‘You know, if you beat Le Banner, you can write your own cheque,’ Dixon told me one day at training. The huge success of K-1 would inevitably spawn usurpers so the K-1 was bullishly protecting their assets with long, lucrative contracts. He reckoned I could get one of those if I beat Le Banner.
‘You don’t even need to win the tournament, you just need to take Jérôme out, and you’ll become a commodity.
The Japanese like you, but now they need to respect you,’ Dixon said.
I told him to chill. I got it.
When I arrived in Tokyo I couldn’t have been more ready. I was fit, strong and relatively slim. I knew I had to stay cool until I got into the ring, though, which wasn’t the easiest task. Unlike my previous visit, it seemed the whole of Tokyo knew about the upcoming tournament – with billboards and posters of us covering the city. Not just that, it felt like everyone knew who I was, and the story of how I’d picked Jérôme. This was obviously a narrative the K-1 had been selling in the lead-up to the tournament.
I tried to stay as focused as I could, and I managed it most of the time. I checked in to the luxurious Shinigawa Prince Hotel, which had been completely sequestered for the tournament. I brought friends with me this time, too – not just Hape and Dixon, but mates from back in the day, including my mate Tokoa, who’d pushed Dave and me to head to Australia.
My headspace was exactly where it needed to be when I got to Tokyo, and Hape had a lot to do with that. While Alex had the temperament of a Zen master, Hape was a more volcanic figure but excellent at directing his fury at my opponent.
‘This fucking guy thinks he’s better than you? He’s been punched one too many times. You’re going to eat this fucking guy up with chopsticks,’ Hape barked while we trained in the ballroom of the Shinigawa Prince.
He was right. Fuckin’ oath he was right.
In the pre-fight press conference, someone asked Jérôme what he would do if I stuck my chin out at him the way I had against Ray.
‘I’ll punch it off his face,’ he said robotically. Nice guy, Jérôme, but man he has all the personality of Ivan Drago.
When I heard that I couldn’t wait for the fight to start. I’d never wanted anything so much before. I can imagine the feeling was close to how other kids had felt on Christmas Eve. The knockout was already mine – the presents were already wrapped – but having to wait was torture.
As impressive as the UFC is as a billion-dollar global brand, it’ll never match the grandeur and sense of occasion of the K-1 Grand Prix. When I was finally called into the Tokyo Dome for the fight, I stepped into a reality I’d never known before. I was on a stage that bore eight giant Roman columns, one of them emblazoned with my name. A huge picture of me sat above it and lasers flew around illuminating 80,000 cheering fight fans.
‘From the notorious streets of South Auckland all the way to the Tokyo Dome, Mark “The Doctor” Huuuuuuuuunt!’
the American announcer called. Aussie kickboxing commentator Michael Schiavello had given me the nickname, suggesting I was someone who prescribes sleeping pills. I looked at my fists.
OK Jérôme, take two of these and call me when you wake up.
When my intro music started, I put all my concentration on suppressing the electric feeling starting to spread across my skin.
I looked straight ahead as Hape yelled this and that in my ear and barely acknowledged the crowd when I got into the ring, which was now flashing like something from the movie
Tron
. Hape had formulated a plan for the fight against Jérôme, but when the bell rang I promptly forgot what it was. I was there to do to him what I’d done to a hundred men before him. I was looking for the punch that was going to separate this man from his consciousness.
Jérôme probably out-scored me in the first round. He’s a big guy, much bigger than me, and every time I tried to get into his range he’d fend me off with long jabs and head kicks. In the second round, though, I started to time his fends and got into his range. That’s when I started throwing with abandon. The crowd roared when one of my wound-up uppercuts skied between us. I hadn’t gotten
him, but they were cheering for the unlikely narrative that the K-1 had been suggesting.
With a minute left in the round, Jérôme got me into a corner and started throwing combinations, getting me in the Thai plum, an allowed clinch in which taller fighters can quite often get heavy knees into a smaller fighter’s head. He might have got me with a couple of knees, I can’t remember. If he did I didn’t care. We were into it now.
I caught him with a couple of counters and he backed off, out of the corner. Then I dropped my hands and stuck my chin out like I had with Ray.
Come get it boy. Come get it.
The crowd absolutely loved that, and it seemed Jérôme was put off by my showboating. The sound levels soared as he came at me, and soared again when I wheeled around and caught him with a flush straight right.
Le Banner retreated into the corner he’d just trapped me in, and there I threw one of the longest combinations of my career. A few of the fourteen or so punches glanced off his gloves, a few missed altogether, but most of them caught the big Frenchman, including the last two which snapped his head backwards as though someone had deleted his spine. Le Banner didn’t so much fall to the floor, as splashed.
The place went bat-shit, but I managed to keep pretty cool. Hopefully I had two more fights and, besides, I’d
already seen all this. As far as I was concerned, I’d won this fight weeks ago.
When I got backstage and into the training rooms, there was an unexpected intrusion. It was Tarik Solak, who bounded in energetically. I was confused, wondering what the hell he was doing there.
‘Mate, I just got you forty grand,’ he said.
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘For the knockout. Call it a bonus. Forty grand, pretty good, huh?’
K-1 didn’t offer any knockout bonuses that I knew about, but I’d happily take the cash. When I told Dixon about the money, I could tell he was pissed. Tarik’s ‘bonus’ was another salvo in the long-simmering war between Solak and McIver over control of Oceanic kickboxing and specifically K-1 rights. Tarik had previously controlled all the big guns in that fight, but with the win over Le Banner, I had instantly become an arsenal, and Tarik wanted to try to get me in his camp. To Dixon’s credit, though, he managed not to complain openly about the intrusion. After all, his man had a semifinal to fight.
Ernesto Hoost had managed to get a decision against lanky German–Croatian fighter Stefan Leko in the first fight of the tournament, so I was pretty happy at the prospect of avenging both my European losses in quick
succession. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Hoost had sustained a leg injury in his fight, and with Bernardo, the reserve fighter, also injured, Leko would have to do.
My output in my second fight wasn’t quite what it had been against Le Banner, but I did manage to drop Leko in both the first and second rounds, and that was enough to get me the unanimous decision and into the final fight. Twenty minutes later I was backstage wearing a Samoan lava-lava (sarong) around my waist, an asoa (lei) around my neck and a T-shirt that said ‘Bad Coconut’, waiting for a million-dollar fight. The prize money for second was almost a fifth of the first prize, reflecting the uniquely Japanese ‘winner takes all’ spirit of K-1.
No problem there. I never thought about anything except that number-one spot. I was given the gift, and I’d done the work. I wasn’t going to be stopped.
Michael Buffer, one of the most recognisable voices in the world, cut through the hubbub of the crowd with his trademark intro. ‘For the thousands in attendance, and millions around the world … LET’S GET READY TO RUUUUUUMBLE.’
I stepped into a cherry picker that had been brought in to transport me to the ring. A spotlight landed on me, and while an orchestral version of Queen’s ‘We Are the
Champions’ played, I floated some 40 metres above the ground towards the ring.
On the other side of the stadium was Francisco Filho, a Kyokushin karate fighter from Brazil wearing a white
gi
and black belt. A life-long
karateka
, Francisco is one of the few men to have undertaken two 100-man
kumites
, in which the fighter endures 100 consecutive sparring rounds against similarly high-level opponents. This would be a fight between the
dojo
and the streets.
The fight wasn’t the most exciting I’d ever been in. I tried to follow Hape’s game-plan, which was to tortoise while I got close enough to the Brazilian’s head, then take it off with my hooks, but Francisco did a good job of keeping me at bay with long, hidden karate head kicks, which are thrown with a bent leg and only obvious at the last moment.
In the final seconds of the third round I could feel the fight was not yet won so I bum-rushed the Brazilian with a flurry of punches and knees, trying to snatch the victory. Nothing really connected, and when I got to my corner I felt we might be looking at a draw.
We were called back into the middle of the ring and the refs announced their results. All three judges had seen the fight 30–30. We were going in for one more round.
As soon as I got back into the middle I could see fatigue in the face of the Brazilian fighter. I thought to myself that
I only had to work hard for another three minutes. Just 180 short seconds of punching and kicking and I’d be set. I’d be the baddest motherfucker on earth, with a million bucks in my pocket. I’d be set. Just one more frickin’ round.
I took the middle of the ring early and kept it for almost the entire round. Cutting off an exhausted Filho a number of times, I delivered heavy body shots while he was trapped against the ropes. He got a couple of decent head shots off and a couple of jabs and a kick, but he couldn’t stop me from coming at him. We were both completely rooted at the end of the fourth round, but I started to feel that I’d got there.
‘Get ready for another one,’ Dixon said when I went back to my corner, but I reckoned I’d done enough. I’d turned it on when it needed to be turned on, and I thought I’d won that last round purely because of my activity and effort.
When the ref took our hands I felt that winning feeling. Like the KO of Le Banner, the victory was already the truth even though it hadn’t been declared yet. As the announcer started speaking in Japanese I began tapping my chest in celebration.
Then I heard the words ‘MARKO HUNTO’, and it was time to go bat-shit. I leapt around the ring; I did the running man; I hugged all and sundry. Tarik was in the ring, along with Dixon, Hape, Peter Graham and Adam
Watt, and also Ray. He hugged me with genuine warmth, but I could also tell he was hurting. I’d snatched what he’d been working towards for so long and from his hands, no less. This was my moment, though, not Ray’s.
Kazuyoshi Ishii grabbed me and kissed my forehead. He was as happy as anyone in that ring. My Cinderella journey from obscurity to the Oceania tournament, to the Repechage B tournament, and now to the peak of combat sports, it was completely unprecedented. That was something he could sell.
A podium was set up and while I stood in the middle of it, I watched Tarik and Dixon jostle for a position next to me. As is the Japanese way, I was festooned with victorious totem after victorious totem – a silk sash, a giant medal, a golden cup and a crown. It felt like I’d just beaten the final boss in a Spacey and they were powering my character up. Then they produced the totem I really wanted, that giant cheque.
I didn’t really take it all in then. In fact, it only really struck me a few days later when I walked, barefoot, onto my flight back to Australia. As I was settling into my business-class seat, one of the flight attendants came over and asked if I had any shoes. I didn’t. I’d only taken one pair of shoes with me to Japan, and I’d given them to a guy on the street after celebrating.
‘Okay, let’s see what we can do,’ she said with a smile.
An Aussie guy across the way called over to me. ‘Hey, champ. I’ve never seen a millionaire without shoes before,’ he said, raising his champagne glass to me. ‘Congratulations.’
Holy shit, I AM a millionaire!
I might have been a millionaire, but I was also still that renegade kid from South Auckland. I’d managed to stave off my vices for a couple of months in the lead-up to this tournament but, with the job done, I succumbed to them all, and then some.
I wouldn’t stay a millionaire for long. That’s the thing about shoeless millionaires – they’re usually targeted pretty quickly by someone selling shoes … and the rest.
I spent a few days in Japan after my Grand Prix win before flying home, and those days would speak of what the rest of my Japanese martial arts career would be like. After my win at the Dome I was taken to a private dining room in the hotel to sit down with the K-1 brass and talk about my future in the organisation. When the functionary came backstage to give me the invitation I was told in no uncertain terms Dixon would not be joining us.
‘We started this thing together, we’re going to keep going together,’ Dixon kept saying as soon as he heard what was going on. ‘We’re a team. It’s you and me, bro. You and me.’
He was pretty much pleading in the end, but none of it was necessary. I didn’t think we were a team, but I do think you should dance with the girl you came with.
‘Don’t worry, man,’ I said to him. ‘I’m not going to fuck you.’
When I arrived for the dinner, the maître d’ bowed deeply then led me through a quiet restaurant of wood-panelling and dim lighting to the private dining room. Inside, Ishii-san and his lieutenants sat with Tarik, awaiting my arrival. There were brief congratulations, and sake, then we quickly got onto the reason Ishii-san had summoned me.
‘Mark, we want you to be managed by Tarik. We know him. He is a friend of ours. We don’t know this Dixon.’
I told them I couldn’t do that. I knew Tarik was an astute businessman and he obviously had a great working relationship with Ishii-san and the K-1, but I just didn’t trust the bloke. When I saw him in that restaurant, all I could think about was him throwing those notes on the ground in front of Lucy and me as though they were scraps for a dog.