MARK HUNT
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kickboxers during his short-lived
K-1 career, scoring impactful wins
over Jerome Le Banner, Stefan Leko
and Gary Goodridge.
These are often heralded as the
glory days of Hunt’s career, but the
champion fighter confesses that
behind the scenes he was a wild
child, wasting his prime years and
rich purses in pubs and clubs all
over the world.
“When I was younger I didn’t
even bother training,” he admits.
“I coasted my entire career. I won a
world title in K-1, and only stopped
smoking and drinking eight weeks
before. I did a lot of things I
shouldn’t have done back then.”
A decade later, those shortcuts
finally caught up to Hunt. By
the time he joined the UFC in
2011, he was overweight and
boasted a laughable 5–6 pro
record, which included two recent
losses to drastically undersized
middleweights Gegard Mousasi and
Melvin Manhoef.
Truth be told, the UFC didn’t
even consider Hunt a fighter
worthy of competing in their
eight-sided cage. As the story
goes, when Zuffa LLC, the parent
company of the UFC, purchased the
Japanese promotion Pride Fighting
Championships, the company
acquired the contracts of a few
fighters — with Hunt coming as an
unwanted piece of the puzzle.
“He had a losing record in Pride
and we didn’t want to bring him
into the UFC,” company president
Dana White bluntly told a group of
media members before Hunt’s UFC
180 title fight against Werdum.
“So we said, ‘We’ll pay you the
money and you can ride off into
the sunset and do your thing.’ And
he was like, ‘F*** that. I want to be
paid to fight.’ First of all, a losing
record, his age, the guy hadn’t
fought in a long time. It just made
no sense to bring the guy in.”
Hunt stood his ground, though,
and against the UFC’s wishes got
his chance to compete under the
bright lights of the world’s biggest
MMA promotion. “He fought it and
fought it and fought it, and finally,
we said, ‘Fine. You wanna earn the
money and fight for the money,
come on in,’” White added.
Then a chubby 37-year-old,
Hunt made his UFC debut against
Indiana-based super heavyweight