Born to Fight (19 page)

Eventually Yoshida turned me into a weird body pretzel where I was on top of him, but with an arm and a leg wrapped up by his limbs. Eventually we worked our way into the corner and the ref decided to stand us up. We wheeled around for a little, and Yoshida went for the
single again, but I saw it coming, bracing his shoulders and sending a big old knee at his big old head. I mis-timed the strike a little though, hitting him in the left collarbone, which snapped in half.

Kudos to Yoshida – he gave me no indication he had a broken bone and shot in again at my legs. Once more I stuffed the takedown, jumping into his guard. I could hear the yells of ‘noooo’ from my corner that time, but I was fighting my way now. If I was going to beat this guy it needed to be by way of fist to the face. I did manage to drop some big shots into the jaw of the former Olympic champion before he threw a triangle over me and eventually rolled me over for an arm bar.

He was a tough bastard, this Yoshida guy. He’d copped a broken bone, and still managed to beat me. This Pride thing was going to be no joke.

Five and a half minutes and it was all over. Earning fifty grand a minute didn’t suck, but I thought the brass would be pissed at me and the other fighters would mock me. That wasn’t the case. Both the executives and the fighters had encouraging words for me. There had been other guys from K-1 who had lasted seconds, not minutes, when they first got to Pride. I’d lost, but they reckoned I could give these blokes in Pride a run for their money.

I had four months until my next fight, and I spent a lot of that time practising takedown defence and escapes, which are basically moves designed for getting off the ground if you end up down there. Sounds easy, but that’s not the case when you’re in the ring with someone who’s spent their entire life stopping you from doing just that.

My second Pride fight was against Dan Bobish, a giant American collegiate wrestler-cum–mixed martial artist with experience in a number of fighting organisations including the UFC. At 160 kilograms, Bobish was going to be the biggest bloke I’d ever fought and I had no doubt he’d try to get me on the ground.

He tried for the first minute or so of the fight to take me down, but I managed not only to keep him off me, but belt him with some pretty nice uppercuts and knees as well. I opened him up above the left eye with one of those and the ref stopped the fight, but only for a moment as the doctors deemed he was able to continue.

After the break Bobish did take me down, and there he lay on me for six or so minutes. Every so often he’d posture himself up so he could throw punches or knees at me. At one point I ended up in the turtle position, on my hands and knees, where he could throw knees at my head at his leisure.

I was so green, I had no idea how to get out of that position. Bobish kneed my head so many times I lost count, only stopping because – as he said after the fight – he was worried he might break his kneecap.

As Bobish moved up and down me, looking for more places to hit me, I kept trying to go through my mental files to match an escape to the position I was in. By the time I found something I thought would work, Bobish had moved again.

When I finally matched position and escape, Bobish, a guy who made me look like a league halfback, had exhausted himself belting me. We got to our feet, his hands and knees hurting from battering me and his gas tank well and truly exhausted. I was pretty gassed too, but I figured I only needed enough in the tank for a couple of punches, if I threw them correctly.

As Bobish lurched towards me, looking for another takedown, I popped him with a nice, sharp little uppercut. That rocked him. One knee to the head and one liver kick later and he was tumbling towards the ropes like a felled tree. He was done. There was no need to jump on him and inflict any further damage.

That was my kind of fight. He’d come at me and come at me with what at the time felt like endless undefended
strikes to my head, but I stuck around. If I stick around long enough, I’ll get you.

At the end of the fight Bobish was sent off to hospital, not because of the glancing uppercut or body kick that stopped him, but because he thought he’d blown his knee out.

When I got backstage I was greeted with cheers from the Brazilian ground-fighting contingent who, in their broken English, praised my escape and finish. When I joined Pride the other fighters welcomed me, but I knew they sniggered at me behind my back. They thought I was going to be an easy win for them like most of the kickboxers who came over to MMA, but that’s one of the things I love about martial artists, they always give credit when credit is due.

‘Escape, huh? Is good. Is very good,’ Antônio ‘Minotauro’ Nogueira, one of MMA’s most talented Brazilian fighters, said with a respectful handshake and bow when the fight finished.

It felt so good. Dan Bobish was a journeyman (and was cut from Pride after our fight), but he was a mixed martial artist and a ground fighter and I’d beaten him. I felt like I was now part of the club.

It would only take one more fight until I felt like I owned the club. My next bout was against one of the most famous MMA and Pride fighters in history – a guy who was on
an eighteen-fight unbeaten streak against legendary fighters such as Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson, Kazushi Sakuraba, Dan Henderson and Mirko ‘Cro Cop’.

I was about to take out the Axe Murderer.

I love living in Western Sydney. That place is heaven to me. There’s no bullshit there. Everything you need is there, and nothing you don’t. There are no Ferraris driving down Campbelltown’s main street and no one looks twice when blokes like my mates and I walk down to the coffee shop. I don’t get hassled by someone trying to get me in on their dodgy business or a cousin asking for a loan because they’ve
been charged with sexual assault of a minor and they need to lawyer up. There is none of that shit.

I’d come to Western Sydney randomly, because of Hape and Julie, but I stayed because it made sense to me. I became increasingly convinced that I wasn’t leaving Pride and their pay cheques any time soon, so here in Western Sydney, with love and calm in my life for the first time, Julie and I decided to start a family.

When I got back from my fight with Dan Bobish in November, I was planning on taking a few weeks out from training. I’d picked up an ankle injury in my first Pride fight when Yoshida got me in a toehold and I was going to try to rest it a little.

I was going to buy a house. I was going to start a family. The idea had come and gone, but now it was back. This was the right place and the right time. Jules and I were going to spend the holidays together. We ended up doing Christmas, but not New Year’s.

I got the call on 28 December, with Yukino asking me if I could fill in on Pride’s New Year’s Eve event, which was usually the biggest of the year. Of course I could fight – I could always fight – but from my experience with the Mirko fight, this felt like opportunity calling.

‘I am technically cleared, but I have this ankle injury which I’d like to get right, and I just fought Bobish, so …’

Of course she knew the game I was playing.

‘What’s it going to take, Mark?’

I asked for four hundred and fifty grand and six business-class flights to Tokyo. This could be a bit of a godsend – not only could I cash myself up, I could take the boys to Tokyo for a massive New Year’s knees-up.

‘That’s it?’

‘Yep.’

‘Don’t you want to know who you’ll be fighting?’ she asked.

Not particularly. I’ve never been concerned with who I’m going to be fighting, because I’ve never met a man I didn’t think I could beat down. Besides, I couldn’t train for a guy in three days, so his name was immaterial to me.

If they got the money right, then they could have me.

‘You’ll be fighting Wanderlei Silva.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay, well then, it’s a deal.’

The boys and I were booked onto the next flight to Japan. I didn’t really know much about Wanderlei Silva when I got that call, except that he was Brazilian, he was one of Pride’s most popular guys, and he called himself the Axe Murderer. In his nineteen Pride fights Wanderlei
was undefeated. I know now that I was probably put up against him just as a big body that could stay upright while it copped a beating, but when I left Sydney I was pretty confident of a win.

Wanderlei was a black belt in BJJ and judo, but he specialised in
Muay Thai
and liked to fight on his feet. Even though we were fighting a catchweight bout, Wanderlei was a natural light heavyweight, so I’d outweigh him as much as Bobish had outweighed me. That would help. Also, Wanderlei liked to stand toe-to-toe and throw down. He’d won twelve of his last thirteen fights by way of knockout, and, as the new boy to Pride, he might not know me well enough to know it’s all but impossible to finish me.

It seemed impossible, but there was more pageantry at that Pride event than even the K-1 Grand Prix. The night kicked off with a single figure approaching a giant
taiko
drum, before ripping off his costume to reveal what looked like a nappy with a g-string. As he played the drum he was joined by a flock of other drummers, all wailing away perfectly in rhythm before building up to a crescendo, then the wall behind them disappeared to reveal the fighters on a giant, multi-level stage. The fighters were introduced one by one, and it was a murderers’ row of talent: me, Dan Henderson, Kevin Randleman, Anderson Silva, Jens Pulver, Takanori Gomi, Mirko, Fedor, Nogueira and Wanderlei,
who got the biggest cheers from the 50,000-strong crowd. The ceremony ended with fireworks. It was time for me to go to work.

I dropped Wanderlei early in the first round and managed to get a really solid escape on him after he took me down and tried to lock me in an arm bar. I was feeling pretty happy with myself after that one. When I extricated myself from him, Wanderlei lay on the ground waiting for me to come back to him.

I knew Silva loved an upkick, so I had to be wary of that, but I also really felt like jumping on that prick and wailing on him. I launched myself at him with an improvised attack that I think is unlikely to have been attempted in professional MMA before or since. I jumped up and tried to land my ass on Silva’s head, as though I was at the swimming pool and the Brazilian was the water.

Randy Couture, who was doing the English commentary, called it the ‘Atomic Butt Drop’. The crowd loved it, but it had little effect and I landed on my back. The round ended with me dropping him again, but I’d taken a decent amount of ground-and-pound damage from my back.

I dropped Wanderlei again at the beginning of the second with an uppercut and jumped on him as he fell, but he showed a solid chin and even managed to get on top of me again. I was exhausted when we started the last
round, and accordingly we spent a decent part of the round with Wanderlei on top of me, even though he didn’t really manage any significant damage.

Silva had certainly outwrestled me, but I thought I might have done enough with my hands to get the win. The Brazilian was a local favourite, though, and a veteran – so who knew how the judging was going to go.

Two of the three judges saw it my way. I’d arrived, man. I’d beaten one of the biggest names in the organisation and I tell you, Roppongi got the true South Auckland treatment that night.

When I returned home, Jules and I stuck our banner in the ground. We were getting a house and after that we were going to try for a kid. That was a pretty huge decision for me, but it just seemed right. Julie wanted to settle her life and I wanted what she wanted. I wanted it too, don’t get me wrong, but without Julie I may have never found my way there.

When the mortgage brokers saw what I was earning in Pride they were happy to lend us a pile of cash, and I got exactly what I wanted – a mansion. Julie said we didn’t need a house that big. She was right, too, and I knew it, but I wanted that place. I wanted lawns that needed a ride-on mower. I wanted multiple bathrooms. I wanted
extra rooms that would just end up storing boys’ toys. I wanted a ‘Cribs’ crib, man.

I found a guy to build a completely specced-out computer for me and set up a dedicated gaming room. That year I managed to put 40 Screaming Eagles on my Counter-Strike account, an honour that’s only possible with more than 60 hours of play a week.

When Pride contacted me about my next fight they had the audacity to ask me to take a pay cut – from US$250,000 a fight to US$200,000. I’d just been paid more than double that and I’d knocked off one of their top guys after three days’ notice, not to mention that I’d broken my finger in the process. The way I saw it, I did them a favour by fighting Wanderlei and my stock had been rising since I’d beaten him. If anything my price should be going up.

Pride continued with preparations for the fight, even though I told them I wouldn’t be fighting on the cheap. To their credit, they did find perhaps the most enticing opponent possible for me – Cro Cop. I’d never forgiven Mirko for making me feel embarrassed at the K-1 event in Melbourne and I was desperately keen to avenge my 2002 Nagoya loss to him, but business was business and as I said to them again and again, my days of fighting on the cheap were over.

Despite this, the promotional wheels went into action. Billboards were erected, advertisements aired and articles were published, but at no point did I tell Pride I would be on that card for $200,000. The days, weeks and months went by, until it was December and I got a call from Yukino about flights.

‘Flights come after money,’ I told her, and hung up.