“I always loved getting hit, I suppose. I dunno what it is. It makes you feel alive. Otherwise you’re cruising through life without a bit of punishment.”
Finn Simpson, 22, is one of Sydney’s growing band of amateur cage fighters, inspired by the spectacle of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Dozens of schools offering serious training in mixed martial arts, as the sport is known, have opened up in Sydney over the last three years.
Several mainstream gyms have started offering classes too – for fitness and without contact – including Fitness First.
MMA combines techniques from boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu, and fights take place inside a steel cage with few holds barred.
Tim Fisher, of Bulldog MMA in Parramatta, started offering MMA training at the end of 2007 to 10 members.
“People said I was a bit ahead of my time, “he said.
Today, the club has more than 200 members.
The popularity of the professional Ultimate Fighting Championship league has driven amateur interest in the sport. The UFC first came to Sydney last year and its stadium shows sell out in minutes.
“MMA now is like boxing was in the days when Rocky came out,” says Igor Praporschikov, one of the proprietors of Igor MMA in Bondi, who says the club has 150 members.
Finn is a blue belt and trains at Lange’s MMA in Manly on the northern beaches.
He started cage fighting about two years ago, inspired by the UFC and the rush of combat.
“When you hit them with a good shot, there’s that look in their eyes.
“I’m standing a foot away from a guy I’ve never met who wants to hurt me as much as he can and I’m doing the same.
“It’s different from when you’re having a fight on the cobbles ‘cos then there’s actually hate between two people.”
Finn says he has gotten into a few punch-ups at school, on the footy field and “with drunken idiots “but he hasn’t fought outside the ring for some time, he says.
Not everyone comes for the thrill of being punched in the face. Most enjoy the mix of physical fitness and the self-discipline.
At Igor MMA in Bondi club members range from 15 to 60 years old and include ballet dancers and professional NRL players.
Many people just go for the punishing exercise. But most who start training there end up competing in amateur fights.
Mr Simpson takes his training very seriously.
He starts at 5am six days a week, and says he devotes about 20 hours a week to preparation.
He quit his second job as a personal trainer because it was interfering with his training schedule.
His routine intensifies as the bouts draw near. He weighs 86 kilos usually but drops to 77 to reach his fighting weight.
For his last fight, at a competition in Wollongong in May, Mr Simpson says he began by cutting his portions and carbs. As the bout drew close, he started losing water.
“I didn’t drink or eat for 24 hours; the night before that I had a small salad.
“I put on the [nylon] sauna suit, masking taped [my] cuffs to keep the heat and sweat in and I started skipping”.
He went for 20 minutes and just made it into his weight class.
“I was very delirious,” he says.
He was fighting a local favourite but the adrenaline made him only barely conscious of the booing.
For all that effort and preparation, he lost in the first round after ‘tapping out’ when his opponent put him in a choke hold.
There are two kinds of chokes: those that constrict an opponent’s wind pipe and those that constrict their blood supply.
“If they block your arteries it’s OK. It just feels like you’re slowly going to sleep.”
None of the fighters admit to fearing or sustaining serious injuries in the ring. They say the fights look worse from the outside and paramedics are on standby besides.
But in an article last month in the Emergency Medicine Australasia journal Dr Michael Slowey, a Queensland emergency room doctor, called for tighter regulation of the sport to lower the risk of permanent neurological damage.
Dr Slowey writes of treating a 41-year-old patient who suffered a stroke after an artery in his neck was damaged while grappling in a cage fighting match.
“With a broader range of styles and rules comes a wider range of injuries,” Dr Slowey said.
“The documented injury rate is 23.6 per 100 fight participations, with severe concussion rates of 15.4 per 1000 athlete exposures, or 3% of all fights.
“Most injuries in MMA are facial lacerations, upper limb injuries and concussions.”
Since 2009, cage fighting in NSW has been regulated by the Combat Sports Authority.
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