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From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2010

 

In my previous column, I made the comment that, of all the things in the world I’d be bad at, the worst would be cage-fighting. I should have kept quiet. Thanks to my editor’s merry sense of humour, here I am at a gym in Hove, talking to a man whose shortest knockout time is 21 seconds, and who lists his worst injury as “temporary paralysis down the left side”. To put this in context, the closest I’ve come to a fight was when I was 17 and poked my friend Roger in the leg with an umbrella for repeatedly insisting I had a Phil Collins album. I didn’t. I had Genesis’s “Invisible Touch” on cassette, which is completely different.

 

The man is Sol “Zero Tolerance” Gilbert, fighter turned gym-owner. Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters—as they are properly known—train in boxing (punching), muay thai (punching and kicking), jiu-jitsu (holds and throws) and ground-fighting (anything except biting). It is Sol’s job to train me. He starts by teaching me some basic boxing punches, holding up pads for me to hit. I enjoy this, and start fantasising that I’m taking revenge on Jason, the school bully, thumping him in the solar plexus while coolly quipping “Who runs like a girl now, bitch?” Fifteen minutes in and I’m feeling pretty good. “How do you rate my fitness level, out of ten?” I enquire, breathlessly. “Compared with one of my fighters?” muses Sol. “Two.”

 

To prove his point Sol gets me to run the length of the gym, deliver 20 punches to a punchbag, run back and then do two “sprawls” (hit the deck, jump straight back up) as often as possible in five minutes. By the end I’m not so much hitting the bag as stroking it, and I stagger up from my final sprawl with all the grace of a person in a CCTV clip about binge-drinking. An actual cage-fight consists of three five-minute rounds. I couldn’t last that long, even without an opponent.

 

The next few days are spent in recuperation, ie agony. My legs refuse to work and I stagger around like Darth Vader learning to use his armoured suit at the end of “Revenge of the Sith”. Worse, at the start of the next session, Sol tells me I’m to train in the cage itself. “See that?” he says, motioning to some brownish marks on the canvas with all the pride of a man showing you a photo of himself on a night out with George Clooney and Johnny Depp. “Is that blood?” I reply, staring at the faded splatters. Sol nods, and raises the pads. I couldn’t feel more out of my comfort zone if I woke up naked, with no memory, crouched behind the altar of a cathedral during a royal wedding.

 

Despite this, Sol insists on showing me how to use the cage wall during a fight, by forcing your opponent against it with a flurry of punches, then elbowing them in the face. It’s an effective tactic, although once I learn that a fight can end in one of only three ways—knockout, medical intervention, or one party “tapping out” to signal submission—I decide I prefer the Stan Laurel method: running round and round the ring away from your opponent. “Can I tap out as soon as anyone comes near me?” I ask. Sol looks at me with incomprehension: that would be pussy. Miaow.

 

My final challenge is to fight in a group MMA class. We’re paired up to practise “takedowns” (moves that get your opponent on the ground) and “submissions” (moves that inflict pain and force them to tap out). The first takedown involves ducking a punch, then grabbing your opponent’s legs, yanking them hard and throwing them down. I sense my partner tiring of the fact that, rather than following the instructor’s entreaties to “make it hard for him”, I fall over the
second he touches me. I don’t want to “make it hard for him”. It’ll hurt more.

 

Over the next hour I’m passed round the class like Richard Dawkins at a bishop’s birthday party. For the final part of the session—spent “grappling” in a one-on-one free-for-all—I am paired with the only woman in the group. She instantly gets me in a reverse chokehold. I begin to wish my mother was here. And, as the class comes to an end, it’s clear that I make the same mistakes when cage-fighting as I used to on one-night stands: I spend far too long saying “Sorry” and “Is that all right?”

 

Time to think about my next mission. I’d be dreadful at learning guitar with Mark Knopfler, and even worse at helping Cheryl Cole with a bra-fitting. 

 

 

(Will Smith is an actor and comic who appears in the film "In the Loop".)