'Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me': Dan Hardy chronicles his life and fighting life in new autobiography

The following is an excerpt released to MMAjunkie from Dan Hardy’s soon-to-be-released autobiography, “Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me.” The book chronicles the life and career Hardy, a former UFC welterweight title challenger now working in a broadcast capacity for the promotion.

“Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me” will be released March 23 and is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.

Preface

My life to date has revolved around fighting, around my pursuit of striking a man’s jaw with the optimum speed, power and timing to rotate his head, disturb the grid of nerves and blood vessels connecting his brain to his skull, and render him temporarily unconscious. My fights are my reference points. And I admit that sometimes I struggle with that fact because I know most people tend to bookmark their journey with more traditional, much less malevolent, landmarks. They recall the likes of birthdays or holidays when seeking to put a moment in time from the past into context. Where were you living in 2004? Well, let’s see. I turned forty in 2004 so that means I … What were you doing with yourself in 2012? That was the year we spent a month traveling through Europe so … Ask me the same questions and I’m beating Hidetaka Monma into a bloody submission in Tokyo or putting Duane Ludwig to sleep with a sharp left hook in Vegas. Choose another year and I could be the fighter rising gingerly from the canvas in a semi-fugue state or battling to keep the blood flowing from my head back to my heart as my jugular vein and carotid artery are closed by an arm attempting to choke the life from out of me. Beyond that brief, exhilarating existence inside a cage, my mind’s eye won’t wander too far. To the torture of the gym or more psychological and spiritual preparation elsewhere perhaps, but certainly no further. Fighting. For thirty-four years, my journey has been signposted by fighting.

The Origins of a Fighter

From a fetal ball, curled up on a blue gym mat, I rolled my head to one side and tried to focus on a figure in the sparse crowd watching on. Through the haze of a fuzzy version of consciousness I spied my mother, sobbing and dabbing at the tears building in her brown eyes and threatening to flow freely down her cheek. I was seven years old and I clearly remember thinking, no, this is not for me.

It all began a few years before that. Looking back, Michelangelo has a lot to answer for. Like every other young boy at school in the late 1980s, I became obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When the bell sounded for break time, I sprinted onto the playground with an imaginary orange mask tied around my head, swinging make-believe nunchaku in the air with innocent, childish glee. I chose Michelangelo out of the four because he appeared to be everything I was not. He was the loud and funny one, the laid-back free spirit. In that always-too-brief window between lessons I longed to be that character, for I knew as soon as I was back in the classroom I’d revert to Dan, the quiet, insular, still-unsure-of-himself kid. Many years later it dawned on me that Raphael, the darker lone wolf of the quartet, was closer to the real me, but at five years old that Californian surfer-dude persona was the one I most aspired to.

Life had been a pretty comfortable bubble up until that point. I was basically not long out of the safe confines of playschool and, with no older brothers or sisters to lock horns with, home life had been largely strife-free too. The first three years were spent at my grandparents’ house in Clifton, three miles south of Nottingham city centre in the Midlands of England. My mother and father were both only seventeen when I arrived and did not yet have the means to fend totally for themselves. Mum, the youngest sister of three, was terrified of telling Grandad she was pregnant but he took it in his stride.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said after a brief pause to consider the life changing news. ‘We will love it and look after it.’

I remember going to my parents’ wedding when I was three, sitting on the church pew eating Jelly Tots and playing with a toy car. Before long we’d moved into our own small home. We were still in Clifton at this stage, regarded as a relatively rough working-class area of Nottingham, but we never had any major problems. A few weeks before I was born, my dad, Mark, began an engineering apprenticeship and for many years he worked twelve-hour day or night shifts. When he was on nights I remember having to tip-toe about the house, fearful of waking the potentially angry, hibernating bear upstairs. Thirty-five years later he’s still at the same company, albeit now in a management role and long past having to grind it out through the night. After a few years we moved to the slightly more affluent, lower-middle-class environs of Silverdale so I could go to a half-decent school in neighbouring West Bridgford. Mum was a part-time aerobics instructor and began volunteering at the pre-school I attended. She would eventually go to university to earn a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in childcare and now runs the school.

In many ways we all grew up together, Mum and Dad maturing and learning to handle their own emotions while I looked on and absorbed everything. The little I understood about conflict or aggression I picked up from watching them going through the regular trials and tribulations of daily life that we all experience in our early twenties. Mum was a lioness, a generally relaxed character until she felt the need to protect one of her own. So it was from my dad that I would catch more frequent glimpses of the combative side to our family’s nature. He was an only child but my grandma is a very tough woman and, along with her sisters, she ensured her son was anything but mollycoddled. I remember standing on the touchline on a Sunday morning while he tore about the football pitch for ninety minutes. Grandad Ian was often alongside me, doling out sweets from a secret stash in his coat pocket. Unlike his son in centre midfield, sliding forcefully into every tackle and wading determinedly into the centre of the melees that pepper the average pub league match, it seemed to me that Grandad always had such a calm demeanour. Later I’d sit in the corner of the pub after the game and watch Dad enthusiastically participate in the caustic banter between teammates that British sporting environments are renowned for. I knew he was the same at work, nailing lunch-boxes to benches and verbally torturing any poor soul who had the misfortune of committing the most minor of mistakes.

My sister Gemma was born when I was four and the following summer we went on a budget holiday to Mallorca, staying in a hotel that struggled desperately to justify the three stars on its gable wall. One day we returned from the beach to find that Gemma’s cot had been removed from the room. When Dad went downstairs to ask for it back I was there to witness him lunge across the reception desk at an ignorant manager who dismissively suggested we drag a mattress off another bed and let the newborn lie on that. Even at four years old, I understood my dad’s anger. I didn’t know what he was angry about exactly, but I knew that he was arguing in defence of my little sister. I always took the responsibility of being a big brother very seriously and I remember immediately feeling very protective of her as soon as she was born. Gemma has been one of my biggest supporters from day one and a huge source of inspiration for me. I’ve never known anyone so musically talented and able to learn new things so quickly. After receiving a saxophone as a Christmas gift one year around the age of ten, she barely put it down to eat dinner and was playing like Lisa Simpson by the end of the day. She attended a lot of my UFC fights and I could always pick her voice out of the crowd above all others. Even with thousands of people cheering, my ears seemed to be tuned in to her particular tone. It may be because I’m so familiar with it, or perhaps it is down to us having basically the same DNA, but either way it gave me a much-needed boost at the right time in many of my fights.