Issue 043
November 2008
A small gallery-cum-studio tucked away in the back streets of Manchester is an unlikely place to find one of the biggest names in MMA, but for one afternoon that’s exactly where Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson is. Accompanied by his new managers – Anthony McGann and Lee Gwynn, the owners of the Wolfslair – Rampage sauntered into the basement space and was immediately confronted by an eight-foot tall werewolf being drawn on the wall.
When we booked the studio for the photo shoot with Rampage, we didn’t know we’d be sharing the space with award-winning urban artist Astrom ‘Ash’ Chang. In a bizarre coincidence, Ash isn’t just a huge fan of MMA (and Rampage in particular), he’s developing a comic character based on an MMA fighter. The twist? – the character is a human-werewolf hybrid.
“He’s a wolf” said Rampage, checking out the floor-to-ceiling image. “I’m a wolf.” “It’s the law of attraction, mate,” said McGann.
The law of attraction could be seen as key to this entire situation. The reason Rampage is even in the UK is because of his recent signing with the Liverpool-based fight team, the Wolfslair. Having fallen out with previous manager / trainer Juanito Ibarra (against whom claims of mismanagement have been made), Jackson was in need of not just a new manager but a team as well. “I haven’t been with a team since Team Punishment,” he said. “And they ain’t really punishing right now.”
After his very public breakdown and ironic ‘rampage’ (blamed on a temporary state of delirium brought on by four days of fasting,
no sleep and consumption of nothing but energy drinks) Jackson found himself in handcuffs and in a Los Angeles gaol. He crashed a monster truck with images of himself emblazoned across the side into a number of cars and refused to stop for police before being restrained. Less than 24 hours later, and after an emergency intervention by Dana White, Rampage was back at home and in need of a change of environment. “We were sat in a meeting with Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta and they said the best thing you [Rampage] can do is go to England,” McGann explained. “Here he gets to concentrate a bit more. He doesn’t get much peace over there. He’s only been here three days and we’ve done six training sessions.”
“I got no time to work out,” said Rampage, sitting in a low swivel chair and sipping on a coffee. For the man who can’t walk down the street in the USA without getting recognised, the relative anonymity that life in England provides is a welcome change. “I’m loving it over here,” he said enthusiastically.
In the space of one year (and with one 113-second fight, a KO of Chuck Liddell)
Rampage was propelled from quiet obscurity to mainstream celebrity. This was nothing new for the 30-year-old Tennessean, who had spent years fighting in front of thousands of fans in Japan and was well used to being stopped in the street for autographs, but America isn’t Japan. “I like Japan and England a lot. I’ll be honest, sometimes I don’t feel comfortable in my own soul. I like to keep moving. I feel like I don’t even belong there [USA] when I’m from there. Over here and in Japan, the people are so nice. In America the people can be not that nice – I’m known to keep it real – they’re not that nice.”
The longest Jackson had ever spent outside of the USA was one month, and that was for his preparations against Dan Henderson. Jackson, already familiar and friendly with the guys at the Wolfslair, trained there alongside Michael Bisping ahead of UFC 75 in 2007. This time his trip to the UK is a mere three weeks long, combining some respite from the States with helping Bisping prepare for Chris Leben. Adapting to life in the UK isn’t that hard for Jackson, even given our most notorious turn-off: the weather.
“I live in California, it never rains there. It rains almost every day over here, it’s the ying and the yang. I don’t mind it, normally I hate the rain, but I don’t mind it here, it’s something different. I like it – I’m around a bunch of cool people, man. I think it’s the people you’re around that makes it different. Like if these guys were all down all the time, like Seattle in America, it rains there all the time and everyone’s always down, people commit suicide all the time, they’ve got bums. But these guys are happy, jumping around, farting on each other’s heads!
“These guys [The Wolfslair] need their own show, you need to follow these guys around with cameras, everyone at their gym is crazy,” he said. “They’ve even got a baby Randy Couture [Abdul Mohamed]! I took one look at him, and I was like ‘Damn! It’s a Randy Couture mini-me!’ These guys are very exciting; I wish I was a very rich man because I would hire a camera team to follow these guys around. I would make millions off them!”
The constant joking and banter at his new team sits well with Rampage, who is known as a joker (see the sidebar for evidence) but his new training partners work just as hard as they play. With three-hour training sessions every day, there are no excuses for someone who is self-professed ‘lazy’. “After two hours I lose my attention span. I’m a lazy bastard,” he said. “I’ve never trained three hours in my life – and I wrestled in college.”
Part of his training involves early morning sessions, some of which he thought were jokes at first. “They made me swim today, and I don’t even know how to swim. I tried to tell them, they said ‘we’re going swimming’, and I was like ‘hahaha’.” His chuckle is deep and echoes off the walls, but he doesn’t stop there.
“I can’t swim. I grew up in a poor neighbourhood. They were all-black schools – I never even saw white people. We didn’t have swimming pools, none of the schools had swimming pools. We had public schools but no-one knew how to swim! There’s no one teaching you how to swim there!
“This guy [McGann], he told me to swim and I said ‘I don’t know how to swim’, he said ‘I don’t give a damn!’ and pssh, kicked me in the water! They made me do twenty-something laps, I felt like I was drowning, but he pushed me and I did what I can do.
“I was looking at the other guys like Paul Kelly and they can swim, they were racing! I was jealous – it would be cool for me to race in a swimming pool, you know? I’m kind of competitive a little bit, you know? Just a little bit. I wanna race somebody in a swimming pool – that would be my dream: to race a slow person in a swimming pool!”
As laughter filled the room and stories of swimming started going back and forth, Rampage had one in particular to add of his own. “I like the diving boards, so I learned how to swim good enough to dive off and get back to the side,” he said.
“True story, when I was in Japan, I went to a big water park. They have the coolest water slides and diving boards. I love diving; I’ll do a crazy trick, I’m not good but I’ll do it. I dive in and I start swimming – the next thing you know a lifeguard is in the water trying to grab me. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’
“I get out of the water and everybody is looking at me and everything, I was like ‘What the hell is going on?’ My friend who spoke Japanese said ‘They thought you were drowning’, I was like, ‘that’s how I swim!’” he laughed.
As much fun as he is having, Rampage isn’t looking at a permanent relocation anytime soon. Though he will spend extended periods in Liverpool training at the Wolfslair, the core training of his fight camps will continue to take place in the mountain retreat of Big Bear.
It won’t be long before Jackson will be back in Big Bear and in hard training. Although nothing had been signed at the time of going to press, the word was out that his next fight was looming on the horizon and would be against old nemesis Wanderlei Silva.
“It’s all over the Internet, it’s going to be Wanderlei but we don’t know anything more about it,” said McGann. “Rampage’s contract says he has to fight someone major. The UFC are always strategising, who is going to make the most exciting fight. It’s a business and it’s what they’re good at. It was said to us it was going to be Wanderlei – they told us it was November but Wanderlei didn’t want to fight because he was going on holiday.”
With a tussle on the UFC’s end of year show looking likely, this gives Rampage the time he needs to prepare. Preferring a 12-week fight camp, Jackson will be training alongside fellow Wolfslair team members Bisping and Cheick Kongo, with the hope that he and the Frenchman will fight on the same card. “I like it that way,” Jackson said, referring to training together as a team. “[MMA] is the biggest team sport there is -– you gonna train yourself? You gonna hold pads for yourself?”
During the shoot, Rampage was sunk back in the armchair and holding his cup of tea. I asked him how he felt about his new team, and he opened up as I snapped away photos. “Wolfslair, we’re taking over. I guarantee you, in a couple of years, the Wolfslair will be the best team, gonna be world-known and on everyone’s tongue. They’re doing all the right things.
“I like being the first American at the Wolfslair,” he said. “I see the UK fighters and see how they train – I see a lot of talent there. I see UK fighters coming to America and putting on a good show. There are a lot of guys coming out of the Wolfslair – the UK is gonna step up in the MMA world. Right now there aren’t a whole lot of British fighters in the UFC, right? I see all that changing. I think they’re gonna have a Wolfslair USA, like an American Top Team, you know? American Wolfslair. People will be like, ‘Damn, I wanna join’.
“Is it a coincidence that I’m a wolf, I come to the UK, I find this group of people called the Wolfslair, and I come along and I join that team – is that coincidence or fate? That’s fate.”
