Born to Fight (23 page)

It all came to a head one day in 2010. I was in a video games retailer on Campbelltown’s main street with Julie and the baby looking for a new PlayStation game to play when a man saw me from the street and came at me. He wasn’t a big guy and he didn’t look like a tough guy, either,
but he made a beeline for me, bumping into me deliberately and staring me down.

I gave him that old stare. That South Auckland stare.

‘You wanna come outside?’ he asked. The guy was twitchy, maybe even druggy.

I followed him out and a moment after he raised his hands the guy was unconscious, lying in a pool of his own blood. I walked away quickly as people gathered. I passed an ambulance with its sirens singing, rushing towards the store. I felt nothing. I felt no exhilaration, or anger, or hate, or even regret. I was simply neutral.

When I was a few blocks away I phoned Julie and told her where I was so she could come and pick me up. She was in tears.

‘No Mark, I can’t handle this anymore. You’re on your own. I’m not coming.’

This wasn’t the first such incident. A few months earlier I’d been involved in a bit of a road rage incident, with Julie and Noah once again in tow. Two men in a car had tailgated me, so I slowed deliberately. They raced ahead of me and parked in front of me at the lights. One got out of the car with his tyre iron as abuse was hurled to and fro. The other guy ended up under the wheels of his car, twitching with his eyes rolled back. I thought he was dying.

When the police arrived I was put in cuffs and taken to jail. After they’d interviewed the witnesses at the scene the police found I had no culpability under the law, but that didn’t mean I was without sin. I couldn’t simply walk away from a tense situation. All those little incidents in life that can spark anger between people were setting off a wildfire in me. I was dangerous again.

‘I’m not coming to get you. I won’t see you in prison. You need to sort yourself out or I’m leaving you, Mark,’ Julie said after the Campbelltown incident.

There was now only a thin membrane of principles holding back the violent madness of my youth. I couldn’t become that boy again; I couldn’t give in to those old demons. I had a wife, a child and beyond that, my fists were too dangerous to be let loose. Perhaps they’d become ineffectual in the ring, but they could be lethal on the streets.

If I didn’t get my shit together, Julie really was leaving me. She met me when I was a broke, wild, damaged kid who didn’t understand why the sheets on a bed needed to be changed. She’d gone through the drugs and the gambling, not to mention the giant hole of distrust in my heart that needed to be filled in before I could marry. She’d gone through it all, but she couldn’t stomach the anger. That was too much.

I desperately wished I could turn off the rage inside me, but it seemed the fuel for this anger in me was almost every aspect of daily life. I needed help.

The day after the Campbelltown incident I went to our GP and told him what had happened. He sorted me out with a referral for some counselling sessions, which I held as though it was covered in dog shit.

I knew Victoria had had counselling that had really helped her, but I wasn’t Victoria. I wasn’t big on strangers and I wasn’t big on sharing, but I didn’t have any choice – Julie wasn’t big on empty proclamations.

I dragged myself to the first session by necessity, but as soon as we started talking I could feel the rot in me being slowly washed away. It was like those days back in Surry Hills when I used to lie on my bed and tell Julie about what life was like when I was kid.

The counsellor was an intelligent, softly spoken African woman, and I reckon she got into the meat of me pretty quickly. I told her some pieces of my personal history – just grabs here and there – but I could tell she was picking up the rest. She was good at what she did, and could see the scars inside me.

When I left my first session I was actually looking forward to going back. Each session brought relief, like
air being let out of a balloon that was fit to burst. I reckon she told me more about myself than I’d told her about me.

I realised I was naturally generous and trusting, but could become bitterly resentful any time I felt that trust had been breached. The breaking points of my trust were irregular, too. In some instances, people leeched money off me for years without me ever noticing. In others there were innocent, misconstrued words spoken to me that I harboured in my memory for years like a death vendetta.

It all went back to that house. Of course it did. I started life trapped in a house that was vicious. When I felt trapped again, I reverted to viciousness. Dog eat dog. Rage first, think later.

My counsellor not only dug into the source of my anger, but gave me some little ways to stay cool when something started to heat me up. The guys who cut me off, that bloke who shoved me in the bakery queue, the dude whose elbow keeps banging mine on the plane’s armrest; they might be having the worst day in the world. They might have just been given a nasty medical diagnosis; their wives might have just left them; hell, some of them might have even had a worse childhood than mine. Who knows? I suppose the key to keeping myself on an even keel boiled down to the simplest mantra – everybody hurts. There were so many times those sessions directly helped me.

We’d moved from my mansion in Oakdale to a smaller, but still very large place in Denham Court, but even then ended up defaulting three times on the mortgage. The sheriff came to the house to let us know it was to be repossessed, and I found out about it while I was overseas training, with a crying wife and screaming baby down the line.

My instinct was to feel the fury and fight tooth and nail to save the place. I could have rushed back and created a scene when next a Sheriff or, God forbid, a banker came to my house looking for the keys. On a less extreme level, I suppose I could have leveraged a rental property and a small personal gym that I owned outright, and tried to stay afloat that way, but I did neither. I sold the Denham Court place and downsized to a humbler place in which Julie is a hell of a lot happier. It was the right thing to do, the wise thing to do.

I also credit, in no small part, those counselling sessions for my success in the UFC. My training turned around after those sessions. Looking back, it might even be possible that I stopped training when I started losing so I could maintain the idea that I was the best fighter in the world. I could say to myself,
Of course I lost, I wasn’t training
. But more than that, I might not even be in the UFC without that counselling.

Like I said before, I’m not at liberty to say what happened after Pride was dissolved and Zuffa picked up my contract, but I can say that I was very angry about the situation. As far as I was concerned, the UFC were trying to put their hand in my pocket, but the situation was a lot more complex than that.

At the time I cursed those three letters, U-F-C, and when they offered me a three-fight contract I wanted to tell them to shove it up their fucking asses. I couldn’t be talked down, either. Even though I had a baby and wife to support and a latent desire to get back atop the MMA pile, I was willing to cut that nose right off my face – if keeping the nose meant working with the UFC.

I harboured secret thoughts of taking their contract and walking into the Octagon for my first fight, throwing in the towel and walking straight out again. I thank God I realised I was being an asshole. It took me a while to change my mind about fighting in the UFC, and it wasn’t the earning potential that did it, it was the idea of taking that belt.

I know it must seem odd for a guy in his mid-thirties on an epic losing streak, with some of those losses coming from middleweights, but I never really believed anyone in the world was a better fighter than me and, by then, all of
the best fighters in the world were slowly but surely being collected in one place.

I agreed to the terms and signed up. I had a new fighting lease and I still felt I had some power left in me. I thought if I trained hard, I could still get past guys like Fedor and Mirko.

After the DREAM nightmare, my entire camp had disappeared. When I signed with the UFC, the first guy I called was Steve Oliver. ‘I’m going over to the UFC, and this is my last chance. This is going to be weird, because you’ve kind of been training me for years, but …’

‘What, you really want to train now?’ Steve said.

‘Yeah. It’s now or never. I really need to do this right.’

Steve Oliver comes from a long line of professional trainers, and although he swears like a sailor and is a big, tattooed unit, he puts the art in martial arts. He’s a bloke who takes sabbaticals around the world to study different disciplines and has black belts in many of them. Unlike some of the others who have cornered for me over the years, Steve wasn’t in it for the money and fun, he was in it for professional reasons. He was in it because martial arts were his passion.

He was always disappointed when I lost, mostly because he thought I could be something special. I’d barely trained with Steve during my DREAM ‘career’ but now he agreed
to get on this ride to see how far it could go. I’d been a lazy fucker, though, and most people would have given up on me.

‘Fuck Mark, I’ve been waiting for this call for years,’ Steve said. ‘Of course mate, let’s fuckin’ do this thing.’

I knew I needed Steve in my corner, but I also decided one of the few things I did right while I was on my DREAM losing slump was taking my camp offshore. It was too hard to have my training and my family in close proximity. On Steve’s recommendation we moved over to train for my first UFC fight at American Top Team (ATT), a large MMA camp in Florida founded by Brazilians Ricardo Liborio and Marcus ‘Conan’ Silveira.

Both Ricardo and Conan were BJJ black belts and ground-fighting experts, and their camp was full of veteran fighters who knew their MMA, including some of the top talents in the UFC and some particularly tall fighters, which would be useful for me against the undefeated six-foot-seven giant Sean ‘Big Sexy’ McCorkle, my first UFC opponent.

It was when I arrived in Indianapolis for that first fight that I realised how far my stock had fallen. In Japan I’d been a rock star. My face was on billboards and playing cards, I was mobbed on the street and celebrities surreptitiously asked me out on dates. When I got to Indiana, I was just
another fighter at just another event in a city that would pay attention to fighting for just a few days.

For the first time in my career I experienced what life was like for the journeyman fighters. Where the Japanese organisations had laid out plush red carpets for my camp – who often got their own rooms, drivers and per diems – the UFC gave me one hotel room, a shuttle to the arena and that was pretty much it.

It had felt like only days before that I was headlining events at the 50,000-seat Saitama Super Arena. Now I was on the bottom of an eleven-fight card. The most galling fact was that atop that card was Mirko, who’d managed to carve himself a pretty impressive UFC career since the dissolution of Pride.

I went into that first fight the best fighter I’d been in years, but it still only took a minute or so to be beaten again. As soon as we touched gloves, McCorkle wrapped himself around me, looking for the takedown. He was even happy for me to be on top, as it only took him a very short amount of time to sweep past me, take one of my arms and lock it in for yet another fucking arm bar.

I tried to hold off on tapping, but the pressure built and built until my elbow hyper-extended and popped out. The ref jumped in and called it. I’d lost again.

When I heard the announcer Bruce Buffer saying, ‘… at one minute, three seconds of the very first round …’ I could scarcely believe it. I’d trained for this fight. I thought I was in good shape, but here it was, yet another submission loss. And this time it wasn’t against Fedor, but a UFC debutant right at the bottom of the toilet card. I thought I was starting my UFC career at the bottom, but after that loss, I found that there were even more depths to plumb.

After the McCorkle fight the UFC tried to dissolve my contract, claiming it was too dangerous for me to fight in their organisation. That was the ultimate ignominy. They weren’t just saying I wasn’t good enough, but that I could endanger myself by fighting in the Octagon. Eventually they relented and let me stay in the promotion, but I think only because the UFC was returning to my hometown of Sydney for their second event and they had very few local fighters to put on the card.

The guy I fought in Sydney was, on paper, possibly the worst MMA fighter I’ve ever faced, in a fight that wasn’t even on the undercard, but carried out pre-broadcast to have in the can just in case the broadcast went short. Despite the inauspicious circumstances I still consider it one of my greatest victories.

The fight started at ten in the morning, with people still filing into the stadium holding coffees and bacon and egg
rolls. Most of the floor seats were empty as I walked in, but despite this, it was the warmest reception I’d had in my career. My last fight in Australia had been more than a decade earlier – against Ernesto Hoost in Melbourne – and while the Japanese were numerous and supportive in their own way, they couldn’t compare to a stadium of Aussies cheering on one of their guys.

I had fewer mates at that fight than I did for most of my fights in Japan, but as I walked to the Octagon the crowd let me know I was home. Normally when I’m walking towards a fight I feel completely neutral, but in Sydney I had to remind myself to bottle my excitement.