas, Shawn Yarborough and Ricky Lundell, thank you for your investment, and for having my back when I was coming off four losses and many people thought my career in the UFC was over. And to Jimmy Gifford, nothing but love and respect. One of the humblest, loving and most real people I know. Always good times, good laughs and good energy.
Along this journey I have trained with hundreds of great people and amazing fighters, of all disciplines, very few I would call brothers though. My secon
d family, Team Rough House. My ‘blood, sweat and tears’ family. Paul Daley, Jimmy Wallhead, Dean Amasinger, Andre Winner, Ollie Richardson, Steve Tetley, Nick Osipczak, Paul Barton, Lee Livingstone and Tamai Harding, I’m grateful for every one of you and thank you for the arse-kickings over the years. My American team mates, Mac Danzig, Frank Mir and Alder Hampel, thank you for your guidance and friendship. Ricardo Samms, for evolving my way of thinking when I was in much need of an upgrade. My approach to professional competition and preparation for it was greatly influenced Ricardo, and I became a better athlete from the many soul-destroying runs that he would take me on!
Thank you to the UFC for providing me with a platform to challenge myself and allow me to do what I truly love. To Dana White, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta for investing in and helping establish the sport of Mixed Martial Arts, and creating an industry for martial artists like myself to thrive. To the old guard, Joe Silva, Burt Watson, Stitch Duran, Huitzi, Bruce Buffer, Goldie and Joe Rogan, for the roles they played in my UFC career. Picking my opponents, looking after me during fight week, protecting my hands during battle, growing my mind and hear and, to the last three gentlemen, for providing the soundtrack to the best years of my fighting career. Thank you all.
And for a final few key individuals, Ian Dean for playing a pivotal role in my early career. Matchmaker for Cagewarriors, part of my management team, and valued friend. There is not a more selfless and giving individual in the sport of mixed martial arts and the European scene in particular is what it is today because of his investment and commitment. My trusted friend, Wad Alameddine, thank you for looking out for me, fighting my corner, running my errands and generally being the kind of support network that every fighter would be blessed to have in a manager. My brother, Beto, for accompanying me on a very important journey, sharing his beautiful photography with me in this book, and being the quiet wisdom and positivity of which the world needs more.
Thank you to John Gooden for being my partner in crime and for his commitment to the sport. You will be hard-pressed to find a more upstanding and conscious individual in all aspects of life. My amazing wife Lacey, for the love, support and guidance at challenging times, and for the patience and understanding when I haven’t been the best version of myself (which is more often than I'd like to admit!). My favourite teacher, my best friend and my beautiful love.
And to the people that made this book possible. Richard Roper for assuring me that people may enjoy reading my story and setting the wheels in motion, and Paul Gibson for helping me pull this mess together. His patience while listening to me ramble on, and shoot off on weird and, at times, pointless tangents. It would have been impossible for me to put this into words and hand it over for printing without great reluctance if it weren’t for his help. Over the last few months of working on the manuscript, he has served as a therapist and friend as well as writer, and I am very grateful for his efforts in helping me pass on my story so far.
And, finally, a huge thanks to you for taking an interest in my life. I truly hope that you have enjoyed the read, and I wish you peace, love and good health.
Epigraph
Caput Gerat Lupinum – Let His be the Heart of a Wolf
PREFACE
My life to date has revolved around fighting, around my pursuit of striking a man’s jaw with the optimum speed, power and timing to rotate his head, disturb the grid of nerves and blood vessels connecting his brain to his skull, and render him temporarily unconscious. My fights are my reference points. And I admit that sometimes I struggle with that fact because I know most people tend to bookmark their journey with more traditional, much less malevolent, landmarks. They recall the likes of birthdays or holidays when seeking to put a moment in time from the past into context. Where were you living in 2004? Well, let’s see. I turned forty in 2004 so that means I . . . What were you doing with yourself in 2012? That was the year we spent a month travelling through Europe so . . . Ask me the same questions and I’m beating Hidetaka Monma into a bloody submission in Tokyo or putting Duane Ludwig to sleep with a sharp left hook in Vegas. Choose another year and I could be the fighter rising gingerly from the canvas in a semi-fugue state or battling to keep the blood flowing from my head back to my heart as my jugular vein and carotid artery are closed by an arm attempting to choke the life from out of me. Beyond that brief, exhilarating existence inside a cage, my mind’s eye won’t wander too far. To the torture of the gym or more psychological and spiritual preparation elsewhere perhaps, but certainly no further. Fighting. For thirty-four years, my journey has been signposted by fighting.
1
THE ORIGINS OF A FIGHTER
From a foetal ball, curled up on a blue gym mat, I rolled my head to one side and tried to focus on a figure in the sparse crowd watching on. Through the haze of a fuzzy version of consciousness I spied my mother, sobbing and dabbing at the tears building in her brown eyes and threatening to flow freely down her cheek. I was seven years old and I clearly remember thinking, no, this is not for me.
It all began a few years before that. Looking back, Michelangelo has a lot to answer for. Like every other young boy at school in the late 1980s, I became obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When the bell sounded for break time, I sprinted onto the playground with an imaginary orange mask tied around my head, swinging make-believe nunchaku in the air with innocent, childish glee. I chose Michelangelo out of the four because he appeared to be everything I was not. He was the loud and funny one, the laid-back free spirit. In that always-too-brief window between lessons I longed to be that character, for I knew as soon as I was back in the classroom I’d revert to Dan, the quiet, insular, still-unsure-of-himself kid. Many years later it dawned on me that Raphael, the darker lone wolf of the quartet, was closer to the real me, but at five years old that Californian surfer-dude persona was the one I most aspired to.
Life had been a pretty comfortable bubble up until that point. I was basically not long out of the safe confines of playschool and, with no older brothers or sisters to lock horns with, home life had been largely strife-free too. The first three years were spent at my grandparents’ house in Clifton, three miles south of Nottingham city centre in the Midlands of England. My mother and father were both only seventeen when I arrived and did not yet have the means to fend totally for themselves. Mum, the youngest sister of three, was terrified of telling Grandad she was pregnant but he took it in his stride.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said after a brief pause to consider the life-changing news. ‘We will love it and look after it.’
I remember going to my parents’ wedding when I was three, sitting on the church pew eating Jelly Tots and playing with a toy car. Before long we’d moved into our own small home. We were still in Clifton at this stage, regarded as a relatively rough working-class area of Nottingham, but we never had any major problems. A few weeks before I was born, my dad, Mark, began an engineering apprenticeship and for many years he worked twelve-hour day or night shifts. When he was on nights I remember having to tip-toe about the house, fearful of waking the potentially angry, hibernating bear upstairs. Thirty-five years later he’s still at the same company, albeit now in a management role and long past having to grind it out through the night. After a few years we moved to the slightly more affluent, lower-middle-class environs of Silverdale so I could go to a half-decent school in neighbouring West Bridgford. Mum was a part-time aerobics instructor and began volunteering at the pre-school I attended. She would eventually go to university to earn a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in childcare and now runs the school.
In many ways we all grew up together, Mum and Dad maturing and learning to handle their own emotions while I looked on and absorbed everything. The little I understood about conflict or aggression I picked up from watching them going through the regular trials and tribulations of daily life that we all experience in our early twenties. Mum was a lioness, a generally relaxed charac
ter until she felt the need to protect one of her own. So it was from my dad that I would catch more frequent glimpses of the combative side to our family’s nature. He was an only child but my grandma is a very tough woman and, along with her sisters, she ensured her son was anything but mollycoddled. I remember standing on the touchline on a Sunday morning while he tore about the football pitch for ninety minutes. Grandad Ian was often alongside me, doling out sweets from a secret stash in his coat pocket. Unlike his son in centre midfield, sliding forcefully into every tackle and wading determinedly into the centre of the melees that pepper the average pub league match, it seemed to me that Grandad always had such a calm demeanour. Later I’d sit in the corner of the pub after the game and watch Dad enthusiastically participate in the caustic banter between teammates that British sporting environments are renowned for. I knew he was the same at work, nailing lunch-boxes to benches and verbally torturing any poor soul who had the misfortune of committing the most minor of mistakes. My sister Gemma was born when I was four and the following summer we went on a budget holiday to Mallorca, staying in a hotel that struggled desperately to justify the three stars on its gable wall. One day we returned from the beach to find that Gemma’s cot had been removed from the room. When Dad went downstairs to ask for it back I was there to witness him lunge across the reception desk at an ignorant manager who dismissively suggested we drag a mattress off another bed and let the newborn lie on that. Even at four years old, I understood my dad’s anger. I didn’t know what he was angry about exactly, but I knew that he was arguing in defence of my little sister. I always took the responsibility of being a big brother very seriously and I remember immediately feeling very protective of her as soon as she was born. Gemma has been one of my biggest supporters from day one and a huge source of inspiration for me. I’ve never known anyone so musically talented and able to learn new things so quickly. After receiving a saxophone as a Christmas gift one year around the age of ten, she barely put it down to eat dinner and was playing like Lisa Simpson by the end of the day. She attended a lot of my UFC fights and I could always pick her voice out of the crowd above all others. Even with thousands of people cheering, my ears seemed to be tuned in to her particular tone. It may be because I’m so familiar with it, or perhaps it is down to us having basically the same DNA, but either way it gave me a much-needed boost at the right time in many of my fights.