by Dan Hardy
The UFC needed footage for three episodes of their Primetime series, which was then their major promotional vehicle. That meant that for four full weeks, in addition to all the standard media work that comes with a PPV title fight, I had a UFC camera crew all over me, around the clock. They were nice, professional people as you would expect, but the nature of the work meant it was the most intrusive and exhausting experience of my life. Aside from the unsettling feeling of having cameras following your every move, there was a constant stream of little demands that soon began to wear me down. Could you just walk back through the door, please? Could you just do that again but look this way, please? Would you mind just changing your T-shirt for this next part, please? One night I got a call at 1am from an apologetic director who said they needed a shot of me coming out of the lift in my apartment block. It had to be done right away ahead of whatever deadline they were working to in the US. On another occasion they had me in the gym in the dead of night with the main lights off, hitting the heavy bag and doing pull-ups while they sprayed me with water for effect. It was deep mid-winter in England at this time and absolutely freezing but, as always, I obliged. It felt like I didn’t have one minute of the day when I could just switch off and relax. Years later I asked GSP how he dealt with it all and I could see him looking at me like, it’s hardly that big a deal. But as we talked I realised that he didn’t have to endure anything like what I went through because they already had so much footage of him in the can from his previous sixteen UFC bouts. ‘They just called up when they needed something,’ he told me. ‘And if I didn’t want them around that day, we just rearranged another time.’ I wish I could have had that luxury.
Then, just when I felt it couldn’t get any worse, Grandad Derek died. He’d fallen seriously ill over Christmas and had been hospitalised ever since he took a real bad turn. For weeks, my routine was train, hospital, rest, and repeat. I spent hours at his bedside and on occasion had to excuse myself for five minutes to conduct an interview over the phone with one media outlet or another. I hadn’t mentioned anything about my grandad’s situation to any of the media, but one evening talking to a Canadian website they asked me where I was and what I was doing and, without really thinking, I answered that I was in the hospital. They immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion and started worrying about my own health and whether there was any risk to the fight, so I decided to explain the situation. I told them how influential my grandad was in my career. How he’d driven me to Taekwondo and back for all those years and even joined me in the classes for a period. How he’d always found a way to get me any book or piece of kit that could help my evolution as a martial artist. How I would go to him ahead of a fight just to listen to how proud he was of me. How I could do no wrong in his eyes. How he’d been the one closest to me along every step of my journey to the UFC. How he’d seen me as a kid on the bad days when I’d fail and cry and lash out at Mick and swear I’d never be back. How he’d been there on the good days too when I’d overcome a hurdle or reached a milestone and walked away with an extra spring in my step. How I valued every second I ever spent with him. Basically, what he meant to me and how much I loved him. When the interview finished I walked back into the hospital room and stood beside my mum, dad, sister, grandma, cousin, two aunties and an uncle. Ten minutes later, we all looked on as Grandad took his final breath.
It was so hard to lose him. And the fact that I was barely a month out from the biggest fight of my life and had cameras following me everywhere exacerbated the nightmare. I remember my coach having to start asking them to turn the cameras off in the gym because between rounds of sparring I would sit on the stool, let my mind wander to Grandad, and just start crying. They asked to go to the funeral to get some footage as well, but I had to draw the line somewhere. Like I say, they were all nice, professional people who were just doing their jobs, but some moments in life are too personal and painful to be used to sell a few more PPVs.
• • •
A couple of days after Grandad’s funeral, and without feeling that I had in any way processed losing one of the most important figures in my life, it was time to fly to America to complete my training camp. I had everything meticulously planned as usual. With my striking coach Steve Papp I flew to Newark, New Jersey and met up with Alder Hampel, a jiu-jitsu black belt friend of mine from 10th Planet who was going to assist with that side of things. We hired a cheap and cheerful Dodge Caliber, stuffed all our gear into the back, and hit the road for the town of Saddle River, thirty-five miles to the north. This part of the world was chosen for one reason and one reason only: Joe DeFranco. DeFranco became famous off the back of his documentary Strong, but he had been well known in strength-and-conditioning circles for years. Since the year 2000, DeFranco has been preparing top college football players for the make-or-break NFL Scouting Combine with an unrivalled success rate. His speciality is the so-called Cinderella story, taking guys you wouldn’t expect to perform well in the tests and evaluations and having them add reps to their bench press, inches to their vertical leap, and shave seconds from their forty-yard dash, to excel at the Combine and get drafted into pro football. As far as I was concerned, there was no better man in the US to pick up my strength and conditioning prep from where Ollie left off in Leicester, and it was Ollie who reached out and set the meeting up. Joe also knew a guy nearby who had wrestling mats in his garage and had secured the services of local high-school wrestlers to keep me sharp until it was time to taper off the training. If I needed it, there were also a couple of boxing gyms in the area that could provide adequate sparring at the drop of a hat. I was happy and confident I was in the right place to get into peak condition for GSP.
When we arrived at our hotel in Saddle River, the UFC cameras were already there and waiting. They followed us up to the one room I had booked for the three of us, a spartan affair with two single beds and a fold-out sofa for whoever drew the short straw. To nobody’s surprise, I ended up on the sofa – number one of the 48 Laws of Power: Never outshine the master! I could see the UFC crew looking a little puzzled by the scene, and when they saw the wheels I had hired and the garage I was planning to train in, I sensed them stealing eyebrows-raised glances at one another. About an hour later my phone rang and it was Dana White on the other end of the line.
‘Hey, Dan,’ the UFC president began, innocently enough. ‘How’s it going, buddy?’
‘All good thanks, Dana. Just getting settled in Saddle River.’
‘Right, right. Here, Dan, what car did you get by the way?’
It struck me as a peculiar question, but I described our humble motor.
‘Okay, yeah,’ he continued. ‘I tell you what, Dan. Give the keys to one of the crew there and they’ll go change that for you.’
‘Eh, okay,’ I replied.
‘And, Dan, where are you planning to train for this?’
‘Here in Saddle River, Dana. I’ve sourced a garage with mats and there are a couple of local gyms—’ I began before the president politely cut in.
‘Okay, buddy. Listen, what you’re going to do is get into the new car that comes back for you and drive to Long Island. I got a guy there waiting for you.’
By now the penny had dropped that my low-budget version of a US training camp was not exactly what the UFC had in mind for its welterweight title challenger. Dana and the Fertittas had drastically overestimated the size of my bank balance at this point in my career. The runner from the camera crew was soon back with quite the upgrade, a massive, top-of-the-range cream Escalade. In working-class Saddle River, where everyone drives more subtle and nondescript vehicles, it stuck out like a sore and garish thumb, but the UFC had TV to make so what could I do? I clambered aboard my pimpmobile and we started the two-hour journey to Long Island. Once there I waited for the cameras to get in place and then stepped out of my ride like 50 Cent, strode through the doors of Serra’s Gym, and dramatically clasped hands with the proprietor, à la
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers in their famous ‘Dillon! You sonofabitch’ scene in Predator.
Matt Serra was the last man to beat GSP, having spectacularly and surprisingly knocked the champion out in the first round of their meeting at UFC 69 back in 2007. He had been given about as much chance going into the fight as I was being given this time around, and the UFC was keen for us to link up and build that storyline into the hype. Serra was pretty much retired by that point, but he had his own MMA school and it was doing well. He is as talented a coach as he was a fighter and he was extremely generous with his knowledge as he helped me prepare. People may think that it was all a superficial partnership manufactured by the UFC for the benefit of the cameras, but Matt really dedicated a huge amount of time and energy to me. He had been in pretty much the same boat as me before he fought St-Pierre, in that his only hope of victory was a big one-in-ten punch landing. But he had also identified all the problems GSP would pose him and he now applied his learning to me. For three weeks I tirelessly worked escapes and positional considerations with his three best black belts and I truly believe I wouldn’t have survived his arm-bar attempt if it wasn’t for those sessions. It was actually nothing revolutionary, but I simply couldn’t have replicated that intensity anywhere else. In three short weeks, Matt equipped me with everything that he thought might be useful from a grappling point of view.
Matt Serra is also a hilariously funny and entertaining guy. He’s very Long Island, which for the uninitiated means he’s like a brash New Yorker but even louder and more to the point. Everyone is given a nickname, and my training partners for the few weeks I was there were Monster, Bam-Bam and He-Man. Ray Longo works closely alongside Serra and he is a great character himself, famous for saying to Chris Weidman in a thick Italian-American accent, ‘I want you to punch a hole in his fucking chest,’ between rounds against Anderson Silva. Weidman stood up and knocked the great Brazilian out a minute later. It was just great fun being around personalities like that – they deserve their own TV show.
All my best-laid plans were in disarray, however, and I had to make a slightly awkward call to Saddle River to explain I wouldn’t be needing that garage with the mats on the floor. But it was all good. Matt’s entire team were so accommodating and I couldn’t turn down the chance to learn from a guy of his quality and experience. The UFC also rented us much nicer individual hotel rooms in Long Island, but I kept doing the daily four-hour round trip from Saddle River and back to see Joe DeFranco and call in on the hotel room I’d already paid for upfront.
By fight week, although the training had tapered off, the media and publicity demands were still pretty intense. The main press conference was at the famous Radio City Music Hall in the Rockefeller Centre, and from there I went to watch the New York Knicks from courtside in Madison Square Garden and was interviewed at the half-time break. It was all a bit surreal, as was looking up in Times Square and seeing a massive poster of myself adorning the side of a building. Well, most of me anyway . . . I was told different reasons why it was necessary, but Mike Swick’s stomach was photoshopped in to replace my own. The problem was my tattoo of a Tibetan prayer in intricate Sanskrit lettering: it either made the event information difficult to read or was offensive to the emerging and important Chinese market. Either way, I had Swick’s toned and pristine stunt-stomach in place of my own.
But as fight night drew closer, I became more and more relaxed. It was nearly time to do what I was born for, what I was truly good at. It was also nice to be in among the fans now the UFC cameras had been switched off. I may get my fair share of abuse online, but face-to-face 99.9 per cent of the public are warm and friendly when I meet them. Perhaps it helped this time that the trash-talk was kept to a bare minimum and the one-liners I did come out with were clearly tongue-in-cheek banter rather than anything resembling personal attacks. Some of the highlights were claiming I was going to knock the fake tan off GSP and that I had no idea how he managed to get his jeans on in the morning with so many people hugging his nuts. When he made a comment about being a true martial artist, something I apparently couldn’t understand, I fired back that he knew nothing about me and that walking to the Octagon in your pyjamas (GSP wears his karate gi for his entrances) didn’t mean anything. Like I say, more humorous than venomous this time around.
Being the main event, and my first UFC world title fight, didn’t weigh heavily on me at all. It may have been a little new and a little different, but I certainly didn’t feel under extra pressure. This was probably due to the fact I was such a huge underdog with pretty much everyone who voiced an opinion on the fight. But that negativity didn’t bother me, in fact it fuelled me. I function better when I have that fuck-you mind-set after listening to everyone say I’m going to get submitted in the first round. I respond much better to that than to being told how great I am and how easy a night it is going to be for me. What did sting a little, however, were the frequent accusations that I didn’t deserve this title shot, that it had been somehow gifted to me. There were fans, media and jealous rivals like Josh Koscheck all beating that drum. The week after I destroyed his teammate Mick Swick, I sat cageside at UFC 106 to see Koscheck defeat Anthony Johnson and then take the mic and claim I didn’t deserve to fight GSP. The camera immediately zoomed in on me and I responded in jest with the boo-hoo face that still appears as a gif on my Twitter timeline at least once a month. Like many people who meet him, I don’t like anything about Josh Koscheck, but his words pissed me off more than usual this time. I had worked so long and so hard for everything I had achieved in mixed martial arts. I knew that I absolutely deserved whatever came my way for all the blood, sweat and tears I’d left in the gym and cage and Octagon over the past decade or more. There is no doubt that it was a stacked welterweight division in the UFC back then, but Swick was the established number one contender and I beat him convincingly. Rankings are always subjective and should be consumed with a pinch of salt, but I was already well positioned and rising in any list available before the Swick fight. The other names in the top ten were Jon Fitch, Thiago Alves, Paulo Thiago, Nick Diaz, Matt Hughes, Paul Daley, Martin Kampmann and Koscheck. GSP had already beaten Fitch, Alves, Hughes and Koscheck, and I was ranked higher than Diaz, Daley and Kampmann by everyone whose opinion counted. Paulo Thiago certainly deserved a shot, but I beat Swick before he did, and when I beat Swick it was an official title eliminator so it is a bit of a moot point. There is no doubt that plenty of the criticism sprang from my nationality as well, suggesting that my elevation to title contender was simply a nod to the expanding British market, but I had a wise enough head on my shoulders to realise I couldn’t do anything about that. All that mattered was that I and those around me knew I belonged where I was and that I was ready to prove all the naysayers wrong.
Backstage in Newark’s Prudential Center, I shared a dressing room with Frank Mir, who was battling Shane Carwin in the co-main feature. Frank is a great guy, super mellow. With the clock ticking, his coaches were eager for him to begin his warm-up and he was shooing them off as he tried to finish whatever game he was playing on his phone. I know that elite professional boxers automatically receive their own individual dressing rooms but in the UFC we pretty much always share, at least two in one large space. And I prefer it that way, being in with someone else who is fighting. I also like the fact we always have a TV screen in the room so I can watch the other fights on the card, something else that boxers apparently rarely do. I can’t tell you the difference between us, but I know it would be odd for me to be sitting alone and isolated with my team, just twiddling my thumbs and waiting to hear Burt Watson cry, ‘We’re rolling!’
The UFC had a camera installed high in one of the corners to keep an eye on us at all times and we soon realised it must be controlled by some guy in a truck somewhere. You could walk from one side of the room to the other and back again, and the lens would mechanically swivel to record your every step. At one point, just to kill some time,
I waited until it wasn’t focused on me and leapt across the room to squeeze into the corner underneath it and the only square foot which it couldn’t cover. Above my head I could hear it going mad, spinning this way and that looking for me. I liked to imagine the controller had just turned away for a drink of his coffee for a split second and when he turned back I was gone. Maybe he radioed Dana or Lorenzo saying, ‘Sir, we’ve lost him.’ It was like a scene from Orwell’s 1984.
Mir’s wife was there the whole time too and she decided to stay with me in the warm-up room and watch her husband in action on the TV rather than take her seat octagonside. As wives or partners or family members tend to be, she was incredibly nervous. Her state of mind was to deteriorate pretty fast, however, as Frank got knocked out midway through the first. Mrs Mir was an absolute mess and, when I really should have been focused on the mammoth task I had in hand, I was consoling her as Frank was struggling to his feet on our TV screen. It was just another bizarre quirk that formed part of the unique build-up to this one.