Born to Fight
For Jesus Christ, my lord and saviour; my wife, Julie; the people who have helped me to be where I am; and all those in the struggle.
M.H.
Thanks go to Mark, Victoria and Julie for their honesty, and to Val, Val, Laura and Luce for their love.
B.M.
Preface: Arena Ciudad de México Mexico City, Mexico 2014
Chapter 1: South Auckland, New Zealand 1974
Chapter 2: South Auckland, New Zealand 1990
Chapter 3: South Auckland, New Zealand 1992
Chapter 4: Auckland, New Zealand 1994
Chapter 5: Sydney, Australia 1997
Chapter 6: Sydney, Australia 2001
Chapter 7: Sydney, Australia 2001
Chapter 9: Auckland, New Zealand 2002
Chapter 10: Auckland, New Zealand 2002
Chapter 16: Mexico City, Mexico 2015
Chapter 17: Sydney, Australia 2015
ARENA CIUDAD DE MÉXICO MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
2014
I could tell Fabrício Werdum was about to put his hands up just a bit too high. There was going to be a little moment when his gloves would be in front of his eyes, and not on me. I knew it. I felt it.
Just a moment, that’s all I needed.
There it went.
I leapt across the four or so metres between us, leading with a little, confusing jab, then a loaded-up overhand right.
BAM.
Caught him right above the ear. Down he went like a big old bag of Brazilian bananas.
He’s a big bloke, Werdum – tall and experienced. Some people were saying I wouldn’t be able to hit him. I was too short, and Fab was too good. I didn’t have enough notice
to get fit, and get fists on him. I was too old, and too fat. Blah blah blah.
I knew I could get him. There’s no man in the world I can’t hit. If you’ve only got two arms and two legs, I can get to you. That’s a talent, given to me by God himself.
My fists have taken me around the world. People have filled stadiums to see these fists in action. Men have feared them – professional fighters, gangsters and criminals and, I’m sorry to say, some poor people who stumbled along the wrong street on the wrong day. Now a fist of mine had put Fabrício Werdum on his bum. Fab wasn’t finished yet, but I could see the UFC Heavyweight Interim title right there, on the edge of his jaw.
There were 20,000 fight fans inside the arena hooting and hollering, and a shitload more watching on TV, especially in New Zealand and Australia, my two homes. They were cheering for me. I could hear them, and I could feel them.
Me? I felt nothing. I was empty.
People assumed later it was the altitude and the cut – 2250 metres above sea level, and twenty kilograms shed in three and a half weeks – that had brought on my malaise. I really hated being hungry, but that wasn’t it.
It was something else.
I was forty years old and had lived five lives, four of them violent. This was just another bloke sprawled on the ground
after I’d given him the skin of my knuckles. This was just another pair of unfocused eyes, just another man on the ground below me, with his hand up, and his chin down.
I was thinking about my wife, Julie, and my little ones. I was just an inch away from another world title, just a second, but I was thinking about the quietness of home, the kids’ toys and the food in my fridge.
This fight was just another moment to get through. Winning this fight wouldn’t be the best thing that would happen to me in this life. Losing certainly wouldn’t be the worst.
I’ve been beaten, tortured and jailed. I’ve lived as a bad man and a good man. I’ve been addicted, homeless and broke. I’ve been lost, and found. This life would have ruined many, but God, he gave me the gifts I needed to keep going.
Those gifts were at the end of my arms.
Woe to the man who’s given a gift by God but ignores it. Woe to him.
I walked back a few steps, bunched my fists and let Werdum stand back up again.
Come on then, get your ass over here. Let’s see what you got. Gummon, boy.
Gummon.
SOUTH AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
1974
Mark was still a baby when all hell broke loose. He’d be black and blue head-to-toe regularly. I’d have to wash away the blood, massage his bruises and put salt on his wounds, so Dad could give him another beating. At about five Mark started to become a thief, and a violent maniac, but how would he know any better? He didn’t even understand what love was until he met Julie. There were good parts of him but, that survived during the abuse, and those parts became the soul of my brother.
VICTORIA NAND (SISTER)
The last time I saw the darkness was on the day my dad died.
The first time I saw that thing I didn’t know what it was. I was terrified of it, though, like nothing I’ve been scared of before or since. The last time I saw it, I finally
knew what it was. I knew who it was. It was the devil, come to take my old man away.
I first saw that darkness in South Auckland at the wheel of a totalled car I’d recently stolen. I’d come round a corner just a little too fast, bounced off the kerb and up into a light pole. When I woke up, my partner-in-crime, Bronson, was pulling me out of the wreckage, but there was something wrong about the night – it was as though the contrast of the sky was all jacked up, and there was a burning smell.
As I ran, I saw a giant claw coming down through the clouds, reaching towards me. I felt myself disappearing from my body, and started to run in third person, as though I was a character from
Grand Theft Auto
.
I was scared that night – one of the few instances I ever was. Bronson and I ran like I don’t think either of us ever have since. Bronson saw it too. He was never quite the same dude afterwards.
I saw the darkness in Sydney once, too, when I was half-conscious in a flophouse in Surry Hills, surrounded by junkies and prostitutes and recently but deeply addicted. That day it didn’t come fully formed, but as something nebulous. I still recognised it, though, the moment it appeared, with that smell and that feeling.
I asked what that thing wanted this time – I was in a bold mood – but it had nothing to say. It just surveyed my
surroundings of shit, before leaving, with its faint smell of acidity and ash lingering.
Those two times I think the devil was just visiting, or perhaps leaving a warning. The last time I saw it, though, it came complete – fully raised, fully formed, and here to do its work.
A few months before my dad died, his eyes had started to go and his skin was turning green. When he finally went to hospital, he was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer. None of us kids knew why the old man ignored the doctors and refused their help, but none of us were surprised either. After his diagnosis, the old bastard discharged himself, walked the many kilometres home and slumped on the couch. There he stayed, taking no medication and no visitors, instead just rotting away like meat left in the sun.
A few months after his diagnosis, it was time for me to throw the shadow of Charles Sale Hunt over my shoulder, toss him into the car and drive him to the hospital to die. On the old man’s last day alive, I pushed my wheelchair-bound mum, who’d been made immobile and silent by multiple strokes, into a giant, bright, sparse, white-tiled hospital room where he was laid out on a bed. Almost all the life had gone from my father; his face was sunken,
with yellow eyes like the Hulk’s. His hair was white and stringy, and his once strong body had wasted away.
What was left in him was about to be taken by the giant that stood next to his bed, which was dark like a void, hooded, huge, familiar and with a stench that was overpowering. I could feel the immense, crackling, untethered power of that figure, but I dared not look directly at it. I could feel that even looking at that thing could level buildings, maybe even cities.
I kept my eyes on my father. As I stared at the old man, I knew he was going with the devil that day. I also knew there was nothing to be done about it. My father had lived his life, made his choices and committed his sins. Now he was going with the darkness.
So be it.
I find it hard to remember my parents’ faces these days. I always remember my dad’s blue overalls and the blue overcoat he wore in winter, and I remember my mum’s big old Afro. Sometimes, though, in my memories, smudges have replaced their faces.
I’m assuming my parents’ story was similar to the rest of the FOB (fresh off the boat) Islanders in New Zealand at the time. The Samoan economy was pretty basic, so if you didn’t want to work in the fields like your parents and
grandparents before you, you probably wanted to think about hopping over to New Zealand.
My parents had both been married before they met each other, so maybe that helped push them west. I don’t know that for sure, though. I don’t know much about my parents’ history, and almost nothing about their parents and beyond. What I do know is that in 1965 Charles Sale Hunt and his wife, Meleiota, moved from Savai’i in Samoa to Auckland, and by 1974, when I was dropped into this world at St Heliers Hospital, pretty much all they had to show for themselves was Victoria, five years older than me; Steve, three years older; John, two years older; and now me, the baby.
My first ever memories were just feelings, and there was one feeling that I remember more than the rest: hunger. Dad had a job at the beginning, a manufacturing gig at the Kent Heating factory, but he could never put enough food on the table. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, whatever.
My memories of places and people started to form when we four kids were shipped off from our one-bedroom place in the Auckland suburb of Mount Eden to Savai’i to live with my dad’s brother and his wife when I was maybe four or five.
Not many people know much about Samoa, which is fair enough; it’s a pretty small place – big people, but a small
place. Samoa is made up of a series of islands, which lie about 3000 kilometres northeast of New Zealand.
The place looks like you’d expect a Pacific island to look – blue seas, green hills and yellow sand – populated by 200,000 or so locals. There are about the same number of Samoans living in Australia and New Zealand, with the bulk living in New Zealand. Samoa was administrated by New Zealand up until the sixties, so there was an easy immigration path between the two countries.
I don’t really know why Mum and Dad sent us over to Samoa. I guess they wanted to give us a better life than the one we were having in Auckland, but I do remember having to catch and cook bats in the fields to eat. So perhaps it wasn’t for our benefit.
In Samoa, I remember a house above a shop. I remember a rock pool where my brothers and I once thought we were about to drown. I remember a cousin pulling each of us out of that water by our hair. I remember a picture theatre, which I now realise was probably little more than a darkened room and a projector. I remember stealing biscuits.
I don’t recall many of the people in Samoa, but I do remember a little Asian bloke with a badass look on his face, shirt off, black pants, howling like a cat.
WAAAAAATAAAAAAAAH.
Some people were trying to attack this little shirtless guy, but he was fending them off as easily as you might a litter of kittens, his fists and feet flying around like he was a banshee. I don’t remember what Uncle and Auntie looked like – they are just smudges now too – but I remember Bruce Lee. That little dude was made out of magic. I loved Bruce Lee and David Carradine, and later Van Damme, Seagal and Norris. There wasn’t a problem they couldn’t fix.