Mark Hunt might be the heaviest hitter in the UFC. He’s almost certainly the toughest fighter living in Australia right now. His autobiography Born to Fight comes out on September 29, but I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. There’s a game related story in there that I have to share.


Consider it a Public Safety Announcement.

I interviewed Mark Hunt last year and discovered he was actually a tremendously invested Counter-Strike player back in the early 2000s — to the point where he was playing 60 hours a week and it was affecting his training.


Mark talks about Counter-Strike quite frequently in his book, but this story stuck out.

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.

We’ve all been there. Goddamn 10-year-old kids and there god given ability to trash talk.

But this is a warning. A good one. You never know who is on the other end of your garbage trash talk. Jesus wept — could you imagine opening your door to an angry Mark Hunt? A guy with the potential to do this:

The autobiography is titled ‘Born To Fight’ and is well worth the read. There’s a lot of interesting stories about Hunt’s love for video games and how it genuinely helped him through some difficult times in his life.

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