Born to Fight (20 page)

Yukino called back and said I could have my $250,000, but I told her we were well past that. Although a quarter of a million US dollars a fight was good money, I was angry about the attitude of ownership the Japanese fighting organisations had over their fighters.

There was so much money being generated – nearly 50,000 tickets had already been sold for the New Year’s Eve fights and the television audience would probably be around 20 million, so why shouldn’t a decent amount of it go to the fighters?

There’d always been rumours that the television companies gave the organisers a certain sum per fighter, and whatever amount the organisers could get the fighter to agree to below that, they could keep. I wanted to see how much financial wriggle room they actually had.

After that I got a call from another Pride representative, this time a lawyer.

‘Hunto-san, how can we make this right?’

‘I just want respect from you guys. I’ve been doing what you need me to do in the ring, now you need to do what you should out of it.’

‘Okay, how do we do that? Do we need to come down there and see you?’

‘That couldn’t hurt.’

Three days later I was in the lobby restaurant of the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney facing an interpreter, a couple of Japanese flunkies and the head of Pride FC himself, Nobuyuki Sakakibara. With me was a friend named Ben who’d been staying at my place. He’d lived in Japan as a Mormon missionary and had picked up a lot of the language.

The Pride people were dressed for business; Ben and I were dressed for Counter-Strike, which was on the agenda after we finished this meeting. While we negotiated there was a lot of private conversation on the Japanese side of the table, with the obvious assumption that a couple of coconuts like me and Ben wouldn’t be able to understand their tongue.

Eventually Sakakibara-san said to me, via the interpreter, that $250,000 was the absolute limit of what they could offer and there was no point asking for anything more. I leaned over to Ben and asked if that was true. He said it wasn’t.

‘There’s a lot going on on that side, and I didn’t pick it all up, but they’re trying to lowball you, man,’ Ben said. ‘There is more money; they’ve said that. I don’t how much there is, but they think that because you’ve been on the shelf for a year and you don’t have a manager, you’ll go for the $250,000.’

I was sick of this shit. A quarter of a million was good money and I’d happily take it again after this fight, but they’d tried to stiff me – and right in front of me, no less. The old anger rose up, so I stood and pointed at Sakakibara-san.

‘You’re full of shit, man. You can shove this fight up your fucking ass,’ I said to him.

Sakakibara-san spoke English, even though he sometimes chose not to, and started speaking – growling really – in Japanese in a way he hadn’t spoken to me before. He didn’t raise his voice, but he spoke with menace. When he was finished, it was my turn.

‘This is my city,’ I told Sakakibara-san sternly. ‘Ben, tell these motherfuckers I’m going chuck them all in the harbour. And you,’ I said, pointing at Sakakibara-san, ‘are going in first. You can open a window, or go through the glass. Up to you.’

Ben spoke for the first time in, what I’m told was, really good Japanese. There were some red faces and a long period
of silence broken only by piped music and the clinks of cutlery on fine crockery.

Eventually it was the interpreter who spoke.

‘Mark, we came to make this right. How can we make this right?’

This was where a manager would have earned his keep, as I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.

‘Six hundred and fifty grand.’

The number just tumbled out of my mouth.

‘And I want three hundred and fifty before you guys leave Sydney, too.’

I’d always had to chase K-1 for my money, and even though I never had such problems with Pride I thought it was better to be safe than sorry.

‘And that’s it?’ the interpreter asked.

That was that. I asked them to please excuse us, as we had a very important meeting with some counter terrorists.

While Ben and I were playing Counter-Strike that afternoon I was wondering how the Japanese were going to respond. A few days later I found out, when more than half a million Aussie bucks landed in my account.

Apart from my K-1 GP match against Le Banner, I’m not sure I’d ever wanted to win a match more than in that fight against Cro Cop. I didn’t really have any deep personal animosity towards the guy, but I couldn’t get over the fact
that he thought he was a better fighter than me. He was dismissive, that was it. That was what was making me angry. Fighters always have to think they’re better than the guy they’re going to fight, but Cro Cop, like Jérôme Le Banner, had considered me in a different class to him. I was just a chubby coconut with a decent chin and heavy hands, that’s all he thought of me. That’s what pissed me off.

Mirko had been easily the most successful K-1 fighter so far to move over to Pride, and he was tearing his way through the Pride heavyweight division. In fact, he’d torn off eight wins over his last nine Pride fights, with his only loss being a title fight against Fedor, and even then he’d been able to break the Russian’s nose, toss him out of the ring, then lose on a wafer-thin decision.

Although I doubt he remembered Melbourne, I think Mirko sensed I had an issue with him. Before the fight he came up to me and said, ‘Whatever happens, we are friends, Mark, yes?’

I had no problem with this; Pride and K-1 kept a very fraternal atmosphere and I was happy to maintain it. My relationship with Mirko could be whatever he wanted it to be – after I got out there and took his head off.

The fight was a pretty good one. I was concerned Mirko would be on his bike the whole fight, with me copping counters and head kicks while I chased him around the
ring. There was a bit of that; I ate a few head kicks and I did have to stalk him a lot, but he stood in front of me enough and I tagged him in the head and body pretty regularly. He hit me with two axe-kicks in that fight – in wrestling shoes, no less – and I ended up under him at the end of the fight when I got jack of him running away for most of the round. I then launched an ill-advised jump-kick at him, but I did enough for the decision.

All of a sudden I was two for two against a couple of the MMA’s biggest stars. I reckoned I was ready to go and get that big Russian’s belt.

I fought again two months later, headlining again, but this time against an unknown MMA property in Yōsuke Nishijima, a well-liked Japanese boxer trying MMA for the first time. It might seem strange, for those unfamiliar with Japanese MMA, that an inexperienced guy (and one I outweighed by a good 30 kilograms) would be put up against someone who’d just taken out their number-one heavyweight contender, but that was the Japanese way. I was Nishijima’s Yoshida in that regard.

Our fight started a little later than expected – after a fight between Mark Coleman and Maurício ‘Shogun’ Rua hosted a few uninvited guests (Wanderlei Silva, ‘Ninja’ Rua and Phil Baroni) – but at least the crowd was well and truly primed for me and Nishijima atop the card.

I hadn’t trained since Cro Cop when I got into the ring but I knew I’d be able to dominate in whichever way I chose. This could have been a fight in which I took Nishijima to the ground and smushed him with elbows and ground-and-pound strikes, but that wasn’t the kind of fighting I liked and it wasn’t the kind of fighting my fans liked, either.

Nishijima is a very talented boxer so I ate a lot of punches in that fight, but I gave out even more. He fought like a warrior, but I slowed him down with heavy knees midway through the second round, so with his speed advantage gone, I battered him until he went to the floor after a left hook/straight right combination, and he didn’t get back up.

I was getting a little run together in Pride, feeling like myself again. I was regaining faith in my hands and my ability to drop whomever they put in front of me.

Unbeknown to me, when I’d fought Mirko I was in a title eliminator. Whoever took that fight was to be fighting Fedor for the Pride belt. After the Nishijima fight I was called to a hotel suite, and when I saw the Russian champ coming out of the room as I was about to go in, I started to glean what was going on. I had a little chit-chat with Fedor in the hallway and asked him what they had for me.

He shrugged and said, ‘They had this for me,’ nodding to his bag.

When I got into the room I found Sakakibara-san, a few guys who looked like muscle and a Korean guy who acted like he was in charge. Also in the room was a table struggling under the weight of many giant piles of crisp currency, stacked neatly.

‘How are you, Mark?’ Sakakibara-san asked.

‘I’d be doing better if I had some of that,’ I said, pointing to the table.

‘Do you want some? Would you like us to pay you in cash? We can if you like, Mark.’

No shit. They could have paid me for my next ten fights and it wouldn’t have made a dent in that pile. I declined, though. The Russians all liked to be paid in cash but I figured it would be a pain trying to explain to Aussie Customs why I was bringing a big bag of foreign currency home.

In that hotel room I got a little preview of the future downfall of Pride, but at the time I didn’t concern myself with any of the organisation’s shady, behind-the-scenes dealings. I only concerned myself with the guy in front of me, and in that hotel suite they told me that soon the guy in front of me was going to be exactly the right bloke – the world’s biggest badass. Well, second biggest anyway.

Before that fight Pride also asked me to fight in their first-ever Las Vegas card – part of a planned international expansion – against super heavyweight boxer
Eric ‘Butterbean’ Esch. I was more than happy to take the fight. Not only would it get me back to Vegas – a place where I could revel in my sins – but I’d also be fighting a bloke who would almost certainly stand with me.

Sadly visa issues put paid to that fight, with my visa coming through three days after the event. I watched Butterbean quickly finish Sean O’Haire from the third row, with Dana and Lorenzo sitting behind me.

Instead of the Butterbean fight, it was mandated that I should compete in a sixteen-man Pride open weight tournament. I won my first fight, stopping a bloodied but very game Tsuyoshi Kohsaka in the second round, but I put in a pretty sub-par performance in my semifinal against Josh Barnett.

After the Barnett fight I realised how much I still had to learn about professional MMA. I’d never had any problem dispelling fear or anger when I fought – during street fights I’d always fought to win so I fought effectively and dispassionately – and there was no way anyone was going to get me particularly riled or upset in a fight, but Josh managed to get me the other way. He’s a funny dude, and he’d launched a charm arsenal in the lead-up to our fight. During the weigh-ins, during our press calls, even just moments before the bell rang, the jokes came thick
and fast – but when the bell rang he was ready to fight and I was not.

That was a short fight. Barnett got on top of me quickly and locked me in a Kimura arm lock in less than five minutes, which forced me to tap or have my arm broken. As I walked back to the lockers I felt embarrassed and inexperienced. I’d slacked off working on my BJJ and ground game, and a bloke I should have knocked off had put me away pretty easily.

The greatest annoyance was I knew what I should have been doing, too. I decided to bring Steve Oliver over to live with me – I thought perhaps if he was hanging around the house I’d be shamed into training. It didn’t work.

Steve is a great bloke and a great trainer, but having another authority figure in my new house wasn’t ideal, especially considering what Steve’s work involved. Like Sam Marsters and my father, Steve was going to be physically dominating me. I was a rich man on a successful MMA run. Having Steve in my home ordering me around just wasn’t going to work.

At the time I believed that if I worked harder I could beat anyone in Pride, but I now realise there was another aspect of professional Japanese MMA that I hadn’t embraced, which probably put me at a disadvantage. When I first met with Sakakibara-san and the Pride officials in Japan after signing
my contract they gave me a rundown of the guidelines the company expected me to stay within, but there was no mention of performance-enhancing drugs. When I asked what the story was with PEDs, they laughed uniformly.

‘Mark, you can take whatever you want,’ one of them said.

When I first started kickboxing in Sydney, I’d seen the effects of the anabolic steroid Stanozolol on fighters. Their bodies changed, their power changed, but also their temperaments. I didn’t want to mess with that stuff, mostly because I didn’t think I had to. I never doubted that I had enough power to put anyone away but I thought PEDs could actually affect my timing and my countenance, which might make things harder for me.

Looking at the number of Pride fighters who’ve moved over to the UFC (where there are stricter rules) and either disappeared ignominiously or copped a suspension (or suspensions) for a banned substance, it’s likely that the use of ’roids in Pride was pretty rampant, and there’s little doubt that I fought against juiced opponents. Whatever the case, though, I lost in Pride because I was fucking around, not because I wasn’t on the juice.

It was strange how wild and loose things could be in Japan. I remember one occasion when I’d broken my finger, I put a brace on my hand before I went to get it strapped.
The guy who did the strapping – the Japanese version of a commission official – said he wouldn’t strap me with the brace on. I said I wasn’t fighting without it, so there we were, at an impasse. When one of the Pride functionaries who kept things ticking over backstage came and asked if I was ready, I pointed out the impediment.

After a stern word I was strapped, and not just that, while I was walking to the ring I saw the reluctant official getting the shit beaten out of him by some sketchy-looking Japanese gangsters. That’s just how it went at Pride.

My fight against Fedor was atop Pride’s big 2006 NYE card, Pride Shockwave, again with 50,000 in attendance. I dominated the first seven minutes of the fight, which ended up running eight minutes. After clipping Fedor with a left hook in the initial exchanges, the Russian took the fight to the ground where, to everyone including my corner’s surprise, I managed to take the top position. Eventually we got back on our feet before heading back to the ground again, and again I ended up in the advantageous position, going into a side mount.