In an extract from his autobiography, Win or Learn, which was released earlier this year, Straight Blast Gym Ireland head coach and owner John Kavanagh reveals how a fight in South Africa played a pivotal role in his development as a coach.
One of the guys who had been training at The Shed was a chap named Terry. He was from Dublin but had been living in South Africa for years. Terry trained with us for a few months after the gym opened in 2001, but he then returned to South Africa.
Shortly after he left Dublin, Terry called me with an offer of a fight. The event was happening in Johannesburg that November and it was being run by the coach at the gym he was training in. I knew nothing about the opponent or the show, but I jumped at the chance. I was probably more interested in the trip itself. While I wouldn’t be receiving any money directly, the week‑long trip was all expenses paid. It sounded like a once in a lifetime opportunity, particularly for the nature lover in me. A visit to Africa was on my bucket list.
They weren’t paying for me to bring a corner man, but my friend Derek Clarke decided to follow for a holiday. When I got to South Africa, I knew almost immediately that I was in over my head. I was actually using my opponent’s gym for training. I was in there, alone, and his teammates kept coming over to let me know how much trouble I was in.
You couldn’t research your opponent on YouTube in those days, so I didn’t even know what he looked like until we met at the weigh‑in the day before the fight. I weighed about 150lb and he was around 165. His name was Bobby Karagiannidis and he was a South African wrestling champion. I knew I was up against it.
It was a pretty big event in a large arena in the Carnival City Casino, where Lennox Lewis had lost his world title to Hasim Rahman just a few months earlier. Until then I had been fighting in small halls, but there would be thousands of people in attendance for this one.
The event was also being broadcast on South African TV. Before my fight, the cameras came into the changing rooms to interview me and the presenter couldn’t believe that I had come all the way from Ireland on my own. When he asked me what type of training I had been doing, I tried to crack a joke because I was so nervous. I said: ‘I’ve been spending a lot of time playing the new UFC video game so I think that has prepared me well.’ Unfortunately, he didn’t really get the joke so we both ended up looking a bit silly.
When the time came to fight, it was like walking out in the MGM Grand. Alone and thousands of miles from home, it was pretty intimidating. My game plan was to take Bobby down and look for a submission, but he was a far better wrestler so he was able to fend off my attempts quite easily.
I ended up pulling guard and going for a leg‑lock. As I did, he was standing over me and raining down punches on my head. I was taking a fair bit of damage, and I should have let go and adjusted my position, but I was emotionally attached to completing the technique. It’s a lesson I’ve since learned, but my mistake cost me dearly that night. As he was landing punch after punch, I persisted with the leg‑lock, searching for the submission, thinking I had him in trouble… then all of a sudden I woke up in the changing room. ‘Did I win?’ I asked. Not quite. I was knocked out in the first round.
Seven years before he became a UFC champion, Forrest Griffin actually fought in the main event that night. Another future UFC fighter who was on that bill was Rory Singer. We all went out together after the show and had a good time. Having been knocked out and concussed, I very stupidly got quite drunk. The hotel I was staying in was in a nature reserve, and I somehow came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to go streaking around the vicinity at 2 am. I found out the following day that I was lucky not to have been some lion’s breakfast.
I might not have picked up the result I was hoping for in that fight, but that crazy night turned out to be one of the most important of my life. One of my fellow drinkers was Bobby Karagiannidis’s coach – a big American fella named Matt Thornton. Matt and I chatted for a long time. I was fascinated by what he had to say about coaching and we really clicked. He was able to verbalize exactly how I felt about coaching. Matt had a long history with mixed martial arts and was well known in the US, having founded his own MMA academy – Straight Blast Gym – in Oregon.
The following day, Matt was holding a seminar in Johannesburg and I managed to fight through my hangover in time to head along. There, I learned about his ‘aliveness’ approach, which really struck a chord with me. Consisting of three core principles – movement, energy and timing – the concept was based around recreating the actualities of a fight situation in training instead of your sessions becoming a rehearsal of dead patterns; challenging instead of dem‑onstrating; honing your skills against an uncooperative opponent.
Matt’s approach created a distinction between live and dead training, and I knew which one I preferred. It may sound like common sense, but the approach was very original at the time. After I returned home, Matt and I stayed in touch by e‑mail. I was eager to work more closely with him, so I invited him to come to Dublin the following summer. Paying for him to come over cost me a fortune, but to say it was a worthwhile investment would be an understatement.
At that stage I had already trained under John Machado, the Gracies and Geoff Thompson, and they were all fantastic in their own ways. But there was something different about Matt that made him stand out. For a start, he was clearly a very intelligent guy. He was also the first proper MMA coach I encountered – a mentor who was adept in all the disciplines, from boxing to Brazilian jiu‑jitsu.
Matt was a BJJ black belt, so he gave me my first ever grading while he was in Dublin. He determined that my first belt would be purple. But certainly the most interesting thing about Matt was his ‘aliveness’ methodology. I wasn’t in a position to be able to move my life to the US to work with Matt on a permanent basis, but if he gave me his formula I knew I could put it into practice.
I was full of admiration for Matt, and he obviously saw something in me too. I was officially welcomed into the Straight Blast Gym family, and in 2002 The Shed became SBG Ireland.
Published by Penguin Ireland, Win or Learn is available to buy by clicking here.
