Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me

by Dan Hardy

  Dad’s short fuse when antagonised naturally shaped my own interactions with others and back in school it soon became clear that I had my own combustible side. The reserved, timid even, pupil during class had a temper that went from zero to sixty in a heartbeat. Inspired by the Turtles and the ninja moves with which they defeated all their foes, it wasn’t long before I spent every spare minute charging around, aiming flying kicks and strikes at whoever happened to be in my way. It was never anything malicious, but it became wild and dangerous behaviour which the school felt obliged to bring to my parents’ attention. Then a new boy joined our class and, presumably inwardly anxious about stepping into a foreign environment, decided he’d settle in and make his name through force. Bullying is a strong term among kids that young, but certainly he targeted me in particular, seemingly intent on boosting his own social status in the schoolyard hierarchy off the back of my downfall. But he had miscalculated and while antagonising me one afternoon when the teacher had left the class, I Sparta-kicked him in the chest and sent him careering backwards over desks to land on the floor in a frightened daze. I had ensured he would never bother me again, but my reaction was to run to the toilets and lock myself in a cubicle. Looking back now, I can see that I simply didn’t have the tools to deal sensibly with such a conflict, either mentally or physically. My parents were again informed, of course, and it was clear to everyone that I needed both an outlet and a control for the aggressive energy that burned ever brighter within me.

  I am sure my dad would have loved me to follow him down the football path, and I did play for a few teams. The fact that I am naturally left-footed, coupled with English football’s infamous dearth of left-footed talent, normally ensured I could get a game on the wing. But I was never particularly good and, more importantly, I was never passionate about being one of twenty-one other kids kicking a ball around a muddy grass field. I liked being outside in nature, and enjoyed the Beavers and Cub Scouts for that reason, but I also spent quite a bit of time alone in my bedroom where it was all about pirates, Lego and, of course, the Ninja Turtles. For no other reason than my infatuation with those four sewer-dwelling reptiles, it was decided that a martial art might be the key to settling my volatile temperament.

  I was immediately delighted with the suggestion and imagined myself soon pulling off the acrobatic ninja moves with which Michelangelo and his cohorts settled their differences. No one in our family had any real understanding of the different disciplines within martial arts, so taekwondo was chosen purely because there was a school just around the corner from our house. Again, I couldn’t have been happier. Two of my friends, Ryan Middleton and Luke Rowlett, were among the coolest kids in the area and they both practised taekwondo. I had always associated their popularity and apparent total lack of a care in the world with that fact and now I was going to learn their secret.

  I was giddy with excitement on the first night I strode into Eagle & Hawk Taekwondo School. The classes took place in the same local community centre hall in which I had attended playschool, Beavers and Cubs, so I was totally at ease in the surroundings and couldn’t wait to get started. We were all standing at one side and I remember just looking up and down the line with a big grin on my face, almost dancing on the spot such was my positive nervous energy. From the top of the hall, a large man in a white uniform with a black belt around his considerable waist marched down the line and stopped abruptly right in front of me. He was middle-aged, somewhere in his forties, had a big gut, thinning hair and an ugly, greasy complexion. Without warning he suddenly tilted forward and yelled in my face at the top of his voice.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he screamed. ‘I don’t want the likes of you in my class. Get out of here!’

  I turned and fled, the tears streaming down my face before I’d reached the door. I sprinted home and straight upstairs to the sanctuary of my bedroom. That hall had always been a fun and safe place for me and I had walked around smiling ever since Dad told me I’d be learning taekwondo there. Within seconds, this guy had managed to shatter all that. Mum, the lioness, wasn’t happy. I was reluctant to return but when she found out what had happened she marched in to the following class with me in tow and ferociously demanded an explanation. It turned out that the previous instructor was a one-off, just filling in for that night. The two regular instructors, Mick Rowley and Paul Allsopp, apologised profusely, put Mum’s mind at ease, and I tentatively agreed to give it another shot.

  It would be disingenuous to suggest I took to taekwondo like the proverbial duck to water, however. Mick and Paul were tough men who fostered a harsh and at times intimidating environment. Eagle & Hawk was a World Taekwondo Federation school, meaning the martial art was taught with full-contact strikes. Right from day one, punches to the body and kicks to the body and head were not just permitted, but expected. A commercial club, the type that hands belts out just for turning up every Tuesday and Thursday and devalues and delegitimises the entire grading process, it most certainly was not. Eagle & Hawk was the real thing, a place to learn both discipline and how to fight via a martial art. ‘You’ll know when you deserve a new belt,’ Mick would often say when he learnt of someone pining for an upgrade.

  But at the outset I was under the command of Paul, who took all the younger kids. Both men could come across as tough and unforgiving at times, but I always felt that Paul was sometimes mean just for the sake of it. Exercise and drills were fierce, often to the point of exhaustion, and the likelihood of consequence if the exercises weren’t completed was enough of a deterrent to ensure I pushed past the point of pain. From his perspective I’m sure it was just an attempt to strengthen our minds, but it made my first few years of training a very unpleasant experience, full of silly, unnecessary physical tests that were dangerous for our young, undeveloped bodies. I remember doing leg raises as a six-year-old until my muscles seized up and there were plenty of nights like that. He pushed us very hard considering our age, and I normally rose a little gingerly the morning after class. When Mum noticed this, her maternal instinct kicked in and she began challenging Paul. As an aerobics instructor she was a stickler for doing physical exercise and movements the correct way. Because of her aerobics background, she believed that exercise shouldn’t hurt, that you shouldn’t wake the next day battered and bruised with muscles aching: certainly not when you’re six years old anyway. Her interventions naturally rubbed Paul’s macho ego up the wrong way and did me few favours during class. It seemed to me that I received his patented hawk-talon pinch on the chest more often than my peers. There were many moments in which I would have walked away if there was an easy escape route, but I could see how proud my parents were and didn’t want to disappoint them. I think this was the first time I realised how stubborn I could be. I had been chased away from martial arts by intimidation on my first night, but I wasn’t going to let it happen again.

  Within a year I was deemed ready for my first tournament. I remember the creeping terror overwhelming me as early as the drive to Harvey Hadden Sports Centre. I sat in the backseat of my dad’s beige Ford Fiesta, looking out the window and wondering what the hell I was doing travelling to an organised physical confrontation. We arrived and I stood on a scale and somebody scribbled down a note and I was told what category I was in and ushered off to the side. I felt a little abandoned then, as I sat waiting and waiting for my fight. I seemed to sit there for hours, the dreadful sense of anticipation in the pit of my hollow stomach growing all the while. Finally, I was called onto the mats. I had advanced two grades up from my original white belt and was now a yellow belt. Across from me stood a kid, two years older and substantially taller, with a blue belt around his waist. It is highly probable he was from a school with a much more generous approach to grading than Eagle & Hawk, but even so, two tags and a green belt come before blue so, if nothing else, my opponent clearly had far more experience than me.

  More important than my foe’s abilities, however, was the clear fac
t that I was just not ready for this environment, that I was totally under-qualified to deal with it either physically or emotionally. I had never before been in a situation in which someone with whom I had no previous argument was going to attempt to kick me in the head with genuinely bad intentions. It was all totally surreal. I felt more like a passenger, like I was at the side watching myself standing in a fighting stance. As soon as the bout began, I wished it to end. I was a rabbit caught in the headlights. I went through the motions, spinning and kicking, but I was removed from the confrontation. I kicked out, but with no real intention of landing. Suddenly, I got my wish and I found myself lying on the ground with the contest apparently over. The next thing I remember is seeing my mum crying. I later found out that my opponent had kicked me on the temple and briefly knocked me out. That was the end of my first ever competitive martial arts tournament and, sitting in the back seat of the car as we drove home, I was determined it would be my last. Why on earth did I volunteer for that? I thought to myself. No chance I’m ever going back there.

  And for the next two years I didn’t fight competitively. More than that, I immediately wanted to walk away from taekwondo altogether. But when Mum got over the initial shock of seeing her only boy curled up on the mat after being kicked in the head, I could see that the pride in her eyes shone even brighter than before. I wanted to quit, but I couldn’t let her or Dad down. And so the following Tuesday I was back in the Eagle & Hawk School, going through my drills, with Mick and Paul’s stern, watchful eyes looking on.

  • • •

  Two years after the trauma of my debut, I was back at Harvey Hadden Sports Centre for my second tournament. This time I knew what to expect but that made my nerves even worse than they had been as a trembling six-year-old stepping into the unknown. I was up against a kid of a higher grade again in my first fight, but we were evenly matched physically and I was now much more comfortable in my body. I remember my opponent had a red head-guard and red spots on his body armour and I just told myself, aim for red. And unlike two years before, I was now fully accustomed to landing kicks and strikes on a foe. I beat him on points, and then won my semi-final in a similar fashion to advance to the final, where a teammate was waiting. He actually suffered an asthma attack and the final was abandoned midway through the second round. As he was ahead on points at the time they awarded him the trophy, but I didn’t really care about that. I was just elated to have felt so at ease within a fighting arena and to have walked away from the day with only positive memories.

  I was never as nervous before a fight again, but it wasn’t until the age of ten or eleven that I could honestly say I enjoyed taekwondo. By this stage the Eagle & Hawk had fractured and I went with Mick. He was still a hard taskmaster, at times backing me into a corner during sparring, provoking tears and other emotional outbursts. But when Mick pushed me to my limits, there was always a reason behind it, even if I couldn’t immediately see what it was when I felt beaten up and humiliated. He also knew that I, as his most committed and consistent student, was the one who could be tested in such a severe way. On one occasion I stormed out, hurling the most vicious insults I could think of as I left, and Mick later said he was sure that it was the last he would see of me. But I now respected him unconditionally and trusted him implicitly. Mick had a much wider understanding of martial arts and what they represent than anyone else I knew. We were now training in a local school hall and on evenings when pedagogical rank was pulled and we were forced to vacate the space for a school play or parents’ evening, Mick secured the use of a video room and arrived bouncing like a kid on Christmas morning with his bag of VHS tapes. He would have spent hours the previous night lining up precise moments within certain fight scenes.

  ‘Now, lads,’ he’d say, ‘I want you to watch here how Benny “the Jet” Urquidez uses a jumping spinning kick to end this contest.’ Then he’d eject that tape and plunge in another, excitedly warning us to pay close attention to Cynthia Rothrock’s hand fighting in close. He introduced me to all the big names in martial arts: to Jean-Claude Van Damme, to Jackie Chan, to Sammo Hung and, of course, to The Master, Bruce Lee. I watched them all, particularly Lee, open-mouthed. In my eyes he was the truest martial artist on the planet. The likes of Van Damme with his balletic moves and Chan or Hung with their background in the acrobatic Chinese circus appeared to be entertainers and movie stars first and martial artists second. But Lee was totally immersed in martial arts. And what he did on that grainy video footage, on that 19-inch television screen that we all crowded around, seemed magical to me, totally unreal. They were unattainable skills but I liked to lie in bed at night and imagine doing what he did. Everything in life would be forever okay if I could fight like Bruce Lee.

  I watched Lee’s movies religiously and even at that young age I saw him for the martial arts revolutionary he was. In the opening scene of Enter the Dragon he defeats Hung by submission at a time when nobody in martial arts was talking about needing a ground game. In Game of Death, unfinished due to Lee’s sudden and untimely death in 1973, the film climaxes with Lee fighting his way through a pagoda to reach the main bad guy, played by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He encounters a variety of opponent, including karate black belts and eskrima and hapkido masters, and adapts his style to defeat them all. This was the literal mixing of martial arts long before anyone coined the name Mixed Martial Arts. In that first fight in Enter the Dragon, Lee and Hung even fought one another donning Bong Sau gloves not at all dissimilar to what is used in the UFC today.

  Even more important than Lee’s somewhat stylised moves for the silver screen, however, were his words. Throughout his movies he shared his philosophy of martial arts and proved he had a perspective miles ahead of his peers. In Enter the Dragon he talks of being like water, of having no particular style, of being prepared for whatever might be thrown at him. This had a massive and profound influence on me. I could see I was developing the skills necessary for conflict in certain situations, but there was still so much I had to learn. I hated any feelings of vulnerability and was determined to learn enough to be comfortable in whatever scenario the old head on my young shoulders could envisage. What if my opponent has a weapon? What if we are in an enclosed space? What if there are several attackers? Before I was fuelled by my parents’ pride, but now Bruce Lee drove me to train and better myself.

  In the meantime, I had begun to perform consistently well in competitions in towns and cities all over the Midlands. Having been a relatively slim and slight youngster, around the age of thirteen I suddenly filled out. Unfortunately, this filling out was largely centred around my waist and consisted of a layer of unwelcome fat. It was useful bulk for the rugby pitch, and I was selected as a prop forward for the school team, but it did me no favours in the taekwondo dojang. Not only did the extra and unflattering heft make me an easy target for barbed jibes, but it also hurt me on the scales at tournaments where I would be forced to battle older, much stronger boys. Sometimes, if I was close to a lower weight-class, Mick would hastily pull me to one side and suggest a trip to the bathroom and ten laps of the sports hall before I officially registered. I was still too young to appreciate the importance of weight classes but I can now see the distinct disadvantage I was at and for a couple of years I lost fights because of it. It wasn’t until a girlfriend of Mick started talking to me about nutrition and drew up a special diet to follow that I began reaching my potential. It was as if I progressed from unable to able within a year as the weight fell off. It was like removing a 10kg weight vest that had been dragging me down and sapping my energy. I now felt like I had an extra engine and this boost coincided with a testosterone increase that was a function of both the weight loss and simply entering my mid-teens. Suddenly, I was blessed with explosive power. Leg muscles that had been strengthening while they laboured under the excess weight suddenly propelled my lighter torso as fast as anyone else on the football or rugby field. Suddenly, I was launching a shot put metres beyond my scho
olmates’ efforts. And suddenly, I started winning almost every taekwondo competition I entered.

  My grandad, my mum’s dad, was by now a massive part of my martial arts world and taekwondo had become our thing. He had been driving me to and from class for a few years when one day in conversation with Mick he mentioned that he would love to be able do some of the moves he saw us execute.

  ‘Well, why don’t you, Derek?’ Mick replied bluntly. ‘You’d be more than welcome here and I don’t see what there is to stop you.’

  So the following week, at the age of sixty, my grandad had his first taekwondo lesson alongside his thirteen-year-old grandson. He kept going for five years and, despite health problems, gave it his absolute all in every class. I remember one evening when Mick had us all hang from a bar in a line to see who could hold on the longest. One by one, younger, lighter, fitter and stronger guys dropped, but Grandad held firm. He had closed his eyes as if in meditation and, by the time everyone else had fallen from the bar, he was still off in his own world. He hung from that bar so long without the slightest movement that Mick finally approached and gave him a gentle prod just to make sure it wasn’t rigor mortis keeping him in position.

  After Mum and Dad’s pride and Bruce Lee’s genius, my relationship with Grandad now became the anchor preventing me drifting away from martial arts. There were plenty of days when my mind wandered, normally warm summer days when all my mates were arranging to meet up in the park or organising a game of football. A part of me longed to ditch taekwondo for the night and go with them, but I knew that Grandad would be waiting outside the house at 5.30pm in his white Austin Metro, thrilled to see me as always. Not that he would have outwardly expressed any disappointment had I told him I wasn’t going that night. He never did that, never forced any expectations onto me. I was perfect in Grandad’s eyes; whatever I chose to do was fine by him. But I would have sensed the pang of disappointment he kept buried within. I would have felt his regret that it would be a few hours he couldn’t have with his grandson. I knew how much he looked forward to it, and so did I. As we grow up we naturally spend less time with individual members of our own family so I treasured this time that was set in stone each week. He must have listened to some nonsense spout from my mouth over the years during those drives to taekwondo and back. For a while I became obsessed with UFOs and anything supernatural. I’d talk him through episodes of The X Files and he’d turn up with newspaper clippings he came across that had anything to do with aliens or crop circles or any phenomena potentially difficult to explain. I look back on my moody-teenager days and wish I could have those evenings back. The times when I slumped into the passenger seat, stuffed in two earphones and listened in sullen silence to Megadeth for the entire journey. But even that was okay with Grandad too. He was never judgemental, never critical. All he ever did was love and support me. Whatever I needed, Grandad would have it within a week. If Mick mentioned a particular book worth having, Grandad tracked it down for me. When he saw we were starting to use the focus mitts more often, he bought me a pair. And he was brilliant with his hands as well, capable of making almost anything out of wood. When I wanted a heavy bag to practise my striking and kicking at home, Grandad went into the garden and built a frame upon which I could hang it. Nothing was too big of an ask for him, he’d always come through for me.