by Dan Hardy
It was all crucial to the game-plan we had formulated to beat Johnson. In essence, I go into every fight with three distinct but interconnected strategies that can be generalised as follows. Plan A is to get in and out with a victory without leaving my comfort zone or absorbing damage. Plan B kicks in if Plan A is not working and states that my opponent must be doing X to counter my Plan A and so I now need to do Y to beat his X. Finally there is Plan C, which is very simple: neither A nor B is working out for me and so I need to bite down on my gumshield and go toe to toe until one of us is unconscious. The specific Plan A for Johnson was to stay out of trouble early but in a way that kept him busy so he’d run out of steam and I could take control in the second half of the fight. Plan B was to counter the fact that he mustn’t be engaging with me by being more aggressive a little earlier until he’s breathing heavily. Plan C was the same as always.
The strategy was based on two vital theories. Firstly, that AJ’s cardio would be nowhere near the level mine was always at and he would inevitably tire and slow down as the fight progressed. His extreme weight cut ensured I could take that assumption to the bank. The second theory was that Johnson was going to trade on his feet and try to spark me out. Now, living up to his nickname Rumble, he had knocked out guys for fun in all his previous victories, and I was seen to be vulnerable, having just had my lights turned off by Condit, my team and I felt we were on safe ground with this prediction too. That confidence then grew when an injured Tito Ortiz withdrew from the main event and was replaced by Phil Davis. Davis was a great athlete but he had no real venom in his work and no real love of fighting. The fans didn’t warm to him because of that and he would eventually become the only fighter in UFC history to be cut from the roster when actually ranked in the top ten of his weight class. A draw like Ortiz he certainly wasn’t and AJ and I immediately recognised our opportunity to steal the show. We began trading private messages on Twitter in which he talked about going to war, throwing bombs for as long as it took, winning the Fight of the Night bonus and putting on a spectacle that fans would talk about for years to come. ‘We should be the main event,’ he said, and I agreed wholeheartedly. There was no doubt in my mind that Johnson was going to try and take my head off as soon as we were instructed to fight.
He didn’t actually appear that big when I saw him stride to the stage and step onto the scales. And when we went head-to-head for the cameras I was quietly pleased that there didn’t look to be much between us in terms of body frame. But twenty-four hours later when I stood opposite Anthony Johnson in the Octagon, it was like they’d switched him for a different, much bigger man. He had piled on 44lbs overnight to arrive at 214lbs and he looked every ounce of that and then some. A year later he failed to make 195lbs for a catchweight bout with David Branch, before breaking Andrei Arlovski’s jaw in a heavyweight contest, and he now campaigns in the UFC as a 205lb light-heavyweight. Having shared the Octagon with this monster for fifteen minutes, none of those three facts surprises me in the least.
What did surprise me on the night were his tactics. After all his messages about fireworks in a toe-to-toe brawl, the big man proceeded to take me down and smother me for three rounds. I couldn’t believe it; he had played me for a chump. I always thought I was smart enough to get the best of any mind games in the build-up to a fight, but AJ sucked me in and I fell for it hook, line and sinker. The most adventurous move he pulled was a head-kick in the opening minute that I blocked with my arm. But my feet were crossed at the time and the sheer weight of his leg knocked me over. From there he charged me into the fence and I dislocated my thumb as we landed on the floor. I remember looking at it while he was on top of me and thinking, that’s not right. He was in my guard and so I tried to reach around his back to force my thumb back into place, but I could barely link my hands together. He was so massive that I felt completely eclipsed. Daniel Cormier recently told me he felt the same against Anthony and Daniel is a full-blown light-heavyweight. I finally managed to pop my thumb back in, but from that point on it was of little use in terms of holding and manoeuvring a giant. I was trying to use a kimura to sweep him, but I just couldn’t get a decent grip on his huge arms and back with a damaged digit. Aside from the beginning of each round or when the ref ordered us back to our feet, I spent the entire night under Johnson’s considerable bulk, struggling in vain to move the battle into a range I could compete in. I was furious with myself for failing to read his bluff and thus finding myself caught in a trap from which I had not prepared an escape. I just didn’t consider the possibility that a knockout artist would hold me down for fifteen minutes. His nickname is Rumble, for fuck's sake! I launched into Plan C at the outset of the third round, but I was too exhausted to land anything hurtful and he just shot and took me down as soon as he could anyway. He stuck fast to his strategy until the final second, exploiting my weakness all the way, and earned the unanimous decision.
I saw him four years later in a hotel lobby in Stockholm a couple of hours after he had beaten Alexander Gustafsson senseless in three brutal minutes and joked that I was glad he didn’t do that to me. AJ just smiled that easygoing smile of his and replied, ‘Yeah, but I like you, man.’ I half-seriously wondered then whether he kept shooting against me just so he didn’t have to knock me out and risk seriously hurting someone he had no wish to seriously hurt. Did he decide to kill me with his own warped view of kindness? To be honest, I’d rather be knocked out inside a minute than spend a quarter of an hour being smothered. And more importantly in the grand scheme of the UFC business, so would the paying public. Fans want dynamic striking exchanges and knockouts and the UFC has structured its fight-night bonus scheme accordingly. If every fighter fought the way Anthony did that night against me, the UFC would be dead within a couple of years. Though impressive in its own right, attritional wrestling matches will never appeal to a mass live or televised audience. I have no problem with wrestlers using their skills to win a fight, but when they use them just to basically shut down or avoid a fight I think something needs to be done.
I have two perspectives on the debate. The first is that the fans will respond to the intention of fighters regardless of what they understand in terms of the intricacies of grappling on the ground. I have no love for Matt Hughes as a person but as an athlete he is the perfect example to illustrate this point. He took people down, held them down, beat them up and there was no booing because the crowd loved it. They could clearly see that Hughes’ intention was to win the fight by hurting his foe and drawing blood. AJ did not do that against me though. He took no risks, caused me little damage, never looked like he was on the point of finishing me and that’s why he was booed during and after our contest.
My second belief is that the scoring system must be modified so that negative wrestling approaches are not rewarded. Matt Hughes was always trying to end the contest, he wasn’t thinking about what he needed to do round by round to emerge a points victor. But a smart coach like Greg Jackson, who is building a team of athletes rather than fighters, knows exactly what to do to win with minimal risk. It’s the intelligent approach and to watch a talented athlete in any sport is impressive, but when it comes to fighting there is something deeper at play. Especially when considering how the fans gravitate towards a fighter. They want to connect with that chaotic, primal endeavour taking place inside the Octagon. But a high-level MMA coach will be able to look objectively at a fight, identify without bias the safe and danger zones for his athlete, and prepare them accordingly. A paint-by-numbers game-plan is written out and, as long as it is followed, the risk of injury or defeat is kept to a minimum. A fighter can thus take the current system and play by the rules to score points, earn a round, and win enough rounds to win a fight. One of the most blatant demonstrations of this thinking is ensuring you score a takedown in the final seconds to steal a round. To my mind, that is not a tactic we want to see dominate MMA fights. The system should encourage and reward aggression, risk-taking and the intention
to finish the fight in any given second. Fighters shouldn’t be going into battle thinking, Okay, I’ve got three or five rounds and this is the scoring system, how do I fight according to that system to emerge victorious? It should be much simpler than that. It should be, This is a fight, how do I beat this man? It is why I liked many elements of the old PRIDE scoring system in Japan because it placed more weight on what happened towards the end. If a fighter got off to a slow start but spent the entire second half chasing and getting closer to a knockout or submission, he would be favoured and scored more heavily for doing so. It eliminates the chances of a fighter simply holding an opponent down to nick the first three rounds, then clearly losing the final two but still having his hand held aloft at the conclusion. To be honest, I think the type of fighter that shoots for takedowns then clings on will be, and probably already is being, phased out of the sport, but adapting how we score fights now would undoubtedly expedite that process.
It would also make it interesting if someone like GSP made a return to the Octagon. There is a real clamour for Georges to make a comeback now but I think a lot of people are looking back in time through rose-tinted spectacles and hold a rather romantic memory of how St-Pierre fought. He was obviously a phenomenal fighter and champion, but if you actually watch footage of his later contests, plenty of fans are booing out of boredom. He began his career more aggressively and attack-minded, but after he paid the ultimate price against Matt Serra he started playing the percentages more. I spent twenty-five minutes in a cage with the undisputed best fighter of my weight class on the planet, and I left without a scratch on me. Something isn’t right there in my opinion. It also goes against what I see as the raison d’être of martial arts. Bruce Lee said it himself: ‘defeat your opponent as quickly and efficiently as possible’, and that is my own perspective every time I step into the Octagon. GSP and AJ both beat me fair and square, but neither could be said to have done it quickly and efficiently.
In the dressing room after the AJ fight, I looked over at my cornermen, Steve Papp and Roy ‘Big Country’ Nelson, and realised I had lost confidence in their ability to improve me. To be fair, there weren’t many genuinely slick, organised and professional corners in operation at that time. Jackson, who coached GSP and cornered Condit against me, probably stood out from the crowd. He went as far as mimicking the cadence or inflection of a foreign fighter’s accent to replicate someone with their mother tongue speaking English as a second language. But the vast majority of fighters were just making do with the corners they had and not really gaining anything from them between rounds. Owen Comrie had been with me for every bout before Steve, but Owen could be very intense and when he got worked up he even slipped into his native Jamaican Patois which I found hard to follow at times. Nathan Leverton was normally alongside Owen. Nathan was very technically-minded and because of this, always had a lot of information to impart between rounds. When my heartrate is up and my adrenaline is pumping, I found that a more relaxed and positively-minded corner worked best to calm me down and reset me for the next round. The frantic atmosphere in that old corner team set-up gave me the information I needed, but the way in which it was delivered made it difficult to digest in the short sixty seconds of allotted rest. Steve then came in for the Swick match-up and I loved working with him. He was fully committed, always had a smile on his face and gave me 100 per cent no matter what else he had going on outside the gym. He also had great Muay Thai and general striking knowledge. But Swick was Steve’s first time cornering in an MMA fight; he was a novice in this world. His lack of expertise shone through at times, like when I had GSP in a brief side-control and I heard him urge me to knee him in the head. He was still learning the intricacies of the sport and thinking in a street-fighting sense. Nelson then joined the camp after the Condit fight. I met him at the North Carolina show I attended during my road trip after GSP and he did a good job convincing me we would make a great team. The idea was that I would settle in Las Vegas to help him with striking and conditioning and in return he’d help me with jiu-jitsu and wrestling. Nelson is a black belt under Renzo Gracie and he wrestled all through high school so I believed he could certainly improve my game. He had lots of experience against top guys and I also felt I could benefit from a new voice and fresh perspective within my circle. But the relationship deteriorated soon after the move to Nevada and by the time the AJ fight came along I had little time for Roy. I just didn’t feel he was as committed to my career as he could have been, considering how much I invested in this during camp. The sum of all those moving parts was that I always felt I was merely working with what I had in terms of a corner. When I went to train with GSP before he fought Condit in 2012, his coach, John Danaher, told me I had been winning throughout my UFC career in spite of my coaching. That was a big moment. It made me stop and think and I saw that he was probably correct. If I could do it all over again, and I had the resources to make it happen, I would move to the US, sign up with one of the big teams, and settle there on day one. But back then I had neither the money nor the contacts nor even a working visa so I got my head down and worked with what I had.
But sitting there with Steve and Roy after the AJ fight, I had never felt more defeated in my life. With my thumb in a bucket of ice I listened to Steve tell me that the journey wasn’t over, that I’d get another chance and there was lots we could improve on. I wasn’t convinced. ‘I’m done, Steve,’ I told him. ‘I’m just not enjoying this any more. It’s time for me to do something else with my life.’ I meant every word of it too. If I’m honest, I presumed the UFC were going to get rid of me anyway. That was my third strike and it is extremely rare that a fighter gets given another life after a trio of consecutive defeats. I had always said that my plan was to ride the UFC rollercoaster until the wheels fell off. There was no way I was going to grind away out of the spotlight in front of a few hundred drunk, bloodthirsty fans on a lower circuit, praying each time my phone rang that it was Lorenzo or Dana inviting me back into the big league. I was ready to move on. As far as I was concerned that night in Seattle, the Outlaw had retired.
• • •
The UFC didn’t cut me, however. Part of the reason for that is down to the gauntlet of killers I had lost to: there was disappointment but certainly no shame in losing to GSP, Condit and Johnson and that bought me some leeway. But I was no longer so naive about my standing within the organisation and I understood that everything was a business decision. The UFC had invested a lot of time and money in me as a brand and I was still marketable due to my fighting style, so the last thing they wanted was for the Outlaw to go and be successful with a rival promotion. I was also easy to work with, never turned a fight down, did all the media work required, and never tried to renegotiate my contract or demand more money. I guess I was the consummate corporate employee, a by-product of being more interested in fighting than riches. And yet I no longer felt treated as such. In fact, I no longer felt particularly valued by the UFC at all. Part of the problem was undoubtedly due to my naivety in the early days when I was winning every fight and everyone was being nice to me. I felt they were building me and allowing me to develop without being rushed, like they were matching me perfectly with exciting bouts that would challenge me in various aspects of my game, yet were within my capability if I gave it my all. I then got my title shot without a delay, lost it but was immediately back in the mix versus Condit. At that time I still thought I was one of the golden boys and that Condit was the perfect guy for me to beat and get straight back into contention. But looking back I see it more as a no-lose situation for UFC. If he won, he was the new fresh contender. If I won, I was back looking for an eliminator again. The UFC would win either way and probably had little preference as to which man advanced. When I then got AJ I really started to understand that the organisation wasn’t interested in me on any personal level, that their interest was in me as a commodity and nothing more. This was a desperately discouraging insight, but the seeds of hopelessness
had been sown even earlier than that.
I felt like I had done more than my fair share of the promotional duties ahead of the GSP fight. There was little interest in it when it was announced as most said I couldn’t win and didn’t even deserve to be there. So I worked my ass off for the Primetime show and all the rest to sell PPVs, PPVs that only GSP as the champ would see a penny of. Amidst it all I lost my grandad and didn’t let that affect me outwardly. I didn’t bat an eyelid when the UFC effectively took over my camp and scuppered all my plans. And I survived twenty-five minutes with a legend. I knew how well the PPV had sold and so when I later got my cheque and it was nowhere near the level of compensation I believed my endeavours deserved I felt truly undervalued. GSP spent five times my total cheque on his training camp alone. Okay, he’d fought his way up the ladder into a position to be able to do that, but I was hoping that after facing him I’d be rewarded enough to be able to make a similar investment in my own career. But it hadn’t worked out like that. Apparently, in some people’s eyes, I hadn’t progressed at all from my first fight in the UFC. Up to then they’d looked after me and met my very humble expectations with their discretionary bonus cheques, but that was no longer the case. Having spoken to other title challengers I had an amount in mind for what I would receive after GSP and the final number was way less than I hoped. I felt I had busted my balls for nothing other than a loss on my pristine UFC record. I felt disillusioned, like I was a cash cow they’d fully drained. I felt like my investment, in terms of money, time, my entire life really, was never going to pay off as I had once imagined it would. Then I was punched unconscious in London by Carlos Condit and I began questioning whether this was all worth it from the point of view of what I was putting my family through. My head was spinning a little, with everything feeding in to a grand sense of disillusionment with my career in MMA.