Born to Fight (6 page)

Soon it was mayhem out on the street. Johnno and I were into it, and the fellas on the other side, but also
people who’d come from nowhere. It became one of those scraps no one wanted to miss. The cops were trying to get a handle on the whole ruckus, but they realised they needed back-up, and they were calling for it on their radios.

While the street was all flying fists and shouting, a hand reached over and pulled me back into the club. It was a dreadlocked guy, shorter and older than me, but strong, tattooed and with a definite confidence. This guy pushed me into the staff toilets and told me to stay there until he came and got me. I did what he said, and waited there for what felt like an hour. When the door opened, I knew this guy had probably just kept me from another stint in prison.

‘So, you like a scrap, do you son?’ the man asked.

I didn’t say anything.

‘You want a real fight then?’

I did wonder what I’d been doing up to that point. The man said the words
Muay Thai
, but it didn’t mean anything to me. He said the word ‘kickboxing’, which I did understand. Then he said the word ‘Thursday’.

‘This Thursday?’ I asked.

‘This Thursday, bro.’

‘Where?’

‘Here. You in?’

This guy’s name was Sam Marsters, a bouncer at DTMs and a few other clubs around K’Road. He was also a fighter,
a trainer and a bit of a local entrepreneur. In five days’ time, Marsters wanted me to have a kickboxing fight in this nightclub. I was in.

There have been a few people over the years who’ve reached into the sloppy mess of my life, pulled me out and put me on some solid ground, and Sam Marsters was probably the first. He invited me to go to his gym in Fort Street for a little bit of training, and the two things I remember about that place are the smell of liniment, and learning how to throw a punch into a pad, which was pretty much all I did learn. After all, five days is five days.

Sam Marsters is a cool cat. Even though he was only ten or so years older than me, he had lived a life, having worked as a free-diving fisherman at his ancestral home, the Cook Islands; run a plantation in PNG; and fought some of the world’s best fighters in the discipline of
Muay Thai
, which is a variation on kickboxing that allows elbow and knee strikes.

I liked Sam from the get-go. He was honest, quiet, strong, fair and left no doubt as to who was in charge in his presence.

When I walked into DTMs the next Thursday, the place had been transformed. The dance floor had been cleared of baggy-pant- and short-skirt-wearing teenagers to make way for a boxing ring. The crowd had been converted too,
from party kids to an older, uglier crowd, and when I came out from the toilets and towards the ring, I saw mullets, prison tatts and gappy smiles either side of me.

Sam had taught me what he could, but I had pretty much no training, and no one expects an eighteen-year-old kid with no training to win an organised fight. I walked to the ring almost completely free of stress, feeling calm even when I got there and found a much larger Islander, older and certainly more experienced than me. Surely if this guy started beating the daylights out of me, someone would stop it.

‘Oh shit,’ I kept thinking to myself over and over again. Not, ‘Oh shit, how did I get into this?’ Or, ‘Oh shit, how do I get out of this?’ Just, ‘Oh shit I’m here in a
Muay Thai
fight in a nightclub and everyone is staring at me.’

It was a very strange feeling and, I tell you, I didn’t mind the attention at all. When the announcer said my name, people started cheering, not because anyone knew who I was, but because I was one of Sam’s guys, fighting in one of Sam’s events. I was the hometown boy and I liked their cheers.

When the bell rang, it felt strange to be wearing gloves, but other than that I felt comfortable. For a good part of the first round I only threw punches, but later I thought I
should throw in a few kicks, because, you know, this was a kickboxing fight after all.

After my untrained shin slapped into my opponent’s leg and a shock ran up through my body, I realised that these kicks were probably slowing me more than him so I went back to punches.

As time ticked past through the first round, I grew more and more confident. Fighting just one guy, on a flat surface, with no bins or kerbs to fall over was actually pretty easy going.

When I came out for the second round I was ready to look for that spot where his chin would be open for business. With naked fists and often wildly swinging opponents, it was much easier to find that spot on the streets, but I was confident, with a little patience, that I’d get to this guy’s spot. A scenario started playing in my mind. The ring was the same, but beyond it wasn’t a nightclub, it was a stadium – the MGM Grand Garden Arena. There were thousands of people and lights and cameras, and I was stacked with muscles. I was darker skinned, too. I was Mike Tyson. My head had been playing a news clip I’d seen on TV of Mike Tyson knocking some poor fella out. It was a clean, one-punch knockout, but which punch was it?

Then I saw it – a naked jaw and dropped hands. I threw a straight right at my opponent, landing it square on the
jaw. It was the same punch as the one I’d seen Iron Mike throw, and the results were the same. This dude was out cold. The crowd cheered and shouted, saying only good things, nice things.

‘They need to put this kid in the movies,’ a woman yelled. A ripple of laughter followed. It felt good. It felt really good. I started dancing around the ring – we were in a nightclub, after all.

‘Good shit, son,’ Sam said to me after the fight, handing me a six-pack. Those beers didn’t last long.

‘You know, I reckon we should probably do this again.’

I reckoned he was right.

After that first fight Marsters left me an open invitation to train with him for free at his little gym on Fort Street in the Auckland CBD. I was an infrequent visitor, but it was at that spartan place where I first learned to bring a little control to my fighting, a little discipline. My fighting style didn’t change – it’s never really changed, not even now – but that was where I started to learn ring craft.

I enjoyed training at Sam’s gym, but it never felt part of my real life. My real life was still all that mayhem in the south. The gym was a nice, safe harbour, but it wasn’t in my country and I’d only visit it when the current took me there.

One day Sam bailed me up at the gym and asked me why I didn’t train more often. He knew I was enjoying it and that I liked the rest of the guys, and I was getting pretty good at it, too. He just didn’t understand.

When I told him about my life outside the gym, just a little, Sam suggested I move into the warehouse he was fitting out as his new gym. He said Dave could move in too.

Why not, eh?

The warehouse started as a big empty space with a ring in the middle, but grew into a home of sorts, with a few partitions bearing some posters of fighters or girls, and a few Pakeha housemates, many of whom had come off the streets, and even some food in the fridge from time to time.

Life there was good, and I liked the other guys I lived and trained with. Discipline wasn’t particularly strict – Sam knew most of the boys he’d taken on had some issues with authority – but what rules did exist were enforced enthusiastically, and the big one was that when you were at the gym, you had to respect the gym, respect your gym mates and, above all, respect Sam.

We had free rein to do whatever we wanted outside the gym – and there were some crazy lives being lived outside that gym (one of those Pakeha dudes was even getting paid to root older women) – but inside the gym we had to be cool.

We were all shits in our own way, though, and sometimes we ran foul of Sam. When that happened, we’d probably end up in the ring with him. Shortly after you’d be waking up. Sam never knocked me out, though. Not because I was never asking for it, but because it wasn’t an easy thing to do. With me, he’d use his grappling skills to establish who was the boss. I hated that. Not the discipline, mind you – Sam was nothing like the old man, and I always understood why he did what he did – but I hated the powerlessness of being stuck in a strong, talented grappler’s embrace.

When I was living at Sam’s gym I started travelling around the country a little. In addition to the fight shows he promoted at his clubs, Sam used to offset the cost of running his gym by plugging us into events his mates were organising.

‘What do you need? A 62, an 82 and a heavyweight? Can do – they’re right here at my gym,’ I’d hear him bark into his mobile, and off we’d go to some event somewhere.

Sam would also take us on road trips to places like Piha and Muriwai Beaches on the West Coast, where the surf
was good, breaking on gorgeous black sand beaches. He was a mad keen surfer, Sam Marsters – still is actually – and so were a lot of the other fighters.

I got on a board a few times, but I wasn’t a great swimmer and was probably a bit too big for those boards, so the surfing bug never bit me. I still loved those trips, though, when all of us piled into a car stacked with food, weed and booze for a few days of fun. It was like being part of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I was particularly useful to Sam, not only because I was a heavyweight, but because I could be plugged into any fight. That wasn’t true of most blokes. A lot of fighters had plans and fears and whatnot, but I never cared who the guy across from me was. Short notice, no notice, notable, unheard of, whoever they were, we could throw down. That’s how I ended up fighting Rony Sefo.

The fight was to be at the Mandalay Ballroom in Newmarket and, unbeknown to me, there was some tension between Sam and the Sefo boys. When Sam walked into the event – it was one the Sefos were promoting – Rony’s brother Ray yelled at Sam to pay the cover. At the time Sam was a pledge for the Head Hunters, one of New Zealand’s bigger gangs, but Ray wasn’t going to take any shit from him at his own event. Sam told Ray he was happy to pay if Ray would accompany him to the toilets. As talented a
fighter as Ray was (and still is), he wasn’t that keen to go into a confined space with an angry Sam.

Rony was only a couple of years older than me, but he was much more advanced on his career path. He and Ray worked hard under Lolo Heimuli, and by the time I fought Rony they were already starting to make names for themselves internationally.

The guy Rony was supposed to be fighting had pulled out two days before the fight, so I got into the ring with about a day’s notice. As soon as we touched gloves, I knew it might be a longer night than most of my other fights, not because I knew anything about Rony, but because he had abdominal muscles. I hadn’t fought anyone with abs before.

Rony and I danced through six rounds, but the thing about Rony was that he just never tired, and he never dropped his hands – unlike most of the guys I’d fought up until that point. His chin never opened for business.

I lost that fight on points. I remember hoping I’d meet this bloke in the ring again, and vowed never to lose to the same person twice. Which is not to say that the close decision against a world-class fighter pushed me in my training, because it didn’t.

Training then didn’t mean to me what it does today. Today I train to win. Today I train to be not just the best fighter I can be, but the best fighter in the world. Back then
training was just something to do. If there was something better to do, I’d be off in a flash.

At that time, though, I did start to realise how good I could be. Every so often, usually when training or fighting, a little squeaky voice of self-belief sounded off in my head.

You’re the best fighter in the world, man; it’s just that no one else knows about it yet.

I honestly used to hear that in my head. If I ever listened to that voice, however, it would be followed by a booming dissenting opinion.

Where did you come from? You think you can be shit? Just shut up, have another drink.

Living at Sam’s gym taught me some of the basics of civilised independent living, and a little bit about working and budgeting, but it was never planned to be a permanent spot, so after about nine months with Sam I moved into Dave’s parents’ garage in South Auckland. I had a good little set-up there, with a bed, PlayStation, TV and VHS, and I remember it was on that video player that I got my first peek into the scale and spectacle of K-1.

VHS copies of high-quality kickboxing matches were a hot commodity around the gym, but no tape was as highly prized as the first-ever K-1 Grand Prix tournament. For those who don’t know, K-1 was where mixed martial arts really began. Created by Kazuyoshi Ishii – the
Japanese karate master who started the Seidokaikan style of full-contact karate – the early K-1 tournaments were Japanese-only affairs, where local fighters would pit themselves in full-contact matches under traditional rules in front of tiny crowds. Soon these karate students were testing themselves against kung fu fighters and the rules were relaxed to create a more even playing field. As the rules became more permissive, Ishii-san found that his open style of karate was starting to mirror the styles of some of the European kickboxing champions.

In 1993, with the help of a group of Japanese businessmen (some with pretty colourful backgrounds) the organisation planned a one-off, eight-man invitational tournament in one of Japan’s biggest indoor stadiums, so they could test their champion, legendary Japanese karateka Masaaki Satake, against the best fighters from around the world.

Fighters from the US, Croatia, the Netherlands and Thailand were invited to compete for the million-dollar prize, with the European kickboxers ultimately dominating. In fact, the only European fighter to lose – Ernesto Hoost – would do so in the final, against Croatian Branko Cikatić.