Born to Fight (17 page)

For the first few weeks Dave and I played in that café, then we moved to late-night LAN parties, then we got our own gaming PCs. It was a good scratch, for that gambling itch, that Counter-Strike, almost as good as the pokies and a shitload cheaper, although perhaps it was even less sociable than the pokies. Woe to the person who talked to me during a round, and death to the person who talked smack to me when I’d just died.

There was one particularly embarrassing moment in my CS life when I was performing poorly in an online session and some keyboard warrior kept riding me and riding me. Things got heated and I ended up asking this dude where he lived. He told me, and to my delight his place was just round the corner from me.

When I got to this guy’s house, a ten-year-old opened the door. I asked the kid where his dad was, and he said he was at work. I went home with a face so red it was about to spontaneously combust.

I loved CS, and it did keep me from drinking and gambling, but it seemed my life was always going to be a
game of whack-a-mole. Any time I’d find a solution to a problem, some other bullshit was just around the corner.

Victoria was the one who called me. She said Dad was dying and he wouldn’t go to the hospital. He’d been diagnosed with cancer, but was refusing any treatments and he was starting to rot, stinking up the house.

I didn’t want to know about it.

‘Dig a hole in the garden and chuck him in it. Wait till he’s dead if you’re feeling generous,’ I told her.

I bought him that house. I’d done my son’s duty. In my mind, that motherfucker lived in a locked box that existed only in the past, not the present.

‘You have to come over and help,’ Victoria pleaded.

I didn’t understand why it fell to me. Even when I got to New Zealand and saw the silent, brooding husks of my brothers – in no shape to help anyone – I still resented that I was needed. I didn’t want to engage with my family. I didn’t want to know what was happening in John’s or Steve’s or Victoria’s lives, and I certainly didn’t want to have to think about the old man, or Mum, who was then incapacitated after a series of strokes.

If they were away from me physically, they would be away from me mentally. Ever since I was a child I’d been able to choose which thoughts would go so deeply into storage that they didn’t even exist anymore. I had a capacity
– a gift as I see it – to put things aside and not think about them except when forced to. I knew being able to do that wasn’t normal, nor would it help most people, but it kept me going.

I’m sure it helps me as a fighter. No matter what might have happened to me in the ring or what my record may be, I’ve always thought I was the world’s greatest fighter. I can forget losses very easily.

I guess this gift came from my father. I don’t really feel pain and fear either, and that’s probably something he gave me too. In a hideous way, my father has probably been the most important figure in my fighting career.

When I got to the house, Dad absolutely stank. He smelled like death, and he was little more than a sack of saggy skin and brittle bones. I didn’t say anything to him when I picked him up and tossed him over my shoulder. I didn’t feel much either – he weighed nothing, and he meant nothing.

As I’ve already described, the devil took my father’s soul, but the question of his body was left to me. There are costs associated with getting rid of a body and while I had money, I didn’t want any more of it to go to that old rapist.

The Hunts stepped in – Dad’s brother and cousins – saying that the old man had to be buried, not cremated,
as some of us kids wanted. They also tried to absolve Charles Sale Hunt’s sins, posthumously painting him as a kind and moral man.

Victoria was the one who finally said Dad should have a proper burial. The task of speaking at his funeral was also left to her. She said what she could, not what she should. I can’t imagine what that job must have been like for her, but at the time I just felt relieved the task wasn’t mine.

I didn’t know many people at the funeral and the ones I did were mostly from his church. As I was leaving, an older Samoan woman approached me, claiming she was my sister.

I asked Victoria if this was true, and she said it was news to her, but most likely true. The stories flew around after Dad’s death about repeated infidelity. It turns out this woman was one of at least three other siblings.

I wasn’t warm to her. I didn’t need any more siblings. I didn’t need any more cousins or uncles either. I didn’t even want the brothers and sisters I already had. I didn’t want any more hands out, any business proposals, any reunions, any catching up, or anything to do with my old life. I just wanted to get home to Australia.

The last fight of my K-1 contract was in Las Vegas; a place that, for a poker machine addict like myself, was pretty much heaven and hell rolled up in one 24-hour-a-day, neon-lit ball.

If you haven’t been to Vegas, there are pokie machines at the airport, there are pokie machines in the car rental
offices, there are pokie machines in the gas stations and the fast-food outlets, and there are certainly pokie machines in the Bellagio Hotel, where my suite was. If my fighting career primarily took place in Vegas (or if I really understood how to play
pachinko
) I’d now be in more debt than the US federal government.

I was in Las Vegas for a week and I spent … a lot. I don’t know how much, but it was a fortune. I did so much gambling I never even got into the local time. It was just too easy to be out gambling and drinking all night and sleep in a darkened room during the day. I even missed my weigh-in for the fight because I was too busy gambling. The commission sat around for almost an entire day waiting for me to turn up, eventually catching me when I stumbled back to my room to sleep in the afternoon. They had to pretty much drag me down onto the scales.

The fight was against Gary ‘Big Daddy’ Goodridge, a heavy-hitting Canadian journeyman who would finish his kickboxing career with a record of 12–24–2 and, sadly, a diagnosis of dementia pugilistica.

I fought with heavy strapping on my left knee and was still moving pretty slowly, but that wasn’t the reason I didn’t take Gary out. He was the kind of guy who got stopped and I was the kind of guy who did that stopping, but I was coming back from injury. I’d only been able to
train back home for a few weeks beforehand and when I got to Vegas I’d only managed a couple of light training sessions in my suite.

I beat Goodridge, but when I returned home after the fight I was out of sorts and low on motivation. I’d fucked around in that fight and wasn’t sure I could get myself up for another K-1 tilt. I had money and I’d proved I could beat the best K-1 fighters. I didn’t feel the need to keep doing it.

I also felt the K-1 was ripping me off. There were rumours flying around that managers were deliberately and habitually screwing fighters over, and I knew of some instances in which managers earned more than their fighters. The conventional wisdom was that the K-1 had fostered that disparity, too, trying to keep all the fighters lean and dependent on both a pay cheque and their managers.

I’d become a big name in Japan and had also won the biggest tournament of them all. I started feeling like I no longer wanted to fill up stadiums at sixty grand a pop. I didn’t mind telling people I was done with K-1, either. I was ready to be plucked by the then surging Pride Fighting Championships.

I didn’t have a manager for a while after Dixon, but lucrative martial arts organisations are like nature in that they abhor a vacuum. A Pride representative managed to track down a guy called Glenn Elliott, a Kiwi TV producer
who’d been coming to some of my events with a view to making a documentary about me. When he fielded that call, I guess he became my manager of sorts.

For many years K-1 and Pride had worked in concert, both relatively happy with their piece of the pie, but in 2003 both organisations were in tumult. K-1 boss Ishii-san had been arrested for tax evasion, an issue that, supposedly, had been a by-product of an obsession to generate enough money to sign Mike Tyson to K-1. On the other side of the equation, Naoto Morishita, the long-time boss of Pride’s parent company, Dream Stage Entertainment, had died in suspicious circumstances and many were speculating that the death might have been over how Pride should be run, and by whom.

Little did I know that Miro Mijatovic, another Australian in the Japanese fight game, was seeing close up how heavily involved the
yakuza
were in martial arts in Japan, and especially Pride during that time. A Sydney-born Australian with a Croatian background, Mijatovic had worked as a resource and infrastructure lawyer in Tokyo until he changed professional tack, starting a sports management company, with Aussie swimmer Ian Thorpe and my old foe Mirko ‘Cro Cop’ Filipović on his books.

After working with Cro Cop, Mijatovic saw there was a great amount of money to be made outside the K-1/Pride
duopoly and brought in a number of disgruntled foreign MMA fighters to an annual Japanese MMA and pro wrestling show called Bom-Ba-Ye (named after a Lingala phrase that translates into ‘kill him’ which the Congolese people used to spur Muhammad Ali on against George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in 1974), which was hosted by former pro wrestler and politician Antonio Inoki.

The show included a who’s who of international fighters, including Lyoto Machida, Rich Franklin, Josh Barnett, Semmy Schilt and perhaps the most famous Pride fighter of all time, Fedor Emelianenko, who had previously been signed to Pride but could fight on the Bom-Ba-Ye card due to a contract technicality.

Normally the Bom-Ba-Ye cards would be accepted by the
yakuza
clans involved with K-1 and Pride, as long as the events didn’t happen on their turf (most Bom-Ba-Ye events happened in Kobe), but this Mijatovic card involved too many of ‘their’ assets. Although the
yakuza
seem to prefer to operate subtly, the affront that Mijatovic had brought to them apparently warranted a similarly harsh response. After the event, Mijatovic was held at gunpoint in his hotel for three days, until he signed all of his foreign fighters over to Pride in iron-clad exclusive deals.

At the same time Pride was also trying to woo me, but I was getting more carrot than stick. A female executive
at Pride named Yukino reached out to Glenn with an offer for me – a quarter of a million dollars per fight. This was a new sport and it was more money, so there wasn’t any part of me that didn’t like the offer.

Glenn voiced concern as to whether I could move to this sport, which involved ground fighting, submissions and wrestling. As he pointed out, I’d be thirty by the time I’d have my first MMA fight, and I had no history of martial arts training in anything other than kickboxing.

‘Do you think you’ll be able to adjust to it?’ he asked.

I thought I’d be fine. With far fewer rules than in K-1, these Pride fights looked a lot more like the street fights I’d had in South Auckland. At the time, I’d never even really heard of Brazilian
Jiu-Jitsu
,
vale tudo
or catch wrestling and perhaps I’d underestimated how different Pride would be from K-1, but I just said to Glenn that I’d be sweet.

Go set it up, mate.

The structure of my K-1 contract dictated, however, that they would have an opportunity to match any other offer I might receive, and when Glenn told Ishii-san about the Pride offer, he invited us all to travel to Japan to explain what they could offer. When we arrived, Glenn and I had to suffer interminable meetings in which we were offered the stars, including a potential fight against Mike Tyson, if I would only re-sign with K-1. I told Glenn I was ready
for a new challenge so they’d have to back up a Brinks truck to keep me in kickboxing, but no matter how much they said I was an important asset to them, they’d still only shift to twenty or thirty grand more per fight. This wasn’t nearly enough.

The trip to Japan coincided with an event K-1 was hosting at the Saitama Super Arena, and I was invited as a guest. When I got there I found myself seated next to Shannon Briggs, then IBU world heavyweight boxing champion.

‘You see Mark, you sign with us and you can fight Shannon Briggs. First Briggs, then Tyson,’ Ken Imai told me that night.

Fighting Briggs would be great, fighting Tyson would be a dream, but that was only going to happen if they could beat the Pride offer of a quarter of a million a fight. It was something they wouldn’t budge on.

‘No Mark, you are ours,’ Ishii-san would say to me. I certainly didn’t see it that way.

On the last night of the trip I was wholly frustrated with dealing with a group of businessmen who saw me as property. Glenn suggested that he, Tokoa, Dave and I head out and get some drinks into us. It sounded like a great idea to me.

We found a small underground restaurant in Roppongi where we thought we could hide from any prying eyes and get well and truly stuck into the piss. We knocked back sake, beer, whiskey and highballs in what we thought was anonymity, but even though there were only a few tables at this place, a couple across from us recognised me and wanted to sit with us.

Three sheets to the wind, we begrudgingly accommodated them. Conversation would have been problematic even if they had perfect English, what with all of us slurring our speech and mostly speaking nonsense, but with them having almost no English (and us even less Japanese) we were reduced to hand gestures and monosyllabic words.