Issue 043
November 2008
With fighters such as Michael Bisping, Quinton Jackson, Cheick Kongo, Paul Kelly and more representing them, the Wolfslair have emerged as the top MMA gym in the country. We met the men who turned a labour of love into an enterprise more successful than anyone could have predicted.
When Michael Bisping enters the Octagon, he does so with the Wolfslair banner proudly hoisted above him. Paul Kelly is so passionate about his allegiance, he has the team logo tattooed across his shoulders. But when the Wolfslair soldiers go to fight, few people spare a thought for the generals in charge of the operation.
Anthony McGann and Lee Gwynn are two Liverpool-based businessmen with a real passion for MMA. Successful in a range of businesses such as property, construction and security, they were long-time friends with Paul Cahoon, a top UK fighter who had made his name fighting in Holland and Japan. Gwynn, a boxer, grew up with Cahoon and introduced McGann, a long-time fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to training. “Lee basically got me into it. Lee has been friends with Paul Cahoon since they were three years of age,” said McGann. “Way back in the early days of Paul Cahoon’s career I used to go out to Holland to watch him fight. The kid is one of our very
best friends. It was him who got us into the sport and I have to give him the credit for it.
“We used to have a coach from Wigan, a guy called Shane Rigby, a great wrestler and a great friend of ours. For a couple of years we did privates with him. We’d be renting mats everywhere, and it’d be ‘oh this place is busy, you have to pay for this place’. In the end we thought, ‘Let’s just build our own gym’.”
Born from a desire to simply have somewhere to train, the pair turned what was merely a hobby into a successful business in a very short space of time, though not without plenty of hard work on their part. “It has run away with itself, which invariably happens with most things me and Lee do, because we’re aggressive in business,” said McGann. “We’re good at what we do, we don’t do things by halves. We never built a gym in a loft space or garage, we built it in an old sausage factory, 8000 square feet. We built a 26-foot Octagon, the base alone was an engineering feat. We didn’t have ten feet of ropes in the corner, we bought a 24-foot competition boxing ring.
“We built such a great facility, we got caught up in the project of it. Me and Lee literally built that gym with our bare hands. We built the cage in the garage at my house, we painted the walls, we put the mat in ourselves. We love the sport.”
Upon fitting out the gym in 2004, they decided to treat it as a true business rather than the hobby it had originally been and started accruing a fight team. “Our original intentions weren’t that [to build a fight team], but we started looking at it from a business point of view.” Luckily, the pair benefited from plenty of foresight, because the sport was nowhere near the phenomenon that it is now. “You could only describe yourself back in them days as a believer. There are a lot of other sports that have come and gone. But we loved it and thought ‘even if it goes, we’ve still got our own gym anyway’.”
The Wolfslair entered the MMA scene in the UK and soon established themselves as a force to be reckoned with, though it was Michael Bisping winning TUF 3 that put them on the map as far as the USA was concerned. When the owners of the UFC saw how the Wolfslair operated, they were more than impressed. “We put the full team in Vegas for six weeks, with coaches,” said McGann. “The UFC let us use their gym, we had all our guys out there training solid with him [Bisping] for the TUF final. I don’t think anyone else in the game had the capability to do that, but it was just another stepping stone for us.
“We’ve learnt the sport as we’ve gone, from dealing with corporate guys and the UFC. Where we stand today, we know the game inside out. When Quinton Jackson spoke to Dana White and said he was thinking of going with the Wolfslair Dana said, ‘If I can advise you to go to any team, I would advise you to go to them’.”
The partnership of Anthony and Lee, with McGann the spokesperson of the team and Gwynn preferring a hands-on role in the background, is a solid one. “I’m a very people-orientated person. The likes of Dana or Joe Silva or whoever else, I do all the dealing with them,” said McGann. “While I’m paving the way ahead, it’s Lee who ticks the boxes behind me. He’s the one who’s keeping an eye on the younger fighters coming through, getting their records built up, keeping an eye on their training. There are guys out there who have been around a hell of a lot longer than us who haven’t achieved what we have.”
With the highly capable coaches Mario Sukata, Tony Quigley and Dave Jackson keeping the troops in order and the expertise of resident physiotherapist Peter Bernie (who works with Premiership football club Everton FC), McGann and Gwynn are eyeing up the future with the hunger of a wolf. Of the Wolfslair’s future plans, McGann simply said: “Wait until you see what we’ve got next. It’ll blow everyone away”.
