Issue 075

May 2011

I have an action figure...! How the hell did that happen? One minute I’m at school, wondering what to do with my life and the next minute, I have an action figure! Every now and then I will see something like that and it freaks me out. I remember being at school and all I really cared about was training. Everything I did revolved around it, the books I read and the movies I watched... Even at the end of the week when I had my cheat meal, I had lemon chicken from the Chinese takeaway around the corner, and watched a Jackie Chan movie.

I used to run across town from one martial arts class to another to train, doing a jiu-jitsu session at the university campus and then back into town to a wing chun school. After doing that through my later years of school, and then a year of university, I used some money I had saved up to go to China to train. Same as most people into martial arts, I was a huge Bruce Lee fan. I had a giant poster of him that covered half of one wall, a photo taken during the filming of Enter the Dragon. I must have watched that film every day for about three years! I used to have it on while I got ready for school.

I bought every book I saw about him. I wanted to know how he structured his training to make sure he included everything; what weight training he did and how he supplemented his diet. I tried to do everything the same. I saw Bruce Lee as the pioneer of real modern combat, a guy that was cutting through all of the unimportant, fancy stuff and really finding out what works. That was what I wanted to do, to be the most efficient fighter I could be. 

I would enter all kinds of martial arts competitions, from taekwondo to jiu-jitsu, from submission wrestling to Muay Thai. I entered whatever I could find to test myself, and if I didn’t win, I would learn from the guys that beat me. On Wednesday nights I would go to my old taekwondo classes and my teacher, Mick Rowley, would spar with me before the session started. We would put on fingerless bag gloves and do MMA sparring and submission wrestling in the classes. Not your average TKD school! 

It was this need to test myself that led me to my first amateur MMA tournament. That was a tough learning experience because, like most amateur MMA, the rules didn’t allow strikes to the head. As a striker it’s difficult to stop someone in one, five-minute round without knocking them out! I fast learned that I needed a ground game because most of the fights ended up on the ground and I was constantly defending submissions. Come to think of it, not a lot has changed; I’m just fighting better guys now! 

After a year or two of fighting in amateur MMA, Muay Thai and submission wrestling, I got my first professional fight booked through Paul Daley. A show he had been fighting on matched me up and that is where this all began. I was never bothered about making lots of money or being on TV. Sure, I thought all that was cool, but really I just wanted to see if my skills were better than my opponent’s. As I kept fighting, I kept learning and traveling to train, learning what I could from wherever I could. I started to make a little money and that helped me train more and work less. As a result I improved a little quicker and went on a bit of a winning spree, all the time looking for opponents to test myself against.  

But now I’m in the UFC, and there’s a lot of crazy stuff that comes with it. Such as action figures! The path has gotten a little steeper but the journey remains the same: learning new skills and sharpening old ones and then taking them to the Octagon to try and outwit, out-point and out-punish my opponent. Every one of them is an opportunity to examine my skills and compare them to someone else’s. Win or lose, I always learn something that will make me better. 

Aside from the magazines, action figures and video games, the core purpose of this journey is to become better. Whatever path you choose there will be distractions, but you can never lose focus of the goal. If you fall off for a second, recognize it, gather yourself and get right back on track. If you don’t, it may pass you by. One day it will all come to an end but I hope that’s because the time is right, age has caught up with me or I’m ready for the next stage of my life to begin. Not because I got wrapped up in my own ego and took my eyes off the target. Stay focused and enjoy the successes but always keep pushing forward, remember why you are here in the first place, and where you came from, and you will get the best out of yourself.

Out(law)

Dan’s Round 5 figurine is currently scheduled for release in May www.round5mma.com