Born to Fight (21 page)

At that point I’d never won a submission victory in MMA – in fact, I still haven’t – and Fedor had never been submitted, but I tried twice to grab his arm and finish him with an arm lock. I got close, too. I hadn’t really trained on submissions, I’d mostly just worked on escapes, but
enough fighters had tried to put me in an arm lock for me to know how it worked. I got the hands in position, locked in his left arm, cranked it and … You know what, nearly getting a submission is like nearly winning the lottery: no one wants to hear about that shit.

I had two sub attempts and no joy – all I had to show for it was fatigue. Fedor dumped me on my back in the eighth minute and I was too shattered to defend myself properly. The Russian locked in his own arm lock and, on the first attempt, got me to tap. If there was one dude who knew how to finish a submission, it was Fedor.

After the fight, discontent set in. I’d lost and even though I was almost universally congratulated, I was embarrassed by how unprepared I’d been. I’d come so close to being recognised as the best fighter in the world, but I let that opportunity go because I was still being lazy.

I had a talent for scrapping and I’d never been bad with my hands, but that wrestling and BJJ, that stuff is a grind, and I hadn’t embraced it yet. I’d carved out a lot of training time for ground fighting, displacing my striking or fitness stuff, but when the time came for a session I often blew it off, instead playing Counter-Strike or heading to the pub to play the pokies.

There was no other way around it, I’d been an asshole. As is often the case with me, when I’m pissed off with
myself it channels itself somewhere – sometimes somewhere good, sometimes somewhere bad. After the Fedor loss I saw there was an opportunity for me to re-focus on my training. Like my first fights with Mirko and Jérôme, a rematch was going to be my motivation.

Fedor and I were among the biggest names in Pride at the time, so I knew our orbits would swing back to meet once again, sooner or later. When that happened, I was taking him out. His number was going to be punched. It was happening. I was going to get on that mat, get on that diet, lace up those running shoes and I was going to knock that big Russian blockhead off those shoulders.

Only that’s not how it went down.

I’d never have that rematch with Fedor, and for a while it looked as though I might never beat anyone again. Trouble was coming, all kinds of trouble. Scandal was coming, and legal issues, and debt, and a forced exclusion from the sport. A baby was coming also, a son. It was the boy Julie and I had always wanted, but he didn’t come into a happy house.

Darkness came over me, and rot. The spectre of my dead father would be cast over my house, and in the chill of his shadow I felt the possibility of my greatest and perhaps only real fear being realised – becoming like my dad.

When I heard rumblings of stories in the Japanese media about links between Pride and the
yakuza
, I thought nothing of it. I thought everyone knew what was going
on – I didn’t think it would be a surprise. I didn’t think it would end up crippling the organisation and sending me into a spiral of debt, idleness and anger.

I never dreamed those media reports would take me to such a dark place. It’s weird to think now that some enterprising Japanese journalism affected my life so significantly.

Let me explain. In professional
kakutougi
(roughly translated as ‘spectacular combat sports’ and shorthand for organisations like K-1 and Pride), the money was in free-to-air television rights. Not gambling or door tickets or endorsements or pay-per-view subscriptions or anything else, it was free-to-air TV.

The biggest live US television audience the UFC ever had was in 2011, when Cain Velasquez and Junior dos Santos fought for the heavyweight title in Anaheim, California, on Fox Sports. Around five and a half million viewers tuned in for that fight, but this was less than a third of the number of viewers Fuji TV regularly achieved with their Pride broadcasts.

Factor in the size of the Japanese population and, as a TV product, Pride was as big as baseball or basketball in the US or rugby league in Australia. Like K-1, Pride was a financial juggernaut propelled by a highly lucrative television deal. When that TV deal disappeared Pride was dead in the water.

It wasn’t a lack of popularity that killed the Pride TV deal, but scandal. It all started when the weekly news magazine
Shūkan Gendai
ran a series of pieces about the ties between Pride’s parent company, Dream Stage Entertainment, and a very powerful
yakuza
clan named the Yamaguchi-Gumi, which wasn’t just one of the most powerful criminal organisations in Japan, but in the world.

The magazine pieces suggested that until 2003 the clan only had a very minor involvement with Dream Stage, in which they may have been collecting a small ‘tax’ at each event and infrequently arranging favourable outcomes for certain fights. After 2003, however, and specifically after the suspicious death of Naoto Morishita, the president of Dream Stage Entertainment, the magazine claimed that the Yamaguchi-Gumi had cut themselves into the real Pride money, the television money, and had became a partner of, if not the owner of, the organisation.

Shūkan Gendai
ran reams of stories about Pride’s supposed links to the
yakuza
, but the most damning was the reporting of a lawsuit that alleged ex-
yakuza
fixer and K-1 organiser Seiya Kawamata had been criminally extorted in 2003 by a man named ‘Mr I’ in the presence of a number of men, including Pride boss Sakakibara-san. Yep, the same man I’d threatened to chuck in Sydney Harbour.

This Mr I was later revealed to be Kim Dok-Soo, a man of Korean background who was a former loan shark and a high-ranking member of the Yamaguchi-Gumi. I’d bumped into him a number of times at Pride events and his importance in the organisation was obvious, if not his actual role.

My boys and I called him the ‘Diamond Guy’ because he liked to adorn himself with jewellery, and I remember one instance when I was coming out of a club and some of Mr I’s boys were out the front waiting for him, and looking after a couple of Lamborghinis. Tooks and I were admiring the cars when Mr I came out and said something to his guys.

‘You want to take a car, Hunto-san?’ one of the guys asked.

‘She’s right, mate.’ Nothing’s free in this life.

Sakakibara-san claimed the allegations made by Kawamata-san were false and malicious, but nonetheless the fabric of the organisation began to unravel. Perhaps the last straw was when
Shūkan Gendai
revealed that Kunio Kiyohara, the Fuji TV producer in charge of the Pride broadcasts, not to mention son of the CEO of Fuji TV’s parent company, was friendly with Yamaguchi-Gumi members and even lived in the same luxury apartment block as Mr I.

In June 2006 a lawyer from Fuji TV handed Sakakibara-san a termination notice, stating that the
television company would no longer be showing Pride events. Furthermore, the company’s contracted talent – like myself – were blacklisted and would no longer be welcome on any Fuji TV shows. I remember thinking it was a pity I wouldn’t be able to do those Fuji shows anymore. I enjoyed my TV appearances in Japan, appearing on crazy game shows doing tug-of-war competitions or arm wrestling or whatever.

What I didn’t understand at the time, though, was that this was an existential crisis for Pride. A multi-billion-yen company, Fuji TV was gouging out a cancer as far as they were concerned, and no new free-to-air TV company was going to take on the potential liability of a
yakuza
-run organisation that had been publicly discredited in the way Pride had.

Pride arranged for their planned events to be shown via pay-per-view, but the revenue from those buys was insignificant compared with the money Fuji TV had been paying them. Dream Stage Entertainment limped on for a few more months (and in those few months, that’s when I fought Fedor) until they were acquired by Zuffa Inc., the parent company that owned the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), which had recently (in fact, at the precise moment Sakakibara-san was handed the Fuji TV
letter of termination) become the biggest and most profitable MMA organisation in the world.

When the UFC took over Pride I’d just signed a new deal with Pride, which still had a significant number of fights in it. UFC bosses Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White came to Japan and held a large televised media conference in which they announced that Pride would continue to operate as it had been, with the Pride champions sometimes crossing over to fight the UFC champions in what White described as the ‘Super Bowl of combat sports’.

American fans were excited at the prospect of Pride versus UFC competitions and I was happy to hear business would continue as normal. When I did finally get over Fedor, I was sure I wouldn’t have any problems whupping whoever had the UFC belt at the time.

The Japanese fans, however, knew the prospect was doomed. The only way Pride could continue was with a free-to-air television deal, and there were simply too many impediments for that goal to be achievable.

The UFC planned to retain the managerial structure of Pride and while there was no legal proof of wrongdoings, the management team had lost face after the
Shūkan Gendai
articles. The overheads of the organisation had also become unmanageable and there were rumours of a great amount of shadowy debt hidden somewhere. Perhaps those issues
could have been addressed, but the insurmountable problem was the fact that Pride was now owned by
gaijin
. After the deal, Pride was seen by the Japanese public only as an arm of the UFC, and they always had far less enthusiasm for American organisations than for homegrown products.

Zuffa finally admitted defeat in late 2007, with Dana declaring he and the company had done everything they could to arrange a new TV deal – but all they’d found was closed doors. They would have to shutter Pride.

While this all went on I proceeded to live as though I was going to earn the same as I had for the previous six years. With no fights on the horizon, my camp disbanded and for a while I stopped training altogether. I started gambling heavily again. There was a pub next to my house with a pokie room and staff who would sort me with free food and drinks, so I put tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars through those machines.

In 2007 I decided to try my hand at promoting. When I signed my first Pride deal they also gave me naming rights to Pride events in Oceania. Even though those rights had now become worthless, I’d always liked the idea of hosting MMA events in Sydney and promoting the sport that had given me so much, so I started an organisation called the Oceania Fighting Championships.

My first port of call after I’d decided to mount an event was Lucy Tui, who had a skillset across match-making, promotion, sponsorship and every other aspect of fight event management. When I arrived at my first event at the Bonnyrigg Serbian Centre I felt a sense of accomplishment. It was only a few short years since I’d fought in that place, and not just that, losing, having been dropped by some unknown kickboxer after a day of sandblasting. Now I was returning as the promoter, having been to the very top of the martial arts mountain.

I hosted two events and they were really good ones, with good fighters and good fights. The stand-out fight was Cuban–Australian middleweight Hector Lombard’s destruction of Fabio Galeb, whose performance was especially notable because he’d fought only a week earlier on a card in the Gold Coast.

Sakakibara-san and some of his business partners flew in just for the day to observe my second event, and I really appreciated their patronage and support. They praised me for the event, which was an operational success but, as it turned out, a financial failure.

In 2000 I used to set up chairs for Lucy’s events, earning $50 cash in hand per event. In 2007 I found that setting up chairs was about $100,000 more lucrative than hosting events. Perhaps I was too used to the production values of
Pride; perhaps I was just better at being in the ring than outside it, but either way those losses came at a particularly bad time.

I had other overheads, big ones. I had two mortgages, a lot of blokes had their hands in my pocket and I continued to live as though there were going to be more fights and more pay cheques. For many months after the sale of Pride I’d pester the UFC, asking when I was going to be fighting again. First I was told there’d be more Pride events soon, then I was told I was moving over to the UFC as one of the handful of Pride fighters who would be incorporated into the UFC roster.

Not long after that the response changed again: my services weren’t needed. I was the odd man out. I didn’t understand, I was a big draw and had just fought for the heavyweight title. I had a contract, for fuck’s sake. It was a delicate situation which I still don’t fully understand; even now there’s a lot I can’t say about the transition – but suffice it to say I was on the shelf and pissed about it.

Since I’d started fighting in Pride I’d been trying to reconnect with my children in Auckland. While my daughter wanted nothing to do with me and is still understandably angry with me, my son, Caleb, was starting to warm to the idea of his absent dad as a real person, not just a name.

When Caleb’s mum called me and said he was twelve now, and was getting to that age where a paternal influence could be useful, I spoke to Julie about Caleb living with us. She thought it was a really good idea; we had this giant house and it seemed I’d be home a lot more in the immediate future. She thought it would be good for both me and the boy.