1

I earn my living from coaching people how to fight. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that until I was in my early twenties, I was terrified of fighting. I hated arguing, shouting, violence – all forms of conflict, basically. That’s not unusual, of course, but to be honest, I was a bit of a wimp – or, as some of the kids in school liked to tell me, a pussy.

I was raised in Nutgrove Avenue in Rathfarnham, a suburb on the south side of Dublin. My sister, Ann, had already been on the scene for two and a half years by the time I arrived on 18 January 1977. James, my brother, came along much later.

We lived in a cul-de-sac and most of the other kids in the estate were girls, which meant that I spent much of my time alone. There was one other boy but he was a lot older than me, so I was hardly ever allowed to play with him. While Ann was off with the other girls, I was hanging around with various local creepy-crawlies. From quite a young age I loved Spider-Man, and I was extremely interested in real spiders. (I still am: I have a tarantula beside my desk in my office. Don’t worry, he doesn’t wander around the gym at his leisure or anything – I keep him in a tank.) One of my favourite hobbies was feeding spiders. I’d go looking for ants and then throw them into the webs to observe the spiders as they ate them. That was my thing.

When I did try to hang around with Ann and her friends, I’d quickly be sent on my way. I was a boy and they were all girls, so I was seldom anything other than a source of irritation to them. Every once in a while, though, I’d get a tap on the shoulder and be told, ‘John, you’re going out with her now.’ As the only boy of a similar age in the area, I was sort of shared around among the girls as a token boyfriend. Unfortunately for me, this wasn’t due to my irresistibility: it was just a case of them lacking options.

My parents say that I was an easy kid to deal with, but Ann and James were a bit wild. I’d describe myself as similar to my mother – calm, introverted. It’s difficult to get me riled up. Ann and James share more of my father’s characteristics. He’s got a fiery temper, to say the least.

I was bullied quite a bit in school, and Ann was usually the one who came to my rescue. She always had my back. The main bully in our school was a boy called Steven. He was the kind of guy who’d steal your lunch, or your money on the rare occasion that you actually had any. Ann spotted Steven giving me some grief one day. She made a beeline for him and attacked him with an umbrella. That was the end of me being bullied by Steven. Hell hath no fury like a Dublin girl with a brolly who sees her little brother being picked on! But Steven wasn’t the only bully. I was never really in a proper fight: I usually just ran from it. When I did get punched, I wouldn’t hit back.

Even though we had different personalities, Ann and I were always very close. One day Ann was walking along a steel fence that separated our garden from our neighbours’. She fell and took a nasty bang – and I cried more than she did. Whenever I’d be given something – even if it was something as simple as a biscuit – I’d always ask, ‘What about Ann?’ I wouldn’t take anything unless there was some for Ann as well. We were very tight.

My dad and I were never close when I was growing up, and it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I started to form any sort of a relationship with him. Along with my mam, my dad did a brilliant job of raising us and I wouldn’t change a thing, but he was loud and aggressive and revelled in shouting and arguing, whereas I was the exact opposite. My dad wouldn’t shy away from standing up to ten people; I was frightened by the prospect of standing up to one, never mind an entire group. He’d make me watch Match of the Day – probably in the hope that I’d come to share his passion for soccer – but I absolutely despised it. The theme tune still drives me mad when I hear it now.

But the years have changed our relationship significantly. Now, I would honestly say that he’s my best friend. As we grew older, we probably began to understand each other better. Even now, though, he loves to have an argument. If we’re both sitting together quietly, he’ll often just manufacture an argument. That’s his nature. My dad and James are constantly bickering. They’re rarely in each other’s company without disagreeing over something silly. I can’t fathom how people can thrive on stuff like that – it just seems tiring to me – but for them it’s different.

It’s similar to how I feel about Brazilian jiu-jitsu: I enjoy that as much as they enjoy having a row.

Moving out of the family home when I got older definitely had a positive impact on my relationship with my dad. When you move out, you finally start to see your parents for the human beings they are. Until then, they’re just your parents.

Apart from my dad arguing with whoever was in his vicinity about whether the sky is blue, we had a pretty standard Irish family home. My dad is an amazing man. He was the manager at the sports complex at De La Salle College – where I went to school – and later he became a builder. He’s very independent and self-motivated. If I’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit, that’s probably where it came from. My dad has no plans to retire. He has said many times that he’ll be carried off a building site. He loves it. He’ll never stop.

Looking at what he did with his family as we were growing up, I have so much admiration for him. He was incredibly hard-working, so while we weren’t a wealthy family, we were never left short of anything we needed. The flip side of that was that we were never given money. Other kids used to talk about getting pocket money and I thought that was amazing. We never got that. Ever. Getting money for doing nothing, that sounded too good to be true. And in our house it was.

I was always kept on my toes by my dad. Never once, as a kid, did I get to have a lie-in. And if I ever made the mistake of saying there was nothing to do, he would quickly have a list of duties for me to take care of, whether it was washing clothes or cutting the grass. From the time I turned fourteen I’d often go out and work with him on the weekends and during school holidays.

I was definitely a mammy’s boy, though. My mother was a calm, reserved, quiet character who never got upset, so I was able to relate to her much more easily. She did some cleaning jobs but, like many Irish mothers in those days, her priority was to keep the household running smoothly. When I was in secondary school, every lunchtime I’d come home and she’d have my toasted ham-and-cheese sandwich ready. I’d eat that while watching Neighbours; that was my routine for my little forty-five-minute break. I loved that. My mam and I would barely say anything to each other but that’s the way we liked it: peace and quiet. It was perfect – unless my dad came home early. Then Neighbours would have to go off because we weren’t allowed to watch TV before 6 p.m. My dad cared little for Jason and Kylie’s wedding as long as there was homework still to be done.

Not that we were given much, since for my last couple of years in primary school at De La Salle, we didn’t actually have a teacher. The principal oversaw our class but he would be in and out of the room throughout the day, so most of our time was spent alone in there. It seems crazy in retrospect – I suppose it was because of cutbacks. Left to our own devices, we’d clear the desks out to the sides and play Royal Rumble. I was the guy on the door, keeping an eye out in case the principal was on the way back.

When I went into secondary school, I was in the lowest stream of students. I had done terribly in the entrance exams because I’d spent my last two years of primary school messing around. I wasn’t outstanding academically, but I was pretty good when it came to studying and applying myself. I wasn’t one of the cool kids, but I wasn’t part of the nerdy group either. In fact, I was mostly on my own, or with my best friend, Derek Clarke. Derek and I both started keeping tarantulas.

When my father was in his late twenties, he started doing a little bit of karate. It was the first time he had trained in anything other than soccer. He had been a good goalkeeper back in his day and he also refereed in the League of Ireland. Soccer was undoubtedly his passion, but he knew from quite early on that I wasn’t interested.

I was four years old when my dad brought me to my first karate class. There were clubs near to where we lived, but instead we made the journey to a club on Sheriff Street in the north inner city because that was where my dad had trained. It was a twenty-kilometre round trip from our house, and we didn’t have a car, but my dad would put me on the crossbar of his bike and we’d cycle there and back. The place was run by an old-school Japanese instructor: a classic sensei kind of guy with a real mystique about him. In the early 1980s, most people in Dublin hadn’t come from any further afield than Mayo, so to see a Japanese man was quite unusual.

I started going to the karate classes two or three times a week. I loved it right from the beginning, but not because I was learning how to punch and kick. What I enjoyed most about it was the quietness. The serene atmosphere. When I attended the classes, I never saw it as the beginning of an education in fighting. The sequences – repeating patterns – seemed more akin to dancing than fighting. What I was actually doing didn’t really matter. It was the environment that was important. I was never thinking: I’m learning to fight here because that’s what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life. I liked quiet time and the karate classes afforded me plenty of it.

From the start, the instructor told my dad that he saw something unique in me for a child so young. I was able to concentrate entirely on the class without being distracted. When I’m asked by parents what age a child needs to be to start training, I always tell them it’s better to just bring the child down to see how they get on, because everyone is different. I could focus on a sixty-minute karate class when I was four, whereas my concentration on other things might not have been so great. A very traditional karate class isn’t easy for a child to focus on; but it suited me perfectly.

When I got bullied as a child, my knowledge of karate didn’t really help. I never found that it was a good form of self-defence. Learning karate in a hall doesn’t prepare you for the pressure of being involved in a fight on the street. When physical altercations broke out, I froze. It’s similar to a response you sometimes see in nature when an animal is being preyed upon. Animals often freeze, in the hope that their attacker will just go away. For all the good karate did me when people picked on me, I may as well have been learning ballet.

I continued to train in karate throughout my childhood, and became increasingly competitive. At twelve, I was awarded my black belt. As I entered my teens, I started training under a new instructor in the evenings at the hall in De La Salle College. There, I was awarded my second-degree black belt. At the age of fifteen I became an All-Ireland Kenpo Karate champion at the National Basketball Arena in Tallaght. I trained extremely hard for that and I was very proud of the achievement at the time. There was even an article about it in the local newspaper, including a big picture of yours truly. For a long time afterwards, my granddad carried the article around in his wallet and he’d show it to everyone he’d meet.

When I was eighteen, I was introduced to an instructor from a different club. He seemed kind of cool. He was a big guy who wore a red karate suit, whereas we all wore black. I was sort of mesmerized by him. When he said I’d be welcome to train at his club, I didn’t hesitate to take him up on the invitation.

One morning, my karate instructor at De La Salle arrived in the hardware shop where I had a weekend job. He had found out that I was also training elsewhere and he wasn’t pleased. He completely lost his cool with me, berating me in front of colleagues and customers. I couldn’t actually believe he was so angry, or understand why. I was still training at his club too, as I had been doing for five or six years. I was just a kid who enjoyed karate and wanted to do it as often as I could. But he couldn’t handle that. It was a pretty juvenile reaction from him. I firmly believe that training in different environments is healthy and should be encouraged, but he didn’t see it that way. In the middle of a busy shop, I stood there in silence, gobsmacked, as this man roared at me about disloyalty and told me I was no longer welcome to train at his club. The incident left such a sour taste in my mouth that I stopped training in karate entirely shortly afterwards.

Being bullied remained a part of my life in secondary school. Outwardly I remained placid and unaffected, but inside it was eating me up. There wasn’t a huge amount of physical violence; it was mostly pushing and shoving, and a general sense of constant insecurity. If somebody whacked me in the back of the head, I’d just keep walking. I never fought back. I would just take the punishment and wait until it all passed over. In spite of all the bullying I experienced during my youth, I was never badly hurt until one night when I was eighteen. I was out with some friends, having a few drinks in a bar in Rathmines called The Station. We intended to move on afterwards to Sarah’s Nightclub in Rathfarnham. When you’re at that age, getting into nightclubs en masse isn’t easy, so we agreed to make our way out to Rathfarnham in smaller groups.

As I was walking to the taxi rank in Rathmines with my then-girlfriend, we passed a group of six or seven guys who had pulled a cyclist off his bike, seemingly for no reason, and begun to unload on him. Everyone around just kept their heads down and walked on by, and so did we. But the cyclist was getting a fairly decent kicking, and I started thinking: I have to do something here, I can’t just allow this to happen. I went back and tried to reason with the guys who were beating him up: ‘Come on, lads. He’s had enough.’

At that point they turned on me. They held me down and beat me up quite badly. I still remember hearing my girlfriend’s screams as they smashed my face into the cold concrete. I was hit by a brick at one point and they even tried to throw me in front of a bus.

Thankfully we got away when my friend Kevin McGinley – who had left the bar after us – came up the road, saw what was happening and bulldozed in to give me some help. We managed to make our way to the police station nearby. I was in a bad way – unrecognizable; I later learned that my orbital socket and my cheekbone had both been broken – but the police just thought I was some scumbag who had been up to no good and they kicked me out of the station. My girlfriend and I got a taxi home.

My parents were going away for the weekend. My mam popped her head around the door the following morning and said, ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’ I just hid my face under the covers and mumbled, ‘I’ll see you then.’ Those guys had done so much damage that I looked like the Elephant Man, and I didn’t want her to see it.

The physical wounds mostly healed after a few days, but it was a long time before I was right mentally. Being beaten up in front of a girlfriend is a big fear for a lot of young men. It’s very demeaning. It makes you feel completely worthless. I suppose there’s that romantic fantasy of beating up the bad guys and walking away with the girl on your arm.

I was really embarrassed in front of her parents when I saw them for the first time after the incident, but they were great about it. When her father saw me he gave me a hug and told me that I had done the right thing. I was mainly glad that nothing had happened to my girlfriend, because that would have destroyed me.

For about a year after that I barely left the house. I went into a depression and was in a constant state of fear. Whenever I did go out, I was always looking over my shoulder in case somebody attacked me from behind. By the time that incident took place I had started to trail away from karate. I had been an All-Ireland champion, but what was that really worth if I was incapable of defending myself? I gradually resolved that if I ever found myself in that kind of situation again, I needed to know how to get myself out of it.