Born to Fight (12 page)

‘The bad news?’

‘The bad news is you’d be fighting Ray.’

Three weeks’ notice against a guy like Ray Sefo would be no joke, but of course I said I’d take the fight. I’d never turned down a fight and I wasn’t going to start now. Even though I may not have been able to win, I knew I could
at least last the rounds. The Japanese fans would always appreciate that.

When the negotiations started, the K-1 started to nickel-and-dime me, trying to give me considerably less cash than I’d earned for my previous Japanese fight, and I started to wonder if I really wanted to take this fight after all. I was going to fight Ray Sefo, the undisputed king of the region, with whom I had my own personal history. Ray would be coming in as strong and fit as humanly possible. He desperately wanted to be the first man outside Europe to win the Grand Prix, and had lost in the final of the previous year’s Grand Prix. With this being the last opportunity to qualify for the 2001 Grand Prix, he’d no doubt been red-lining his training.

It was actually Adam Watt who convinced me to go. ‘What have you got to lose?’ was the cut and thrust of his argument, and it was an argument that spoke to me.

Sometime in 2001 the Japanese decided to adopt me as one of their dudes. Early in the year I had barely any profile in Japan – a K-1 0–1 nobody as far as the Japanese were concerned, if they were concerned at all. By the end of 2001 I was doing fast-food advertisements and presenting at the Japanese MTV Music Awards.

It all started with that fight against Ray. I’d gone over to fight him for a repechage tournament, one of the eight ways a fighter could qualify for the Grand Prix. My fight
against Ray was a first-round fight so there wasn’t much interest building up around it, but it’s now remembered as one of the most famous fights in K-1 history. That fight was really my introduction to the broader fighting world.

Like I said, though, I went into that fight unfit, so my normal strategy of ‘taking the other guy’s head off’ developed into ‘taking the other guy’s head off in the first minute of the fight’. Ray is, like me, a Samoan Kiwi, and our heads don’t come off too easily.

I came out swinging, every punch a sidewinder. Ray looked a little shocked at my early output but weathered the storm like you would expect. At the end of the round I could tell he was enjoying the abandon of the contest. K-1 was big, serious business and most fights were very technical. But Ray seemed to like being in the ring with someone who was willing to stand there and trade leather with him.

The first round ended not only with the customary clapping, but also cheers from the Japanese crowd. I was told about the cheers later because all I could hear was my own breathing and the pounding of my heart. After a round of effort, I was rooted.

I went into the second round sucking up the big ones, and now out of ideas. I swung for some more home-run shots but the punches were flying past Ray’s bobbing head.
As the seconds ticked by, my feet were getting heavier and heavier. I could punch, but I couldn’t move much. Ray moved me around the ring, bouncing punches off me and every so often I’d load up a big right or left. A 2–1 combo landed right on his scone, with Ray nodding his approval. He was in it now. I was too.

Oh, we’re in a scrap now, boy.
The ring, the crowd, the city all started to fade away. Now it was just a couple of concrete-headed Samoan scrappers doing what we do best.

What have you got for me fella?
Ray loaded up with a five-punch combination, finishing with a left hook that landed flush on my chin. Good punches, real good. He’s got heavy hands, Ray.

When he was done I dropped my hands and stuck my face out towards him so his nose was right in front of mine.

‘THAT IT?’ I yelled.

Ray threw me a smile, moved in and kissed me on the cheek. It wasn’t a ‘fuck you’ kiss, as some people have suggested, it was something else. We were brothers, man, a couple of Polynesian brothers tied to this moment we would both remember for the rest of our lives.

I patted him on the back and then loaded up with a 2–1–2 combo, with each punch landing flush. Ray rolled backwards and took them, all of them, before dancing a
little dance with a huge grin on his face. I threw my arms out to my sides.

Okay boy, your turn. Think you can knock me down?

Ray danced forward and started throwing all he had. I dropped my hands, bit down on my mouth guard and let him rain down on me.

‘YEEEEEESSSS,’ I screamed at Ray while his fists flew into my head. After ten or so unguarded shots I started to shoot back and soon we were throwing in turns. When the bell rang and the punching stopped, the ring came back, and the crowd, and the context of the fight.

I looked out at the Japanese crowd and they were cheering and clapping, but they also had looks of disbelief. That’s not how the European fighters do it, and certainly not how the Japanese fighters do it. It seemed many in the crowd didn’t know how to react. There was laughter, which is not something you hear regularly at a Japanese combat sport event, and people with their hands on their heads, shocked.

South Auckland comes to Japan, eh?

When I was called for the third and final round, I was well and truly stuffed and I knew, no matter how conditioned Ray might have been, he must have been rooted too. We kept trading as best we could, but the fight had
peaked and we got across the line with a lot of clinching and counter punching.

The crowd cheered when Ray took the decision, but I knew a good part of that appreciation was for me. I patted him on the back after the fight. That was some scrap. My tournament may be over and my Japanese record may now be 0–2, but it really was a scrap for the ages.

I’d only been backstage for a few minutes when I heard a bit of a commotion going on. I only vaguely noticed it; I had a towel hung over my head, trying to unring that bell Ray had struck. Then I heard my name.

‘Hunto-san, Hunto-san?’ It was two Japanese men – one I recognised as an organiser of the event and the other I assumed correctly was the fight doctor.

‘Sefo-san, he can … he cannot continue. Can you continue?’

Always boy, always.

Ray’s vision had been jarred by our exchange in the second round and he was unable to count how many fingers the doctor was holding up. The doctor had ruled him unfit to continue on to the next fight. When the doctor gave me the same test I passed with flying colours. Probably the first time I’d ever topped the class in a test of numeracy.

I had twenty minutes and I’d be moving on to the second fight, which would be against the winner of the
fight between K-1 veteran South African Mike Bernardo and the bloke I’d been sparring with less than a month earlier, Adam Watt.

My fight with Ray had been a war, but Adam’s with Mike was a beat-down. Bernardo fancied himself as a bit of a gangster and he and his entourage had been trying to intimidate Adam since we’d arrived in Japan, but it seemed the Aussie wouldn’t be so easily flustered. Bernardo went down twice in the first round of their fight, before being finished after two and a half minutes.

Twenty or so minutes later, Adam and I were facing off. When the announcer introduced us and the ref gave us the rules I could still feel Ray’s punches in my head, but as soon as the bell rang I was on again and ready to scrap. I still had slow feet, but fast hands. I took the middle of the ring, letting Adam dance around me while he threw a series of kicks and testing jabs. When he came into range I threw power punches and I dropped him a couple of times. I mostly managed to avoid the barrage of spinning attacks his camp must have thought I was susceptible to.

In the third round, with me ahead on points and my gas tank close to empty, Adam got me in a corner for one last attempt to get over the top of me. He threw combo after combo and mostly I had to just cover up, until I saw Adam dropping his right hand and shoulder when he threw his
combinations. The first time I caught him with a left hook, the punch just glanced away. The second landed flush on the jaw. He dropped to the ground and the ref called time to have a look at a big cut I’d opened up on him earlier in the fight. That thing wasn’t going to stop pissing blood, so they called it.

One more fight.

Adam’s guys started congratulating me, then Hape and Dixon. Soon it dawned on me there weren’t any more fights that day – I was done. This hadn’t been an eight-man tournament as I’d thought, but a four-man one. I was heading to the K-1 Grand Prix – the final eight in the biggest martial arts competition in the world.

The next day I flew back to Tokyo and was taken to a soundstage in the Fuji TV building, where I found the seven fighters I’d be competing against in the Grand Prix, amid a large set. The tournament’s draw was to be finalised live across Japan on prime-time TV. On set there were eight positions on an elevated stage – A–H, with the positions representing a spot in the draw. A and B would fight first, then C and D and so on. If you wanted to avoid fighting the person in position A, you could place yourself anywhere from E to H and it was guaranteed if you were to fight the person in position A, it would be in the final.

Each fighter drew one of eight balls, with each ball bearing a number. As luck would have it, Jérôme Le Banner got ball number one and chose position A. Of course he did. Le Banner was on a thirteen-fight undefeated streak and the heavy favourite for the tournament. Why wouldn’t he consider himself the A-1 man?

I got ball number three. That meant I could essentially choose whom and where I wanted to fight. The inexperienced Danish fighter Nicholas Pettas had already picked a spot, across the draw from Jérôme, and I could tell people were expecting me to pick him. Pettas was the least heralded fighter on the bill (except for me, of course), but I knew exactly whom I wanted to face. I didn’t want to risk someone else getting the opportunity to punch Jérôme’s ticket.

The sound from the crowd grew louder and louder as I drew closer to position B, and claps and cheers when I gave the big Frenchman a bit of a shoulder shove and just a hint of the South Auckland stare. Jérôme clocked me with a look of disbelief.

Afterwards the Japanese media had quite a few questions.

‘Did you understand how the draw worked?’

Yeah.

‘Do you think you can beat Le Banner-san?’

Yeah.

‘Do you think Sefo-san is upset?’

Nah.

‘Do you like hamburgers?’

Yeah.

‘Do you really think you can beat Le Banner-san?’

Yeah. In fact I’m knocking his ass out.

That night I went out in Tokyo with some of the other guys and got a little taste of what life would be like as a K-1 star. We travelled in limousines, drank expensive champagne and everywhere we went, they treated us like kings.

Ray met up with us too, and we ended up in a restaurant owned by a guy who would become a good friend of mine. Konishiki (born Sale Atisano’e) was another bloke with Samoan blood pumping around a big frame who’d been welcomed by Japanese sport fans. Born in Hawaii, Konishiki was discovered in Honolulu by a scout as a teenager and competed as a sumo wrestler from the age of eighteen, until his retirement fifteen years later. He’d reached the sumo rank of
Ozeki
, the first foreign fighter to achieve that rank, and at 287 kilograms Konishiki had been one of the heaviest and most popular sumo wrestlers of all time. He was a great help to me when it came to understanding the ins and outs of Japanese culture, and he’s still a close friend today.

Konishiki took us all to a karaoke joint in Roppongi and while he sang (like an angel, might I add), Ray draped his arm over me and toasted me with a whole bottle of champagne.

‘Welcome to the K-1, bro.’

I felt good. I felt great. I felt like I’d arrived.

We left that joint and headed for a nearby nightclub, but we were stopped by a group of pissed-up American sailors on shore leave. They started giving Ray shit about his clothes and it was obvious that they were looking for a scrap. With Ray and me were Stefan Leko, Jérôme and Mike Bernardo, and I’m now racking my brains trying to find a worse group of blokes to fuck with. Our days of street scrapping were behind us, though, so some of Ray’s entourage took over and beat those guys up while the rest of us piled into the club, joking and laughing, into a roped-off area where bottles of champagne and a cordon of staring Japanese punters were waiting for us.

When I arrived home in Sydney, I got straight into training. One day Julie asked me what I was going to be earning for the Grand Prix. I knew it was the world’s most lucrative martial arts tournament at the time, but I didn’t know the details. When I asked Dixon what the breakdown would be, he went back to the contract and told me that my appearance fee would be what I’d earned
for my last fight, which was $8000, and also any prize money. And what was the prize money for a first-round loss? Jack and shit.

‘I’m sure I told you that,’ Dixon said to me. This was the first little bump on a road that would lead to financial ruin. The only way I’d get paid was if I got past Le Banner, but that was fine by me. I was coming for the Frenchman’s head, and nothing less.

I trained my ass off for that tournament (some of it, anyway). For the first time since I was thirteen, I stopped smoking and drinking. I was working towards something, which other people might do as a matter of course, but I hadn’t lived my life like that.

I wanted Le Banner on a plate; I wanted it so badly. I had slow-motion dreams of my fists flying, steady and true, and Jérôme’s eyes rolling backwards. I saw the man lying unconscious at my feet.