I hadn’t paid much attention to UFC until I was asked to write a book with fighter Dan Hardy . The sport won me over, but boxing will always be my true love

“What do you know about the UFC?” my agent asks me over the phone.

The UFC? My mind starts racing. Let’s see, there’s the Irish one who might be a hype job. There’s the woman, or is she retired now? There’s a bunch of Brazilians apparently juiced to the gills. There’s an old English one who is supposed to be an asshole ...

“Hello? Paul?”

“Sorry, I lost you there,” I lie.

“Well, what do you know about the UFC?” he repeats.

“I follow it,” I answer, making full use of my artistic licence. It is the equivalent of returning serve with a blocked backhand to midcourt, just to keep me alive in the rally for at least one more shot. I probably would have answered in a similar vein had he questioned me on Morris Dancing in 15th-century Norfolk.

“OK, good. A publisher is looking for a ghostwriter to tell Dan Hardy’s story. Are you interested?”

Am I interested? I’m a freelance sportswriter, struggling to survive the death throes of print journalism in an age when the average publishing house prefers the subject of a book to have 100,000 Twitter followers rather than anything of interest to say. Freelance is to all intents and purposes a euphemism for unemployed. I also have two kids under the age of two, which equates to an average of 13,000 nappies per month. Am I interested? I’d probably write The Complete History of Paint Drying for a year’s supply of Farley’s Rusks.

“Sure, get me on the shortlist and we’ll hear them out at least.”

Chosen for story-telling ability rather than mixed martial arts expertise, I was given the gig last year and embarked on an illuminating six months. Hardy, once Britain’s first UFC title challenger and now one of MMA’s most respected analysts, is a highly intelligent, articulate, interesting and insightful guy, so it was a pleasure spending time in his company and learning his story.

Shaolin monks, psychedelic medicine, crossing the Atlantic on a clipper, Bruce Lee’s legacy, the never-ending evolution of MMA, and the eternal conflict between fighting and sport that burns within him were all on the menu. I did my research and subtly guided our conversations as best I could, but in essence I sat back and listened as Dan weaved the fascinating narrative for me.

We first met last summer when I spent a few days in his home, a cavernous, converted church building with a labyrinth of nooks and crannies in a quiet village in Leicestershire. It’s a unique and contradictory homestead, perfectly befitting of the character of the owner. Always close to his roots, Hardy carried the British and English flags with pride during a fighting career in which he became the first from those shores to contest a world title in the UFC.

A vast and glorious, maritime-looking Union Jack is draped from a mezzanine balcony inside the heart of his home and I joked that it is a fine welcome for an Irish guest that grew up in Belfast during the Troubles. Our early conversations are earnest but equally light-hearted, subjects such as vegetarianism, the mystical power of crystals and funny YouTube videos deftly breaking the ice. Then we abruptly changed tack.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hardy punches Duane Ludwig at UFC 146 in the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas in 2012. Photograph: Donald Miralle/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

“Yeah, I suppose so,” he somewhat begrudgingly allows. “For a long time I didn’t agree, but, yeah, I can now accept why they outlawed it.”

He’s still trying to totally convince himself even as we chat about it in 2016. Our topic is the MMA soccer kick: the act of simply booting a grounded opponent in the head as hard as a footballer might strike a 30-yard free-kick towards goal. Dan, born and bred in Nottingham, has thicker thighs than Stuart Pearce had in his pomp and he has been practising kicking objects, inanimate or otherwise, since his first taekwondo class at the age of five. He had also just rapped his knuckles on his shin to demonstrate how thousands of hours of conditioning by aggressively rolling a glass bottle up and down his tibia have calcified the bone and made his leg as solid as the trunk of an ironwood tree. Imagining Hardy or one of his mates from the Octagon given free rein to try and volley my head into row Z causes me to swallow hard.

And yet, 23 years ago when the Ultimate Fighting Championship was born, the soccer kick was a standard move. In fact, 20 seconds into the UFC’s very first bout, a Dutch savateur by the name of Gerard Gordeau executed it perfectly when he found his opponent, a 460lb Hawaiian sumo wrestler by the name of Teila Tuli, vulnerable on his hands and knees. Tuli’s front tooth flew over the side of the caged wall, the referee waved it off, and the big man from Honolulu spent several minutes wiping away his own blood and tottering about with the expression of a pained and confused baby.

Biting, gouging and merciless groin attacks aside, pretty much anything went in those early days, when Royce Gracie would fly in from Rio de Janeiro and use Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to calmly submit whoever was placed in front of him. A couple of years later, Senator John McCain was moved to describe the spectacle as nothing more than human cockfighting as he spearheaded an effort to ban MMA across the US.

The fight game reloaded: how MMA and UFC conquered the world | Andy Bull Read more

And there was definitely an element of Wild West lawlessness surrounding the sport at that stage, one which the original promoters were only too happy to revel in. But, by the time Dana White and the Fertitta brothers were in charge and the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts written and adopted, the raw violence had been tempered somewhat. It was then, with the broadcasting of season one of The Ultimate Fighter on British screens, that I first encountered MMA.

For clarity’s sake, I’m a boxing writer. I’ll dabble in all sorts, but I consider professional boxing my bread and butter. After years at ringside, or even closer in gyms, I am neither squeamish about the inherent violence of boxing nor receptive to the moral objections proffered towards combat sports in general. But even so, watching The Ultimate Fighter caused me to wince. With the damage that the razor sharpness of elbows or the bludgeoning power of knees could inflict throughout each five-minute round, the potential for brutality appeared much more alive within the octagon than the ring. Savage, was how I remember describing it at the time.

Applying adjectives such as savage, brutal and vicious to a physical confrontation is a subjective task, of course. We can all more or less agree on what constitutes an act of violence, inside or outside of a sporting arena, but whether a fight is to be considered savage, brutal or vicious is entirely down to the observer’s appetite for that sort of thing. When I first submitted a long-form piece to Boxing Monthly magazine, the editor, Graham Houston, opted to change just one of my 5,000 or so words.

“I try to avoid the word savage when describing a hard fight,” Houston advised me. “I can’t think of many boxing matches that were truly savage.” Houston is an International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee who has been writing about the sport for over half a century so, when he speaks about boxing, I listen. He was right, savage wasn’t the right word then and it very rarely is as far as boxing is concerned. But MMA? I don’t know. Back then it genuinely did seem savage to me.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dan Hardy in his younger years. Photograph: Dan Hardy

I didn’t really watch much MMA from that point on. When it appeared on my radar, I, like so many, viewed it through a boxing-tinted lens. From that terribly skewed point of view, I saw only square-on stances, unguarded chins and ineffective striking techniques. And when a fight went to the floor, I had no clue what I saw.

But I didn’t dislike it per se. It wasn’t my sport, but I had no trouble understanding why millions of fans all over the world do love it. I was never part of the school of thought which decrees you must be either boxing or MMA. I simply got on with following boxing and left MMA practitioners and fans in peace. Life is surely too short for a sportswriter to be devoting energy to watching and reporting on a subject they just don’t get or appreciate. More than that, in writing from such a biased foundation there is a risk of journalistic integrity being compromised as prejudices become entrenched in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. As I grew closer to Dan and immersed myself in MMA last year, I learned that plenty of writers are making a living from writing ill-informed, snide and irrational articles in which their need to undermine and belittle dominates every other sentence.

Opinions on the sport in the mainstream press were formed and fixed in the bad old days: back in the 1990s when the multi-disciplined MMA was conflated with cage fighting and many British shows were just grizzly money-laundering exercises run by local criminal underworlds. Those characters dragged the sport down to their shadowy level and plenty of the fighters were happy to go along with the dark and violent image for a few quid, a few more lines of cocaine, and a quick boosting of their street cred.

But the bad old days were a generation ago. The world has changed. Speaking to Hardy it is clear that the sport felt under siege for more than a decade, but it has come out the other side now. MMA has had an extreme aesthetic makeover, while the foreboding prophecies of death and life-altering injuries in the octagon are yet to come to pass. You can check all the facts and figures for yourself, but the rise of the UFC has been unstoppable. Plenty of media continue to be standoffish but, in another generation, when the UFC has succeeded in cementing MMA’s place within the mainstream, the objections and reticence will seem quaint and antiquated. MMA people are already there – already comfortable in their own skin and safe in the knowledge that they are here to stay.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fighter-turned-pundit Dan Hardy interviews Brett Johns after his fight at the SSE Arena in Belfast in 2016. Photograph: Brandon Magnus/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

It is apparently a weak card, but you wouldn’t guess that from the 8,000 crowd in attendance and the noise they are generating. And unlike the majority of boxing shows, where 90% of the punters loiter around a nearby watering hole until the main event, MMA fans arrive early, with plenty in situ alongside me at 5pm for the first of 13 bouts. It is the SSE Arena in Belfast, Mousasi Hall II, and my first live UFC Fight Night.



Though I try to fight it, the desire to compare and contrast everything in front of my eyes with boxing overwhelms me. That impulse is only exacerbated by the fact I am sitting beside Jamie Conlan, the Commonwealth and WBO Inter-Continental super flyweight champion, but at least Jamie is an MMA fan.

If you loved Arturo Gatti, you'll admire the gutsy and talented Jamie Conlan Read more

The first thing that strikes me is what a polished product the UFC behemoth is. You would think they have a Saturday-night residency at the arena. I am sat in the second row as a fan, but I cast an envious glance towards the press seats, where journalists are living like kings with tables to rest their laptops and coffees on, sockets to plug their gear into, and an unobstructed view of the action – all luxuries the common-garden boxing scribe can only dream of, even at the biggest world title events.

No expense has been spared on the big screens either. There is one in each corner and an extra monster screen behind me. Between bouts, documentary snippets on the upcoming fighters or future events are shown to keep the crowd focused on exactly why we are all here. The two octagon girls are well turned out and everyone around me seems to know them by name. They, just like the referees, cutmen, announcers and commentators, are all very much part of the UFC brand. Even a man whose sole job appears to be ensuring a camera’s cable doesn’t creep on to a scorer’s desk begins to build up a cult following with a tipsy-happy bunch behind me.

This establishment of a well-defined brand is one of the UFC’s great strengths. And when the presentation is so slick, it is easier to paper over any cracks that appear in the product. It is my first live event but it all seems very familiar because it is exactly the same as every UFC show I have ever seen on television. It is a franchise feel, like walking into McDonald’s in another country. That is not meant as a criticism; people who know what they like yearn for consistency and the UFC has tapped into that demand by creating something that can be transported easily into any city in the world. It is a page straight out of a Marketing 101 textbook, but a page most boxing promoters have obviously skipped.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Artem Lobov celebrates with Conor McGregor after his win in Belfast in 2016. Photograph: Brandon Magnus/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

Conor McGregor is cageside to support a couple of his SBG team-mates. As he isn’t fighting, it is a dialled-down version of his Notorious alter-ego that swaggers to and from his seat, but every movement still creates bedlam in the crowd. Hoards leave their positions and charge towards a heavily barricaded and guarded walkway each time he leaves or enters the arena. Plenty around me are happy to ignore the action they have paid upwards of £200 to see and choose to simply stare at the Dubliner from a distance. It is a scary level of adulation, one no boxer on the planet currently enjoys or endures.

How to look good while fighting, by Conor McGregor's strength coach Read more

It reminds me of watching Tiger Woods play a WGC event in County Kilkenny in 2002. The strongest field in world golf was out on the course that day and yet there I was gathered around a putting green with 99% of the rest of the paying public. We all preferred to strain for a glimpse of Woods practising six-foot putts rather than accompany Sergio García or Retief Goosen as they both shot astonishing course-record 62s. McGregor is a different type of character, of course, but he shares some of that intangible magnetism that Woods has wrestled with his entire career.

I don’t mind admitting I was unsure of McGregor’s genuine fighting calibre before I discussed him with Dan. He is clearly a genius in terms of self-promotion, but I had read so many writers attempting to belittle his achievements and mock his status as an athlete that I too wondered what substance lay beyond the hype.

Reading between the lines, it is clear that the money-driven egomaniac spiel grates within MMA circles, but Dan separates ability from hubris when he breaks down a fighter. He talks about the Irishman’s innate understanding of range and timing to deliver that devastating left hand, but it is perhaps striking given McGregor’s image that he highlights work ethic and respect for the martial arts as his greatest strengths. Dan admires McGregor’s thirst for knowledge and cerebral approach, how he develops new techniques to diversify an already versatile attack and help the entire sport of MMA to evolve.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hardy greets fans at a UFC event in Las Vegas in 2016. Photograph: David Becker/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

The action in the octagon ebbs and flows throughout the night. For every jarring knockout, there is a slightly obscure submission. For every one-sided beat-down, there is an even-matched epic. For every expectation exceeded, there is a slight anti-climax. Four women fight, but there is no discernible change to how they are treated by the fans. The first two bantamweights are jeered for a lack of engagement, while two straw-weights receive roars of approval for an entertaining war. Refreshingly, the respect and criticism is totally ambivalent to gender. They are all just MMA fighters.

The five-minute rounds are noticeably longer than the three minutes used in boxing. At UFC 1 back in 1993, there was no such thing as a round: it was simply a fight until a victor emerged. As it happened, none of the bouts even reached five minutes, but in theory at least, two of the fighters could still be at it as I type today. I ask Jamie beside me what he would do if boxing converted to a format of five-minute rounds. “Fuck all for the first two minutes of each round,” he responds with a grin.

The sounds emanating from the battles in front of me differ from what I am used to as well. Absent are the breathy wooshes, the sharp slaps of leather on torso and the compressed-air thuds that eight- or 10-ounce boxing gloves deliver. The measly four-ounce mitts used in MMA are more silent assassin than brash, loud bully.

I brace myself for savagery and brutality, but it doesn’t arrive. Television undoubtedly sanitises boxing. Watching it on screen, the viewer feels clearly removed from the action. In reality, you must sit ringside for any accurate appreciation of the true damage being done. That was the case in 1933 when Archie Sexton and Laurie Raiteri put on an exhibition in Broadcasting House London, and no network has seen fit to tinker much with the product ever since.

The UFC has gone a different route, however. Perhaps simply a function of having more room to work with and the cage structure making a cameraman’s life a little easier, they have managed to place an armchair fan closer to the battle. The effect is thus the total reverse of boxing. From a remote vantage point on your living room sofa, the violence of an MMA bout is actually intensified and magnified rather than watered down. So, unlike my first jolting experience of watching boxers throw hands with bad intentions in the flesh, my first taste of UFC fighters doing likewise feels slightly distilled if anything.

Conor McGregor may never use his boxing licence but don't write him off Read more

There is still plenty of blood, of course, much more than the average boxing card. And I find it unsettling to watch a man have the consciousness choked out of him and lie limp on the canvas floor for what seems like an eternity. Such a sight in boxing makes me physically nauseous as it can frequently be a precursor to enduring tragedy, but few observers seem concerned as medics surround this fallen fighter. And, true enough, a couple of minutes later he is strolling past me back to his dressing room as if had he had just woken up from a Sunday afternoon nap.

It makes me wonder whether MMA is safer than boxing. At first glance it appears a bold statement. How can a confrontation in which you are limited to heavily padded fists be more dangerous than one in which feet, knees and elbows are also permitted? Not to mention throwing, choking and continuing an assault when an adversary has been knocked down and lies prostrate on the floor. But the devil, it turns out, is in the detail.

The violence of the octagon is starker than that of the ring. An elbow can cut like a Stanley knife and the resulting wound can gush like a burst pipe, staining combatants and canvas blood red as they fight. But the damage is superficial more often than not, cleaned by the swipe of a towel and closed by a line of stitches at worst. Limbs can be twisted and broken or struck and shattered, and it can be a sickening moment to suffer or witness, but the consequences are immediately there for all to see and worst-case prognosis relatively easy to declare.

To date, after 24 years and around 4,000 fights, a top-10 list of the worst injuries sustained in a UFC fight is made up of a selection of these gruesome gashes and agonising fractures. It is still relatively early days but no one is dying, no one is slipping into comas and no one is resigned to a retirement of long-term neurological damage. I couldn’t help wondering why. The mitts involved clearly make a difference, and it is important to remember that they were introduced to prizefighting to protect hands and not brains. The smaller gloves in an MMA arena lead to quicker, cleaner finishes. They also preclude covering up and absorbing a prolonged barrage of concussive blows that can come back to haunt a fighter in later life.

The lack of a referee’s count in MMA is also key. Boxing connoisseurs may be repelled by the sight of a fallen competitor being leapt upon and subjected to a sustained ground attack, but it is beginning to look like the gentlemanly approach of giving a downed foe up to 10 seconds to recover before renewing hostilities is far more damaging to long-term health. The length of a contest must also play a part. UFC fights last 15 minutes, or 25 if a title is on the line, compared to the normal 30 or 36 minutes that experienced boxers go through. Finally, the old chestnut of not comparing like for like must be considered. Head trauma is the big fear within combat sports, and MMA fighters, with so many more options to attack, simply spend a lower percentage of their time bludgeoning each other’s skulls. In-depth, empirical analysis of all the data is needed before any definitive conclusion can be reached, but from a neurological point of view it appears that an octagon is safer than a ring.

Part Reptile, by Dan Hardy and Paul Gibson

Dan’s book is now complete, my sabbatical is over and I’m trying to piece together what I can take away from the experience. MMA has burrowed deeper into my consciousness. My knowledge remains limited but it is growing and with it my appreciation for what mixed martial artists do when the octagon door slams shut.

The sport is young and it is exciting to see it evolve in real time. New techniques and approaches are born in MMA gyms every year, and fighters still emerge and do something never seen before to totally change the game. This, coupled with the natural diversity of a multi-disciplinary art, engenders a heightened sense of unpredictability in every match-up. The UFC’s best-must-fight-the-best approach then guarantees a steady supply of the fights the fans really want to see. It is one hell of a business model.

So am I converted? Yes and no. As I knew it would be, boxing is still my sport. I could try and articulate why, but I’d prefer not to pour more fuel on the boxing-versus-MMA false dichotomy. That is just not necessary. There is room in the global sporting landscape for fans to enjoy both sports, or just one, or neither. And the beauty of it all is that we are free to choose as we please.

• This article appeared first on The Balls of Wrath

• Follow The Balls of Wrath on Twitter