4

With my own fighting career a thing of the past, I was able to focus entirely on coaching. The challenge was to make SBG Ireland as successful as we could possibly be, and to put together a fight team to represent the gym accordingly. And we weren’t going to be able to achieve that from a shed down a back alley in Phibsboro.

After a couple of years, The Shed’s membership was steadily increasing and those four thin concrete walls were struggling to hold us all. If SBG was to grow, we needed more space.

In 2003 we relocated to Greenmount Avenue in Harold’s Cross. The place we found was like a palace in comparison to The Shed. It was much larger and brighter, and it even had a shower. With such luxuries, we really felt like we were moving up in the world. The unit had been a Thai boxing gym before we moved in, so it was fit for purpose. Upgrading to a facility like that was very exciting, and the fact that I could afford to do so was a good indication that things were heading in the right direction.

Still, there was more than a hint of sadness about leaving The Shed behind.

Sure, it was smelly, damp, cold and not at all suitable for elite athletes, which was what we were aspiring to be, but I had built up an enormous feeling of attachment to the place and the other guys felt the same. No matter what happened from here on in, regardless of the direction in which the journey was about to go, The Shed was where it all started. Because of that, it will always have a special place in my heart.

Having brought my own fighting career to an end, I was able to focus completely on putting together a competitive fight team and making sure that they were coached well. A few of the guys were making an impact on the UK scene. Mick Leonard was one of SBG’s top fighters at the time; Andy Ryan also had some good wins; and even though he didn’t compete very often, Dave Roche absolutely ran through his opponents whenever he fought.

Probably the most impressive athlete we had at the time, however, was Adrian Degorski. He was Polish, part of the large migration into Ireland from eastern Europe at the turn of the century, and he arrived with an extensive boxing background. Grappling never came easily to Adrian, but his striking was outstanding and he was a phenomenal athlete. Adrian had been a member of Poland’s national amateur boxing team and had a record of something like 50–1. He fought with a broken foot in the only bout he lost, which seemed less surprising as I got to know him a bit better, because the guy was as tough as a coffin nail. He had quite a short temper, too. I got him a job on the door of a pub and he knocked out the first guy who gave him hassle with one punch. I tried to explain to Adrian that he couldn’t hit everyone who caused a problem, but I’m pretty sure he thought I was joking.

Another member who joined SBG at The Shed was an eighteen-year-old street kid from Ballymun who came down one evening with Dave Roche.

‘John, this is Owen Roddy,’ Dave said to me. ‘He can’t afford the fees for now but if you allow him to train here he’ll clean the mats every night.’

‘I clean the mats myself, Dave,’ I responded. ‘It only takes me thirty seconds.’ But I’m a bit of a sucker in those situations. Dave kept pushing me and Owen seemed like a really nice kid, too. He was both polite and enthusiastic – two essential characteristics for me – so I gave him a chance. And I’m glad I did. Owen would eventually prove to be worth his weight in gold to SBG.

For those of us who had been there from the beginning, 2003 was an exciting time for the sport, with promotions like Cage Warriors and Cage Rage having launched in the UK the previous year. The circuit was still very small. The promoters were shuffling a small deck of cards. If you were competing at an event, you’d keep a close eye on the other fights too because the likelihood was that you were studying a future opponent.

More often than not we were heading across the Irish Sea for fights, but there were occasionally events in Ireland too. The biggest regular show on the island was Cage Wars – the promotion which had used a cage in Europe for the first time in 2002. It was organized by Paddy Mooney and Tom Lamont, two promoters who put on some really good events at the King’s Hall in Belfast featuring fighters like Jess Liaudin and Samy Schiavo, who went on to appear in the UFC.

However, as my fight team expanded, there still weren’t enough events taking place to satisfy their appetite for competition. How did I find a solution to that? By doing what I had always done before: I decided to do something about it myself. I had no previous experience as a promoter, of course, but I thought: How hard can it be? Let’s get a ring, put it in a hall, have a bunch of guys fight each other and charge people to watch it all.

The venue was the Ringside Club, which is the small hall next to the National Boxing Stadium in Dublin. It held around 300 people, and while it wasn’t easy to shift all the tickets – social media hadn’t arrived yet so we couldn’t rely on Facebook and Twitter to put the word out – we still managed to sell out our two or three events a year. The show was also where most of Ireland’s future stars of the UFC got their first taste of competitive action. At €15 a ticket, I always felt the spectators got value for money. They were fun nights.

I called the promotion Ring of Truth, because the fights took place in a boxing ring and, as I saw it, this was truth in combat: two guys who weighed the same, blending a variety of fighting styles to see who was truly the better fighter. Later, when I could afford to hire a cage from the UK, it became Cage of Truth. It was the first regular show in the Republic of Ireland and it was also where many fans were first exposed to MMA, so it played an important role in the gradual growth of the sport.

The first event happened on 1 October 2004. It featured fighters from gyms around the country who had travelled to compete. Many of them – like John Donnelly, Francis Heagney, Micky Young and Greg Loughran – were laying the foundations for relatively successful careers.

As productions, the first shows couldn’t have been more basic. We put a ring in the middle of the Ringside Club and opened the doors to the punters. We didn’t have proper lighting and there certainly weren’t any TV cameras present, although there is a bit of dodgy footage available on YouTube if you fancy checking out how primitive it all was. It was proper spit-and-sawdust stuff. As both the promoter and a coach, it was sometimes tricky to make sure the show was running smoothly while cornering my fighters, but it was always enjoyable. As for the medical checks, a guy from St John Ambulance would basically ask: ‘Are ya all right? Grand, in ya go.’ That was all there was to it. That side of things would eventually become much more scrupulous, and rightly so, but back then we didn’t really know any better.

The shows didn’t generate a profit, but I never accumulated any debt from them either. The aim was to give my guys fights, not to earn money, so it was mission accomplished. The main difficulty we faced was that fighters often pulled out at short notice, so you’d spend the final days beforehand e-mailing gyms in the UK and France to see if anyone was available to step in. On one occasion we had ten bouts on the card, and six of them involved fighters who were travelling down in a convoy of cars from Northern Ireland. At 7 p.m. on the night of the show, with the doors open, the venue packed and the first fight about to start, there was still no sign of the guys from up north. In a state of panic, I phoned one of them and learned that after driving around Dublin for a while, unable to find the venue, they had just decided to head home. With only four fights left on the card and three hundred people having paid for a night of entertainment, I had to scramble around to fill the void. I was looking for anyone in the hall with a bit of martial arts experience to help me out. I ended up putting two guys into the ring to do a judo demonstration, as well as a little kid to show off some karate techniques. It was an absolute disaster, but we got through it without too many complaints.

MMA was never illegal in Ireland – and at that point the vast majority of Irish people weren’t even aware that it existed – but we weren’t sure how the authorities would react. Thankfully, we never ran into any difficulty on that front. I think that was partly down to how we advertised the shows. Even when we started using a cage, the posters referred to a martial arts event and not a cage-fighting show. Rightly or wrongly, the two seem to have very different connotations.

Another show that was being planned in Dublin around that time went down the opposite route. It was due to be held at the Red Cow Hotel and, as a one-off, I had actually agreed to fight on it. I was quite excited about this one because it was going to be me, in my Brazilian jiu-jitsu gi, against Jim Rock, a well-known Irish professional boxer. I pictured myself playing the part of Royce Gracie at UFC 1.

Unfortunately, it never got off the ground. A week out from the show, despite the fact that hundreds of tickets had been sold, it was shut down by South Dublin County Council. The promoters had put posters up that advertised ‘cage fights’, including a massive one at the Red Cow roundabout. I guess it attracted some unwanted attention from the authorities and they pulled the plug.

One afternoon in 2005, at the gym in Harold’s Cross, we were paid a visit by this Lithuanian guy. A year later, when Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat came out, we started referring to the Lithuanian by the same name: they were like the same person. The accent and the garish suits were almost identical.

‘Borat’ ran a popular promotion called Rings, which had staged nearly a hundred events around the world since 1995. He wanted to bring the show to Ireland and asked if some of SBG’s fighters would be interested in competing. The event was scheduled for 12 March 2005 at the Point Depot – later rechristened the O₂ Arena and now known as the 3Arena. It would be the biggest MMA show ever seen in Ireland, so we were obviously on board. There were some really good fighters brought in from abroad to compete on the show, including Gegard Mousasi, who later became a Strikeforce champion and is a top contender in the UFC even now.

Matt Thornton travelled over from the US to be there and it felt like a big night for the gym. After building up a reputation as the top team in Ireland, with fighters who were capable of mixing it with the best in the UK, this was an opportunity to make a statement on an international stage. I was really keen to impress Matt, too, and was conscious of his presence as I took the guys through their warm-ups and guided them from the corner during their fights.

But it was a bad night for SBG. Some of my guys were slaughtered, and the show itself was a bit of a catastrophe. Occasionally, even at the very highest level, you get those nights when the fights don’t deliver, the crowd are restless and it’s a soundtrack of jeers instead of cheers. Rings was one of those. The low point of the night came with the main event. Rodney Moore from Northern Ireland was due to fight a guy called Jimmy Curran, who was a noted kick-boxer from Dublin, although he didn’t really have any MMA experience. Jimmy had sold a lot of tickets for the show, so in many ways he was the star attraction.

Rodney walked out first and went to his corner but when Jimmy’s name was announced, he didn’t appear. There was an awkward silence, before ‘Borat’ – who was also the announcer – gave it another go: ‘Let’s try that again. From Dublin, Ireland, Jimmy Curran!’ But there was still no sign of him. The crowd weren’t happy and bottles of beer started to rain down on top of those of us near the ring, so we all ran for cover.

When we got backstage, we found out that Jimmy had changed his mind about fighting and had climbed out the window before he was due to walk out to the ring. Unfortunately Jimmy soon had other, more serious problems to deal with. Three weeks later, in an unrelated incident, he was shot dead in a Dublin pub.

I was completely despondent for days after the Rings event. Not only had it been disappointing for SBG, it was a shambolic night for Irish MMA as a whole. I was upset, embarrassed and disillusioned. It was one of those nights when whatever could go wrong did go wrong. I took a lot of abuse from Irish MMA fans on internet forums as a result – ‘John Kavanagh embarrassed Ireland on the world stage’ – but I was even more concerned by what it might mean for the sport in the country overall. MMA was already struggling to get off the ground in terms of popularity and this was hardly going to help its cause. For many people at the Point Depot that night, it was their first taste of the sport. If they never wanted to experience it again they couldn’t have been blamed. It was that bad.

The aftermath was challenging, but in tough times you must persevere. It was a difficult period, but I never once considered throwing in the towel. Soon we were all back in the gym preparing for the next batch of fights. If there’s a perception that the growth of MMA in Ireland followed a constant upward curve, I can assure you that certainly wasn’t the case. There were almost as many downs as ups, particularly early on, and that was one of several setbacks. However, if you’re on the road to success, you cannot reach that destination without encountering some failures along the way. The people who matter, they don’t care whether you’ve won or lost. You lose on a Saturday night and start afresh on Sunday morning. That’s why I’ve never gotten carried away with celebrating when we win, just like I don’t get too down in the dumps after defeats. Winning and losing are two sides of the same coin. Win or learn is the SBG mantra, not win or lose.

One of the many benefits of being a part of Straight Blast Gym has been meeting and getting to know other members of the SBG family worldwide, some of whom have become close friends. Karl Tanswell in Manchester, for example. Karl is an outstanding coach and a great man to have on your side. Travelling the world for the sport we love, we’ve shared some great experiences.

Ireland will always be my home but there’s a big place in my heart for Iceland too. I first went there in 2005 following a request from Matt Thornton to travel over to do some seminars and coaching at a gym called Mjölnir in Reykjavik. Matt had been going there once a year, but in 2005 he asked me to stand in for him. More than anything I saw it as a holiday in an interesting part of the world; I certainly didn’t think it would turn out to be the first of many trips to Iceland. It was also quite an honour that Matt felt he could place his trust in me to that extent.

Mjölnir was full of enthusiastic athletes, but two guys immediately stood out. One was Arni Isaksson, a pretty intense character who was always looking to test himself. His nickname, ‘The Ice Viking’, was appropriate. The other was a sixteen-year-old kid called Gunnar Nelson. I had been told about Gunni before I left Dublin. He had very high-level karate and, while grappling was still new to him, he was taking to it like a duck to water.

When I arrived, Gunni asked me for a private lesson, and his potential was very evident when we rolled. Still, just to remind him who the coach was, I held him down for a while and tickled him at the end of the lesson.

My first encounter with Arni wasn’t quite as good natured. Wearing just a pair of Thai shorts and sweating from head to toe after a training session, he walked up to me with a crazed look in his eye and said, in his broken English: ‘You do stand-up?’

I thought he was looking to fight me, so I just responded: ‘Not with you, I don’t.’

But what he was actually asking was if I coached stand-up fighting as well as ground fighting. After that initial hiccup, Arni and I really hit it off. Just twenty-one years old, he was a good kick-boxer who was eager to make an impact in MMA. When I returned to Dublin, Arni came with me to train at SBG.

The initial plan was for him to stay at my apartment in Ranelagh for a couple of weeks, before finding a place of his own. Three months later he was still living with me. Every day I scanned newspapers and websites, looking for a room for him to rent somewhere in Dublin. I’d send him off with the addresses, but every time he came back with bad news.

‘Didn’t get it.’

What’s going on here? I wondered. Arni was a nice guy, and it seemed strange that nobody would rent him a room. The next time Arni went out to look at a place, I went along too. And then I realized why nobody wanted to rent to him.

When we arrived at the house, a young woman answered the door and Arni just barked: ‘I want room!’ He had a black eye – as he usually did – and wore his hood up. Slightly terrified by this angry foreigner with a busted-up eye who had arrived at her front door, the girl just said ‘It’s gone’ and slammed the door.

Confused, Arni turned to me and said: ‘This happen every time.’

Arni made his MMA debut in Dublin later in 2005, and it marked the beginning of a good professional career that would yield big wins against guys like Greg Loughran and Dennis Siver, as well as a Cage Warriors welterweight title shot.

Another of the promising youngsters in the gym at Harold’s Cross was a very exciting seventeen-year-old named Tom Egan. Tom was really slick on his feet, he had a lot of charisma and was a superb athlete. As far as SBG’s younger generation was concerned, he was the main man in the gym at the time. There was also my very first female fighter, Aisling Daly. When she first showed up at the gym I was apprehensive about a teenage girl training with a load of guys, and she seemed like a quiet, nerdy person who wouldn’t be cut out for that environment. I had to give Aisling the same treatment as any of the lads, so I put her through hell in order to see if she had what it took to fight. Every time I did, she kept coming back for more.

As the gym continued to expand, we were welcoming a wide array of new members through the doors, from young kids to retired adults. With the summer of 2006 approaching, I was in a position to upgrade the home of SBG Ireland once again. After agreeing a lease on a really nice unit in Tallaght, I notified the landlord at the Harold’s Cross facility that we’d be vacating the building.

However, three weeks before we were due to relocate, it all fell apart. The owner of the place in Tallaght called and said he’d had a change of heart, despite the fact that we had shaken hands on the deal months earlier. According to him, the planning permission to house a mixed martial arts gym in his building was too complicated, so he was backing out. By now it was too late to salvage the Harold’s Cross lease, so I was left completely in limbo.

The four months we spent looking for a new premises were extremely tough. In the meantime I had to run classes on a part-time basis from a school hall in Crumlin. I was painfully aware that the longer the wait for a new gym rumbled on, the more detrimental it would be for the future of SBG Ireland. How could we be taken seriously as an international fight team if we were training only a few times a week on mats that were supposed to be for children to use during PE class?

Operating on a part-time basis took a toll on my income, and as a consequence I resumed working on the doors of bars and nightclubs several nights a week. A couple of years earlier, when the gym was growing and I was able to drift away from door work, I had told myself that if I ever ended up having to rely on that job again, it was probably a sign that it was time to give up on the dream of making a successful career in martial arts. I was starting to feel the pressure to get what my parents would call ‘a real job’. At one stage I locked myself in the bathroom at home, curled up on the floor and just cried for a couple of hours. It all stemmed from the fear that I might have wasted years of my life going down a dead-end when I could have been taking advantage of my education.

Then, as the summer ended, we finally found a new home. It was in an industrial estate in Rathcoole, about fifteen kilometres from Dublin city centre. The location was by no means ideal: it required at least two bus journeys to get there from the centre of town. But it was a nice building for a gym, and we hadn’t lost a single member during the fallow period. The dream was still alive.