Born to Fight (10 page)

‘I reckon you thought I was going to lose,’ I said. Turns out this fight was the most important of my career up until then.

The K-1 organisation had been steadily gaining momentum since the first Grand Prix I’d seen in 1993, and in 2000 it was going global. There were seventeen events planned around the world, with many serving as feeders for the bigger Japanese events, all culminating in the Grand Prix which was now happening at the 80,000 seat Tokyo Dome.

At that time the Seidokaikan master Ishii-san still sat atop the K-1 organisational tree, but he’d allowed others to control their own, local branches, and the man to be in control of Oceania would be proud Turkish–Australian ex-fighter Tarik Solak. By the time Tarik was granted the K-1 licence, he had a long history of mounting big events,
including the one that had just hosted a hungover coconut who woke up just in time.

Lucy knew Tarik was planning to hold his first K-1 event – an Oceania championship – at the start of the next year, so she started getting into his ear. After all, what would an Oceania championship be without the region’s punching bag? I was eventually invited to fill out the eight-man roster, and I’m sure it was because of my ability to stay in a fight, not because Tarik thought I had any chance of winning. To understand how he felt about my chances, you only had to look at the poster for the event, which featured me behind the other fighters, standing in the dark, barely visible.

I took one more fight before the championships against veteran Tongan heavyweight Neilson Taione, who was another of Lucy’s fighters. This fight was supposed to be a K-1 warm-up for Neilson – her golden boy at the time – not for me. While I fought, though, Lucy and Lolo got a glimpse of the form I would find in the next couple of years.

Taione won a unanimous decision against me, but after the fight Lolo told Lucy the fighter she should be concentrating on was me. Compared with the other fighters I was unfit, undisciplined, inexperienced and far too old to be as unpolished as I was, but Lolo thought I could be a special fighter, if Lucy could ever get me to knuckle down.

I hadn’t been knuckling down. After the Chrisopoulides fight I borrowed a couple of hundred bucks from Alex, which I fed straight into a pokie machine. With no means of repaying the cash, I stopped going to the gym.

After Alex told Lucy about my absence, she approached me with an offer of a sea change. She had a spare room at her place in the ocean-side suburb of Manly, and if I started training again with Alex she’d let me move in. She’d help arrange my timetable and make sure I didn’t piss away this opportunity to fight at the Oceania K-1 event.

It all sounded pretty good – I liked Lucy and got a sense that she did care about me, and not just as an asset either – but I wouldn’t commit to it. I didn’t tell Lucy for some time that it was because I was embarrassed about the money I owed Alex. When I eventually told her, she did her big old belly laugh. ‘Alex doesn’t give a shit about that money. You think a guy like you walks into his gym every day?’

If Alex did care about the money he never gave me any indication of it; he just seemed happy I was back at the gym with him. Excited about the prospect of the tournament ahead, he immediately set out a training regimen that involved running and conditioning as well as technique training and sparring.

I never dreamed I’d do it, but I ended up completing all of it. My days suddenly became very full, starting with a
run at 4.30 am and finishing at 10.30 pm with work, fitness training and a shitload of public transport in between.

Those pre-dawn runs became meditation for me. I enjoyed the quiet of the mornings, with the sound of my own breathing the only thing in my head until some thought formed, which would be studied from a hundred angles. I know it’s silly, but for many of those runs the thought that would end up in my head was the ‘Secret Sound’. During the day I was working at a company that made Blackmores vitamin pills, and we’d listen to a tinny radio locked onto a local FM station. There was constant promotion of a competition whereby, if you could figure out what was happening in the short sound grab, you could win $10,000.

That sound would play in my head over and over again, and I’d dream about what I’d do with the cash. It seemed so easy: just an A–B line between the cash and my pocket. The only other times there’d been such a straight line between me and a decent amount of cash had been when there was talk of committing some criminal act or other.

When my mind was clear and fresh, I’d wonder why the frick I was thinking about a radio contest. Then, during one run, it occurred to me that I wasn’t thinking about the Secret Sound at all, I was thinking about the K-1 Oceania tournament. It also had a ten-grand first prize, and surely
this tournament cash was closer to me than any radio contest money.

When I tell people I never really trained for a specific fight or goal until I was 25 years old, they don’t believe me. In those early days I used to train because I felt like it, not because I was going anywhere with it. I’d never thought about anything but the day ahead until that point: it was as if next week was a possibility, not a certainty.

Things changed after that run. Soon the only free time I had was on the weekend, when Julie would come over from her parents’ place in Campbelltown to me in Manly, and we’d spend full days in my room just talking, listening to music and watching movies. Did I have time for gambling and drinking? No – I managed to stay away from both in that little period before the K-1 Oceania Championships, and it was probably the happiest time of my life up until then.

I must have been running on the weekend sometimes too, because I remember coming back to Julie one morning after having my revelatory moment about the Secret Sound and the K-1. I told her I was going to win the Oceania tournament. I’d never said I was going to do something like that before; I’d often declared that I
could
do something, but had never said that I
would
.

She grunted and went back to sleep.

It wasn’t Alex Tui who taught me how to fight, or Sam Marsters, or Lolo, or anyone. Those guys taught me about ring craft, technique and discipline but, really, I knew how to fight before I met any of them. Most of the guys in the UFC started in another martial arts discipline – in Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu
, or
Muay Thai
, or freestyle wrestling, or karate,
or
Vale Tudo
– and then later picked up the rest of the skills needed to be a mixed martial artist.

When you get into the UFC Octagon, announcer Bruce Buffer says what your base skill is. When I’m announced, he says I’m a kickboxer, but that’s not exactly true. My style was already set when I started K-1, before I’d even stepped foot in a gym. No matter how many fights I have left in me, I’ll never have more fights in the ring and Octagon than I did on the streets of Auckland, where I really learned to fight.

This man is a South Auckland Scrapper
… That’s what Bruce should say.

My trainers drill me now according to what I’m likely to face when I get into the Octagon, and give me some specific responses and attacks that will be useful, but when I step into that cage I don’t go in with the mental clutter most fighters have. MMA has become a very strategically deep sport and every day it becomes more so, but thankfully you can still win if you can punch the other guy until he can’t continue, and that’s always my plan.

I go into my fights now with the same strategy I had when someone would throw me that look in the mid-nineties – I go in there looking to get that big shot. If I do, it’s all going to be over. The only thing I need is an empty head, and I can let my fists go. After the Oceania
tournament, I knew how I could empty my head. I had to train.

When I’ve done the work for a fight, I can’t wait to get into that cage. In the cage, I’m free, like a greyhound running or a bird in flight. In the cage I can do what I’m best at, what I’m built for. When I’m fighting, I can transcend my life and feel grace. If you’re in the ring with me and my mind is free, God goes through my fists. If God be with me, then who can be with you?

I flew down to Melbourne for the K-1 Oceania tournament well rested, well trained and well and truly ready to lay some people out. Despite my record indicating it should be a short trip (it was a ‘loser goes home’ tournament), I knew for the first time in my career that I’d done the work and, with the work done, I just didn’t see how any of the other fighters could stop me.

My first two opponents gave me the opportunity to settle some old scores. In the quarterfinal I was drawn against Clay Auimatagi, the same guy who, with his brother, had come at me with chains and bats in South Auckland so many years ago. There was no talk of this between us before I knocked his ass out of that tournament, nor after. I have nor had any ill-will.

In the semifinal I was drawn against Rony Sefo. With his brother absent, already an established K-1 fighter
earning the big bucks in Japan, Rony was the tournament favourite. I hadn’t really thought about my loss against him in Newmarket back in the day until I saw him in Melbourne, and it made my skin crawl. I was hoping our paths in the tournament would line up and when they did, I couldn’t wait to get in there. I’d done plenty of shit in my life I wished had gone down another way, and a lot of that was irredeemable. Not fighting, though. If you lost a fight, you always had the opportunity for a rematch and when I stepped into the ring with Rony, I resolved never to lose one of those.

Rony is another good guy I have no ill-will towards, but at the time he was another bloke who really needed to get his ass beaten. I fought within myself against Rony, picking my spots with a cool dispassion that won me a unanimous decision.

In the last fight of the tournament I fought Phil Fagan, a muscular British fighter who’d resettled in Australia. I accounted for him easily, laying him out cold in the second round. When all the tournament brass piled into the ring to give me accolades and a trophy, it seemed I was the only one who wasn’t surprised about how the day had played out. Lucy seemed to be the most astonished of all, and also the most ecstatic.

‘I hope you’ve got a bloody passport,’ she said.

‘I didn’t swim to Australia.’

Did I need my passport to pick up my money? It seemed an odd thing for her to say. ‘What do I need my passport for?’ I asked.

‘You’re going to Japan, boy.’

Someone had probably told me at some point that if I won the tournament I’d be going to Japan to fight in one of the big K-1 events feeding the Grand Prix but, as a rank outsider, it’s also possible no one had thought it necessary. Either way, I never took the information on board. Even after Lucy told me, it didn’t seem real.

‘Oh yeah, okay,’ I said blankly.

Travelling to Japan? It was like someone had informed me they were going to triangulate the hypotenuse of my pancreas. It didn’t mean anything to me. After I won, I just concentrated on the here and now, which by the way was pretty fucking good.

I’d cruised through that tournament like a hot knife through butter, and Tarik Solak congratulated me warmly after the fight. It was very different from my last post-fight interaction with the bloke when, after the Chrisopoulides fight, Lucy had approached him about the fighter’s meal money. He’d looked at her as if she’d asked him to lick her armpits. He eventually reached into a wad of cash and threw two 50-dollar notes onto the ground in front of the
two of us. In that moment I should have learned a little about the relationship between management and fighters, but I didn’t and would have to learn about it later, the hard way.

Julie and I were happy homebodies, so I spent the ten-grand prize money on my room – new sheets, a new TV, a new DVD player, some kung fu movies and some new duds. I felt like a king in that room, and could scarcely believe that I could treat my girl to a night out of Chinese food and drinks, before heading back to fresh sheets and a DVD copy of
Bloodsport
. I kept up my training, too, not because I was thinking about Japan, but because I was enjoying the routine of life.

After my Oceania win some other first-class kickboxers gravitated to the Mundine gym, so I soon had a couple of tough heavyweights to spar against: Peter Graham, a local guy who would carve out his own solid K-1 and MMA career; and Auckland Auimatagi, Clay’s brother.

Peter, Auckland and I went hard in the gym. One day it would look like Peter had it over me; the next day Auckland would be on top; and then maybe me the day after that. I loved those battles, and they brought out the competitor in me.

I trained intensively for my first trip to Japan, which is not to say I was ready for it – I wasn’t. I was ready for
the fight, but I wasn’t ready for the experience. The fight was to be in Nagoya, a mid-sized port city, against Jérôme Le Banner, a very experienced Frenchman known as the best fighter on the K-1 roster to have never won the Grand Prix. He’d won everything else and had got through all the way to the Grand Prix final, but had never made it over the last peak.

Everything about that trip was overwhelming. I’ve been to Japan dozens of times now and I love the place – the people, the food, their passion for combat sports and especially how they’ve embraced me as an athlete – but when I flew to Nagoya that first time, I was a kid in an adult’s body, a stranger in a strange land. Lucy and Alex had both travelled in Asia before: Lucy had been to the K-1 as an observer and Alex had fought around the world, but I’d only been to Australia and New Zealand, which have only the slightest of cultural differences.