March 2025
February 2025
E. Spencer Kyte masterfully steers this interview through the beautiful madness that is Dan Hooker—laughing through stitches, craving chaos, and somehow turning post-fight boredom into an existential crisis.
With a cutman nursing the incisions spilling blood down his face and his coaches working equally as hard to pass on the knowledge needed to win the third round, Dan Hooker leaned back and told them, “Boys — I love this s***!” chasing his words with a cackle. When the one-minute break was almost over, Hooker rose and strutted. The Perth crowd erupted as the fan favorite urged them on, eager to get back to mixing it up with Mateusz Gamrot.
“Yeah, we got a way of doing things, but you’ve gotta laugh it off and relax,” Hooker says, lying in bed after a hard training session, recounting the memorable interaction at UFC 305. “I know it’s one and one, and we’ve gotta have a big Round Three. I’m aware of what’s going on here.”
He showed he knew what was needed in the final round, landing with greater impact than his Polish counterpart to win on all three scorecards and emerge on the happy side of a split decision.
THE AFTERMATH
You’d think the high of such a competitive battle coupled with the serenading crowd would be the kind of thing that leaves an athlete walking on sunshine for days, but for Hooker, it’s the exact opposite.
“As soon as it’s over, you’re kind of sad,” he says with a smirk. “It’s anticlimactic. You’re at the afterparty like, ‘Aw, can we go back?’ I went to the hospital. I tried to stay and watch Kai (Kara-France) and Israel (Adesanya’s) fights, but they gave me the boot out of the arena. They told me Dana was saying I had to go to the hospital. Then I saw myself in the mirror of the ambulance, and I was like, ‘Ah yeah — that makes sense.’”
A cackle like the one let loose in his corner ahead of Round 3 pierces the air.
“Everyone was freaking out, and I was just trying to get a beer,” he continues. “Everyone was panicking, and then I saw myself in the mirror of the ambulance, and I had five different cuts on my face, and I was like, ‘Ah yeah, that makes sense. I’ll go. I’ll concede.’
“But then it’s boring,” he adds, the genuine disappointment of things down-shifting after such an incredible high evident in his voice. "You’re sitting in the hospital. It’s boring and slow, and I just want to go back to fighting.”
(Zoe Hooker TV)
THE HANGMAN, THE SAVAGE
Dan Hooker is an absolute savage, and I mean that in the most respectful way possible. It’s the word I use to address him each time we set up one of these interviews. It best describes his approach to his craft and his competitive DNA. You have to love misery. Love feeling hurt and putting your mind, body, and soul through torture to thrive in this sport. Few people are more willing to endure those hard days in exchange for 15 or 25 minutes of violent freedom inside the Octagon than Hooker. He genuinely loves what he does. It is just about the only thing he has any interest or aptitude for.
“Nobody believes me,” he says, his ever-present mischievous grin growing wider.
“Nobody believes me that I don’t have any hobbies.”
He was doing some streaming with his daughter, Zoe, but she relegated him to an off-camera roll a few shows in, but later revealled the injury that kept him from fighting Gaethje. Other than that, the only thing that excites him is readying for battle and making the walk to compete. He gets antsy when that option isn’t available and usually ends up in a tattoo studio.
“They’re challenging things as well,” begins Hooker, who spent 13 months out of action between his win over Jalin Turner and his victory over Gamrot as a result of breaking his arm twice. “It’s not like I have little smiley face tattoos - let’s go difficult because they suck, they hurt. “It’s like the night before a fight where you’re like, ‘I gotta prepare,’ and then you’re standing there, and it’s like a fight because you’ve gotta be calm. Then you get home, and you’re sore, so it’s sort of the same kind of mental process as a fight. Hopefully, I don’t break my arm again, or I’m gonna run outta skin.”
@danhangman/Instagram
LOVE OF THE GAME
Just how much does Hooker love a battle? Well, he loves it so much that when the UFC Countdown crew was in town and asking about film of him fighting bare-knuckled in the streets, he offered up the opportunity to get some live, fresh footage in the alley next to the pub.
“They were like, ‘Do you guys have any bare-knuckle footage?’ Like me fighting bare-knuckle or something, because we kept telling stories, and then he was pissing me off, so we almost had a fight at the UFC Countdown lunch,” Hooker recalls, of questions being asked to his teammate and good friend Aaron Tau.
“I was like, ‘Just come around the corner, and we’ll legitimately have a bare-knuckled fight around the corner.’
“It’s just two people having a pissing contest,” he adds, once again chasing his words with a chuckle, clearly aware that he sounds like the savage that he is. “And we both like doing it. It’s not like we’re upset after. Win some, lose some.”
According to Hooker, he came out with the win, making him 1-0 already this year as he prepares for his first official fight of 2025.
CALCULATED APPROACH
Hooker isn’t someone who backs himself indiscriminately with little consideration for his opponent. While some competitors sing their own praises, forecasting first-round knockouts, Hooker has no time for such boastful proclamations. He credits the run of bouts he had during the COVID lockdowns with smartening him up.
“With all the COVID s***, we were in the most locked-down country in the world,” he says. “And I continued to fight because there’s like an air of arrogance where you’re like, ‘I can do it without my team. I can do it without my coaches.’ And then you look at the results. You keep getting your *** kicked, and you really can’t,” explains Hooker, who fought five times from June 2020 to March 2022, when things were just started to return to some semblance of familiarity, posting a 1-4 mark in those contests.
“Now that the world is back to normal and stuff, there’s a new level of appreciation for my team and my coaches. I listen to them more, and these are guys I’ve worked with for 10 years,” adds the 34-year-old lightweight, who remains one of the City Kickboxing stalwarts. “It’s just consistency over time, and now with that true appreciation for their knowledge and their skill set and their help. I don’t take it for granted anymore, so my ears are open. I listen a lot more because I appreciate it.
“I think I’ve got a pretty realistic view on fighting,” he continues. “Obviously, fighting is like a constant line where you have to push that confidence to the absolute extreme but not let it bleed into arrogance. And it’s a very fine line. If you bleed into arrogance, you make stupid decisions.”
CONFIDENCE GAME
One of his greatest lessons is that confidence can be tricky when preparing for a fight, and that feeling unsure in the weeks leading up to the bout isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“I don’t have to be confident right now,” begins Hooker, sharing his realistic view of the violent sport he loves so dearly. “I don’t have to be confident in training. If I was just going, ‘I’m gonna smash this guy. I don’t have to train.’ That’s when it bleeds into that arrogance line.
“And I feel like the less confidence you have, the harder you train,” he adds, cackling at the admission. “It’s good to not be confident in training and to think the other guy is going to beat you. That is useful in training because if I think I’m gonna lose, then I panic, and I prepare really well. I tick all the boxes, and I train really hard and I get really tired, and I push myself to the absolute extreme. I know that I only have to be 100 percent confident for 15 minutes or 25 minutes on the night. You don’t have to walk around living life thinking that you’re bulletproof, this and that. You’ve got to be confident for 25 minutes. The level of experience and understanding I have in the sport. I wouldn’t trade it for a million dollars. It’s pretty useful.”
MIND BEFORE MATTER
That confidence element factors into the way he thinks about his fights.
“I never plan on — I never think in my head, ‘I’m going to put on an exciting fight,’” he says. “I think that’s what boring people have to do. That’s what boring guys think about. I go out and be myself. I am who I say I am.”
And who Dan Hooker is, is a mad bastard that won’t even entertain the thought of walking into the Octagon and ending things quickly against any opponent.
“Now we’re going back, and I have an incredibly realistic view of fighting,” he says, shaking his head when asked if he’d fancy a quick day at the office. “That’s a terrible mindset! Reverse engineer. That’s not something I’m gonna plan on. I hope the fans have a good time. I hope they enjoy themselves. I hope everybody wins.”
“Worst-case scenario is I get my ass knocked out, and I come home with heaps of money,” Hooker adds, snickering. “My garden’s a mess at the moment, so I’ve got to trim my roses. I’ve gotta cut my hedge. I’ve gotta cut a couple trees, so I’ll come back to New Zealand and sort my garden out. That’s worst case, and then I’ll just reverse-engineer from that.”
WINNING ATTITUDE
That certainly would be the worst case, but the second part sounds awfully close to being a hobby.
“I take a lot of pride in… I wouldn’t let…” says Hooker, stumbling to find the words when confronted with the possibility that he just might have something else he enjoys besides fighting. “I feel like a man shouldn’t let another man mow his lawn.”
He laughs, but when I point out that he didn’t say, “I have to mow my lawn,” instead offering some greater details on different, green-thumbed tasks that need tending to, he affable New Zealander relents.
“Alright! Hobby? Gardening,” he says, laughing. “I’m s*** at it, but I do take a lot of pride in it.”
Thankfully, he has plenty more fighting to fall back on.
...
