by Dan Hardy
• • •
Cage Warriors called to offer me a fight with Chad Reiner in Florida at the end of March and the American was exactly the type of opponent I needed to face at that moment in time. Not only was he a respectable name in the MMA world and a decent test for any welterweight at my level, but he had also just fought twice in the UFC. When I sat at home and built the case in my head for why I should be signed to the UFC, the lack of a victory over a fighter with Octagon experience was one of the holes I needed to fill. I believed that with a win over an established name they could overlook me no more. A couple of weeks out from the fight, my belief was proved accurate. It was all hush-hush and totally off the record, but my manager had been told by an insider that if I beat Reiner I could expect a call from the UFC. I was absolutely buzzing. I trained like a demon and then we flew to Kissimmee for Cage Warriors USA: Battle Royale. It was a big expansion move by the British-based Cage Warriors and I was installed as the main event, ably abetted by my Rough House teammates Andre Winner and Jimmy Wallhead. A fourth guy, Greg Loughran from Northern Ireland, was also on the bill and after surviving with us for the week in our rented accommodation, he became an honorary member of the team.
On fight night, I was primed and ready in the dressing room as the time approached midnight. Jimmy was out in the arena in the middle of his fight, then Andre was up, and then me. My hands were wrapped, my mouth guard was in, I’d built up a sweat and couldn’t wait to get out there. Jimmy’s fight went the distance and he lost a unanimous decision, and sitting in the dressing room we could hear the roars and the applause and then the crowd dying down to near silence. The commissioner entered and Andre stood up, expecting to be told to make his way to the cage. Instead, the gentleman announced that the show was over and we may as well start packing away our things.
‘Hold on a minute,’ I immediately countered. ‘The show isn’t over. It can’t be, there are still two fights to go.’
‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ the commissioner replied gravely. ‘The promoter only paid for insurance for the day of the event, and that policy unfortunately expired when the clock struck twelve midnight. We all need to get out of here now.’
I couldn’t believe it. While Andre, the most laid-back man in the world just shrugged his shoulders and started getting changed, I sat grinding my teeth. I was all-consumed by the energy to fight. I had begun the physical and psychological process that can only end with a violent confrontation. In my early years on the MMA scene I had fought with too much rage and not enough control and over time I had learnt to redress that balance. But I still flicked some switches inside my head that could not simply be ignored. I had engaged the part of myself I reserved for combat and it is difficult to put that monster to bed without satisfaction. The next day I went on a pre-planned trip to the Disney theme park Typhoon Lagoon with my fiancée at the time, but I was still seething inside. Mickey fucking Mouse and his pals were walking around with inane grins on their faces while all I wanted was to have had my fight and my closure. Somehow I kept it together, but as soon as I got back to the UK I was on the phone to Cage Warriors demanding a solution. To their credit, they were apologetic and, more importantly, promised to rectify the situation as soon as possible. ‘We’ll try and get Reiner over here to England in the next couple of months,’ they said before adding that my purse may suffer due to the budgetary requirements of flying Reiner and his team in from the US. ‘I couldn’t give a fuck about my purse,’ I told them. ‘Get him over here so I can knock him out!’
True to their word, Cage Warriors brought Reiner over five weeks later and we met in Nottingham on another Enter the Rough House card. Given the importance of the fight for me, I was pleased when it was announced as a five-rounder for the vacant CW welterweight title, the one that Petz had vacated but never returned when he signed his UFC contract. Chad came into MMA via wrestling and he was a good, tough, ground-and-pound fighter. It was no surprise then that he spent the first ten minutes of the fight attempting to take me down. He had some success early on, and locked a relatively tight guillotine around my neck for about thirty seconds, but he was mistaken in underestimating my takedown defence. I sprawled well to defend the majority of his shots and when he was successful, I coped comfortably on the deck and was soon back on my feet and in the range in which I knew I would dominate. My effective takedown defence started to wear him out and, beginning with the very first exchange of the second round, I was soon landing good, hurtful shots with fist and elbow. At the very end of the round I dropped him with a thudding knee into his face and as I marched back to my corner with a spring in my step, I looked back and saw a rather forlorn Chad Reiner on his knees and breathing heavily. To emphasise the difference between our current physical conditions, I bounced hyperactively on the spot as we waited for Marc Goddard to clap us back into battle. I knew Reiner was more or less done and all I needed was one clear opportunity to knock him senseless.
I never gamble because fighting provides all the adrenalin rushes I need without having to chase more by throwing my hard-earned cash away. My dad doesn’t either, but once a year he puts a 50p bet on a horse in the Grand National for each of us in the family. My luck was in that April at Aintree and Dad’s low-stakes punt won me a crisp five pound note. I decided to keep riding that luck and slipped it into my wraps as they were going around my wrists and hands in the dressing room. My signature punch was always the left hook and I originally thought I would put the fiver in the left wraps. But having spent part of training camp working on slipping the jab and landing a big overhand right counter, I concealed the note in my right hand and forgot about it. Forgot about it, that is, until I forced a faltering Reiner up against the side of the cage with a double jab midway through the third. From there he held out a lazy left and, bang, over the top of it I detonated a right on his jaw and he crumpled. It was over there and then but just to make sure I crouched and swung with both clenched fists until I felt the referee’s intervention.
Elation. Just elation. I roared in delight and then Dad came barging into the cage, grabbed me in a bear hug and started bouncing. I’d done it. I had reached the Promised Land. I was in the UFC.
5
THE RISE
Joe Silva couldn’t believe his ears. ‘What the hell do you mean, you’re fighting next week?’ he shouted down the phone. ‘I have your goddamn UFC contract sitting right here in front of me.’
‘I’m sorry, Joe,’ I told the UFC matchmaker supreme, ‘but I made a promise to the promoter before the offer came through, and he’s already announced that I’m fighting.’
‘Well, if you lose this fight you realise the UFC contract is off the table, don’t you?’
‘I know, Joe. But listen, if I can’t beat this guy, I don’t deserve to be in the UFC.’
• • •
This guy was Daniel Weichel, a talented German fighter well known for his grappling prowess. The Ultimate Force promoter had asked me to appear on his show in Doncaster before the whispers from the UFC became a concrete agreement, and I said yes. And despite how much certain promoters and managers had messed me around in the past, I’m a man of my word, UFC career in the balance or not. I told him I would fight for him, but only if he could secure decent opposition. My days of going through the motions or taking bouts to keep the motor running were over. I needed a genuine challenge, someone I could get easily motivated for, in the opposite corner of the cage now. Weichel fit the bill as he was undoubtedly a test. But he was naturally smaller and lighter than me and I didn’t consider him to be of UFC standard so I was comfortable and confident accepting the bout.
The Ultimate Force cage is different to most in that where the mat meets the fence, it has a triangular wedge of padding running along the joint. It was presumably to prevent a fighter ever getting a foot caught between mat and fence and twisting an ankle, but in a well-constructed MMA cage such additional precaution is largely unnecessary. I
t seems a small and insignificant detail in the wider scheme of the dangers present in an MMA fight, but as soon as I stepped into the cage on the Saturday night, it caught my eye. It was probably still preying subconsciously on my mind when at the instruction to fight, Weichel charged across the canvas, smashed me up against the side, and tried to drag me down to the only range in which he had a chance of causing an upset. Instinctively, I attempted to press my foot into the corner to fix the length of my leg tight against the fence and prevent him getting his arms around my thighs and meeting his hands together. Once those hands are joined it is very difficult to separate them and you are left with few options against the takedown. But with that extra padding, it proved impossible to close the gap between the fence and my leg, and Weichel exploited this unavoidable defect in my defence and took me down. For most of the remainder of the first round, Weichel was all over me, taking my back, squeezing my neck, and generally probing aggressively for any sniff of a submission. I managed not to give him any but the entire five minutes was spent in frantic defence, struggling to get to my feet to beat the fight out of him, and he clearly won the round.
Back in the corner a panic gripped me. That extra padding had caused me more problems than the majority of my previous opponents combined and I couldn’t pull my mind away from it. Baron had denied me a PRIDE contract. The disqualification fiasco in Japan had cost me my first crack at the UFC. And now a few damn metres of Toblerone-shaped padding were threatening to slam the Octagon door closed again without me having had the chance to step inside. I hadn’t seen it yet, but I knew that my UFC contract was sitting in a brown envelope on the table at cageside with my manager. He hadn’t let it out of his sight since it arrived from the US but we decided not to sign it until Weichel was beaten. I knew my parents were seated at that table too, so proud that I’d finally done it. Standing in my corner, I had visions of the contract being ripped up in front of my face. And all because I took a fight that I didn’t really need to take. I shouldn’t even be in this cage, I started thinking, and I’m going to screw this whole thing up again.
Jimmy was cornering me that night and I’ll never forget the look on his face as he peered through the fence to offer me water and instructions. He seemed almost stupefied by a combination of shock and bewilderment, but thankfully he found the exact words I needed to hear to snap out of the paralysis of dread that briefly gripped me. ‘What the fuck are you doing!?’ Jim roared. ‘Fight him for fuck's sake!’
And fight him I did. I decided I wouldn’t bother wasting any more energy trying to get up if he took me down for I was confident that I could match him in any range, including on the ground. And as the absolute last thing this guy was going to do was stand and trade with me, we found ourselves on the canvas early in the second with me in half-guard bottom and Weichel looking to attack my neck. I was able to control the ankle of his free leg and tie his other leg up with a lock-down, a position that I had worked extensively with Eddie Bravo and the 10th Planet crew in Hollywood. From here I was able to use a sweep known as Old School to roll him onto his back and take half-guard top. Now I could shift the momentum of the fight in my favour. Rolling his wrists, I dropped elbows like anchors and forced him to cover his head in fear. Any respite this move provided was short-lived, however, as I immediately slammed the point of my elbow into his solar plexus, knocking the air out of his lungs. His arms involuntarily dropped to hug his ribcage and left his head slightly exposed. Switching straight back to a head attack, I brought my elbow down between his hands and cracked him right on the side of the skull. He turned away and covered his face, clearly hurt, if not partially separated from his consciousness. Seeing the effect, and knowing the inevitable barrage of successive elbows that would follow, the referee stepped in and waved the fight off. Cue my manager striding into the cage with the contract in his hand and a grin as wide as the River Trent across his face. And cue me promising everyone I wouldn’t lay another glove on anyone in anger until I was inside the famed UFC Octagon.
• • •
I knew I was ready for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In fact, I believed I had been ready for at least eighteen months and had begun to get frustrated when I saw other guys around me were getting the nod before I did, guys I knew I was superior to. But now I can look back and see that perhaps the UFC had a bigger plan in mind for me. Rather than simply adding me to a bill due to the need for a sprinkle of British talent to assist with marketing and ticket sales, they allowed me to develop, made sure I was truly ready, and then gave me my chance. This had been my goal for the past couple of years, but, now I had actually made it, I immediately revised my target. Just reaching the UFC was never going to satisfy me. I didn’t want to be one of those myriad fighters who get there, lose once or twice, and then disappear onto the minor circuits for the rest of their careers, never to be spoken of in UFC circles again. In my mind, that fate is even worse than being the guy who never got there but is always told he should have. So now my focus was set on becoming a contender at the top of my division.
My first assignment was a pretty tough one for a debutant. I got matched with the veteran Japanese campaigner Akihiro Gono in the opening contest of the main card at UFC 89 in Birmingham, England. Bisping versus Chris Leben was the headliner and big names such as Keith Jardine, Chris Lytle and Marcus Davis also crossed the Atlantic to be a part of the seventh UFC event to take place in the UK. Gono was a veteran of almost fifty professional MMA bouts and, having watched plenty of him when he was competing in PRIDE, I was fully aware that he was an awkward and crafty opponent for any welterweight on the planet. Having only lost three of his previous thirty fights, he was also full of confidence and that showed in his typically extravagant entrance to the cage. Sporting wigs and comedy sunglasses, he and two of his team paused halfway to the Octagon to break into a well-rehearsed dance routine that even incorporated one of the burly minders who guarantee their safe passage. Gono clearly had no worries about fighting such a long way from home and was determined to bring with him the entertainment element of Japanese combat sports.
Waiting backstage, I surprisingly had no nerves either. In fact, I actually started to feel unnerved by my lack of nerves ahead of the biggest fight of my life. I knew Gono would be tough and tricky, but I felt at ease as I made my own entrance to the Octagon. This was the first fight in which I used ‘England Belongs to Me’ by Cock Sparrer as my music. It was a deliberate statement to all of the fighters coming over to my home country looking for a victory to add to their record, particularly those in or around my weight class. I wanted them to know that I was here now and all the pretenders to the throne need to quieten down. I felt that I had already established myself as the best welterweight in the country by a distance. There was always chat about who was number one and who was number two between Paul Daley and I, but I excluded Paul from my thinking because as a teammate and a brother, we would never fight one another. But as far as the rest of the domestic competition was concerned, England belonged to me now.
I started the fight well, aggressive and on the front foot. I caught him with a couple of solid hooks and a couple more stinging jabs. I kicked him in the chest and knocked him back-pedalling towards the fence. At one point he secured double underhooks, but I shook him off immediately. I felt bigger and stronger than him and wanted to bully him around the Octagon. He finally managed to take me down in the second, but I exploited his moment of rest in a front headlock position and was able to sit out, scrambling back to my feet within a few seconds. But he was as wily and inscrutable as promised and within his unorthodox attack he found the means to have some success. He began to land wild-looking left-hand leads, but never with the knuckles and force of his arm and shoulder behind him. Basically, he was bitch-slapping me every time my right sank low enough to allow it. With one such counter left he caught me with the seam of his glove and split my skin, the first and only time I’ve been cut in an MMA bout. The third was a messy affair in
which I was ticked off for an inside kick reaching his nether regions, and Gono received a much more severe warning for landing two illegal knees to my head while I was on all fours. He got me down a couple more times but could do absolutely nothing with me while on the ground. On our feet I continued to boss the action and landed heavily throughout, drawing blood and swelling his right eye almost shut by the end. As we waited for Bruce Buffer to make the announcement, I was sure I had won but I felt more frustration than satisfaction. Gono was a big Roy Jones Jr. fan and he revelled in making an opponent miss with his loose style and elusive head movement. Unlike Jones Jr. in his prime, however, Gono often forgot that the real challenge was to make someone miss and then punish them as well. He was more a pure spoiler, literally running away from me at times. Part of my job was to pin him down, but for my UFC debut I would have much preferred someone who really wanted to fight. When Buffer announced me as the winner by split decision, I felt relieved more than anything. Relief that I had cleared the first hurdle and was now guaranteed at least two or three more shots to really show the world what I was capable of.