Born to Fight (16 page)

While the judges made their deliberations I thought my campaign might be over before it had even begun, but they called a draw. In the extra round I did find that big swing, dropping him and taking the decision win. I almost felt like apologising to Mike when the announcer said my name.

Oh well, on we go.

In the press conference preceding the big event, the Japanese media wanted to know what kind of training I was doing for my defence.

‘I’m mostly concentrating on sleep training,’ I said.

There were follow-ups of course.

‘Hunto-san, can you please tell me how you do this sleep training?’

‘Yeah, basically what you do is you think about training really, really hard, and when you think you can’t think about it anymore, then you go to sleep.’

The newspaper stories the next day talked about hyper-baric chambers and visualisation and the power of extreme concentration. I do love the Japanese.

I guess it was true that visualisation had helped me win the last Grand Prix, but when I walked into the Tokyo Dome for my second GP I wasn’t thinking about Jérôme Le Banner’s head and how it could be removed, I was thinking about what kind of meal I was going to have when the night was over. I’d found a good steak place close to where
we were staying, and when I walked into the ring to fight my first opponent, Stefan Leko, the German–Croatian I’d beaten the year before, I was thinking about whether I was going to have mushroom or pepper sauce.

Stefan kicked the shit out of my legs in that fight. I was heavier than the year before and less mobile than I should have been when the fight began, but after battering my thighs, knees and calves with heavy kicks in the first round, I was moving around like a mummy. I still had my little power-dash, though. I know I don’t look like I do, but I’ve always had a couple of those in me in a round. I’m plodding towards you and then all of a sudden I’m up on you like cholesterol.

I’m not sure what the scoring would have been in the first two rounds of that fight, but it became academic when, in the third round, I threw a little left hook that caught the German flush on the nose, sending him to the ground. He stumbled to neutral corner and tried to take the mandatory eight count, but mid-count found himself once again on the floor, with his scone lolling around like a bobble-head.

That was that. On we go.

Almost as soon as the fight finished the bruises came – blue, black and purple patches spreading up and down from my knee. As they grew the news came that my next opponent would be Jérôme Le Banner.

This frickin’ guy!

A long, strong fighter with some of the most vicious leg kicks in the world, Jérôme could do some serious damage to my legs if he wanted to.

‘Reckon he’ll have a go at these?’ I asked Hape, pointing to my bruises.

‘Wouldn’t you?’ he asked.

Me? Nah, I’d probably still try for his chin.

My question was answered in the first second of the fight. When we got to the middle, I put my hand out so he could meet it with a glove touch, but not only did he leave me hanging, he threw a heavy right kick, straight to my knee.

Okay then you big French prick, let’s do this.

I leapt and put a nice big opening flurry on him but he weathered it pretty well. We traded fairly evenly, until, late in the first round, he swung a right leg kick that I checked, but instead of feeling the slap of his shin against mine, I heard and felt a snap, as though an elastic band had broken in my knee.

When I put my foot back down my leg wobbled and I almost went to the canvas. From then I couldn’t push off the leg. I knew something serious was up. So did Jérôme, who proceeded to batter that leg at every opportunity.
Each time I checked one of his kicks, a pulse of heat spread through my body. Something was really jacked up.

When I got back to my corner I told Hape what was going on, and he said I would probably have to get the KO if I was going to win. That was always Hape’s strategy, but in this instance it seemed like prudent advice.

When I got back out there for the second round, I was street fighting. Every punch was thrown with a view to separating Le Banner’s head from his neck, with wild intent. Some whooshing punches flew just past his nose, which brought gasps from the crowd, but not the decapitating effect I was looking for.

For the rest of the fight Le Banner did his thing, banging the shit out of my leg and tagging me with fast punches while I lumbered past him, then scooting away before I could retaliate. I grew more and more frustrated, until I ended up hip-throwing him on the ground in the clinch. He responded by getting up and throwing a heavy step-kick that landed flush on my injured knee. I crumpled to the ground.

I was fresh out of ideas. I was up against the ropes for much of the second round and, at one point, I walked into the corner and put my hands on the ropes to support myself. When Le Banner came at me, I braced myself on the ropes and threw a vaulting front kick.

Needless to say that didn’t work.

Near the end of the fight I was about as mobile as a Romero zombie, and my only chance was to wait for the Frenchman to walk into my danger zone. Just after the strikes marking that there were ten seconds left in the fight, he did. I threw the combo I’d been looking for all fight – a left uppercut that landed in his armpit and a right hook that smashed right across his jaw. He fell to the floor, but he did manage to get himself up again as the final bell was tolling. With blood streaming from his nose and mouth, he raised his hands high. The Frenchman had taken the match, properly avenged his GP loss and had pretty much ended my K-1 career.

When Le Banner went into the final, his only loss over his last 22 fights had been against me the year before. Once again, however, it wouldn’t be his year, losing in the final to Ernesto Hoost.

It had been an old-guard final, but there were two new fighters on the scene, who were knocked out in the early rounds, who would represent what K-1 would soon become. Those men were Bob Sapp – a 180-kilogram former NFL player who looks like a huge condom crammed full of walnuts, and Semmy Schilt – a seven-foot giant with destructively long and heavy limbs.

By 2002, K-1 was losing traction to Pride so its organisers
had started appealing to the Japanese appreciation of pageantry to stay relevant.

The relationship between Pride and K-1 was delicate and complicated. They were fiercely competitive organisations, but also often shared the same TV partner and were required to come together in huge co-productions, with the first such event being known as
K-1 Dynamite!
or
Pride Shockwave
, depending on whom you speak to.

Held a few months before the 2002 K-1 Grand Prix,
K-1 Dynamite!
was mounted on a scale that is still yet to be surpassed for a mixed martial arts event. Ninety-one thousand people crammed into the open-air Tokyo National Stadium for a night of spectacle (they even had an opening ceremony, with a torch relay that ended when Hélio Gracie, the great progenitor, re-lit the Olympic cauldron) and fights, some of which were held under K-1 rules, and others under Pride rules, which are very similar to the rules the UFC uses now.

When I saw those Pride fights I was intrigued. It was a whole new style of fighting: smaller gloves, fewer rules, no stopping because the fighters had ended up in a grapple or had fallen to the floor. It seemed much closer in style to the kind of fighting I’d experienced in South Auckland.

The other factor governing the relationship between Pride and K-1 was their dealings with the Japanese underworld,
known as the
yakuza
. None of us
gaijin
knew exactly what was going on behind closed doors, but every so often we’d see a glimpse of the underlying structure of the two fighting organisations and, sometimes, as was the case when my K-1 contract came to an end, we even saw the full force of what the
yakuza
were willing to do to achieve their desired outcomes.

Before any of that, though, I had a snapped posterior cruciate ligament to deal with. When I limped backstage after the Le Banner fight, my knee began swelling up quite badly. The fight doctor sorted me out with some painkillers for the night, but that was pretty much it for treatment for a good few months.

I’ve never been one for complaining about injuries, and this was no different. My knee got more and more swollen as the days passed, but I assumed this was like any other little niggle you might pick up after fighting twice in a day. Turns out it wasn’t, though.

Before the 2002 GP, Julie and I had made plans to go out and see a bit of the world after the tournament. When I won the GP in 2001, I also won a first-class trip to Japan for two, which we managed to exchange for multiple business-class flights. This enabled us to bring some friends to Japan for the GP, but it also meant the two of us could fly on to the US and Europe when the tournament was done.

In LA and London Jules and I ate and drank like Caesars, never looking at a price tag the whole trip. One night when the fire alarm in our London hotel kept going off, we just grabbed our bags and moved to the hotel next door, despite the fact that the rooms were £1300 a night. Fuck it – it was only money. It came easily, why should it not go in the same fashion? It was a trip I’ll never forget. It ended up costing $150,000, but I don’t regret a minute of it.

We went up to Scotland to meet Julie’s cousins, and I’d never seen a country quite so enchanting. Jules and I hired a driver to take us out to Loch Ness, and while he told us about the region I whispered into her ear, saying, ‘Close your eyes.’

Our guide kept talking and she started to stifle girlish giggles. The dude sounded exactly like Sean Connery’s James Bond. It was as though James had a twin brother who’d missed naval recruitment and had ended up in hospitality.

When we got out onto the loch it felt like there was no one else in the world. The soft, rolling hills disappeared into haze, like a video game with a short draw distance, and when the sun appeared it came in soft panes, diffused by the clouds.

I was so happy there, with Julie, in that moment. We were happy. I’d had relationships before but they were
highly combustible affairs. I’d never really known someone who could be at peace like that – not my mates, not my girlfriends, not anyone.

We could just sort of be there, together, and we’d be happy. We didn’t need to be doing anything, we were just happy enjoying the loch. I wasn’t sure life could get better than that.

Perhaps I should have asked Julie to marry me there and then – it would have been romantic, classic. It didn’t occur to me, though. I know that some things occur to me later than most.

I ended up asking Julie some years later, at home over a box of chicken and without any forethought. I have no regrets, though. She’s my wife now, and my proposal epitomised the way we enjoyed spending time together.

Another aspect of that overseas trip I enjoyed was the frigid northern European temperature. It felt like my knee had been getting hotter and hotter each day since the Le Banner fight, and I only really got relief from it when I stepped outside into the chilly air.

When we got home I was happy. I was happy in our little apartment, happy in Western Sydney, happy with Jules and happy to do some training. When I did get back to training, though, something had changed. I wasn’t in
shape, which was to be expected, but I couldn’t get any traction from my left leg.

When Auckland Auimatagi floored me with a leg kick during a sparring session I knew something was really buggered. I went to the doctor and discovered I’d torn the posterior crucial ligament in my knee. I’d be on the shelf for a year.

With too much time on my hands and a healthy bank account by my standards, of course I hit the pokies hard again. First it was an outgoing trickle of cash, then a torrential gush. Tens of thousands flew away until, thankfully, one day Dave and I walked past an internet café that was offering LAN gaming. We walked in and it was like we were stepping into a secret society. All the dudes hunched over their computers were silent and still, except for infrequent quiet calls of disgust or glee and a crescendo of excitement for a few moments, then they resumed their silent poses.

The place looked like a crack house, with people passed out under tables, full ashtrays and empty bottles, and chip packets strewn around, but the players’ dedication to their screens was enticing. Most of the Asian blokes (and they were pretty much all Asian blokes) were playing the same game, the multi-player first-person-shooter Counter-Strike.

Counter-Strike seemed exceedingly simple at first. The game was round-based, each round starting with the players
choosing to be a terrorist or a counter terrorist, and fitting themselves out with some weapons before being dropped into a designated area – terrorists in one area, counter terrorists in another. The game finished when all the players on one side were dead, or when a team’s objective had been fulfilled.

This game spoke to me. This game spoke to us. Dave and I jumped on a computer and we were there for hours. It seemed that with each round we played, the game revealed another level of depth. Every map had its own points of tactical importance; each weapon was useful in certain areas; and there were numerous tricks – fast-switching weapons, crouching behind walls, entering rooms after throwing flashbang grenades – that kept me a little longer in each round and with a slightly higher kill-to-death ratio.

There was a visceral aspect of the game that I liked, too. When you found yourself in a gunfight, things happened very, very quickly. The good players seemed to be able to get a crosshair on their opponent’s head with preternatural speed. When I first started playing there were many times I’d fire on an opposing player who hadn’t even seen me, and find myself dead. It felt like they were cheating. I know they weren’t, though, because eventually I got to that crazy, twitchy level of speed.

I figured out that I liked to play CS the way I liked to fight, choosing to equip myself with the AWP (Arctic Warfare Police) – the big heavy sniper rifle – and the slow-firing but high-calibre Desert Eagle pistol as my weapons. My CS game was all about the one shot that would take you out.