The blood that splatters around the fight cage and is left dripping over the canvas floor is real. Eyes bulging, swollen and red, bodies pummelled, faces battered, the men have been pushed to the limit of physical endurance in a body-to-body combat sport of sanctioned savagery.
Or, as a critic once put it, “human cockfighting”.
These modern gladiators come back for more, blow after blow, while a referee hovers but permits — to the point of unconsciousness — what otherwise armed police would be sent in to break up on the street.
Finally, it’s over. Dazed with exhaustion, they manage to embrace — an acknowledgment of each other’s fortitude in this bruising “slugfest”.
To the uninitiated and the critics, the combat is confronting, brutal and too violent to be called a sport.
To the fans — millions around the world and growing — it feeds the most basic of instincts to “kill or be killed” in a strategic and extreme contest of muscle and mind.
To them, it’s exciting and addictive and, like boxing before it, the cult of personality is strong.
The men (and women) in the cage do what the average Joe might like to do — if only.
Mixed martial arts — enshrined in the $3.5 billion global promotion known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) — feeds the masses’ vicarious thirst for a hardcore contest.
Which is why it’s difficult to reconcile the softly spoken, 193cm smiling giant I’m talking to with the baddass, ground-and-pound, knockout specialist you see in televised cage fights.
Palelei is sitting in our office, his gold teeth glinting as he grins, a far cry from the pit of pain he’ll face on Saturday in Cincinnati’s US Bank Arena in front of 17,000 fans and millions more watching on Foxtel and pay-per-view online.
To this Willetton Senior High School kid, with sporting ambitions and brawn to spare, mixed martial arts was love at first sight.
“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘Wow this is crazy’,” says the 36-year-old. “I was hooked — hook, line and sinker.”
Mixed martial arts brings together a number of disciplines. Brazilian jiu jitsu, wrestling and boxing are all reflected in the epic pitched battles that are so physically debilitating, the matches go for just three, five-minute rounds.
Fighters use open-fingered gloves and are bare-footed. The sport has been cleaned up from earlier days where dirty fighting — for instance, kneeing a downed competitor in the head or fish-hooking (inserting fingers into orifices) — was permitted under a no-rules motto.
Coming from a school of hard knocks helped to prepare Palelei for the fight arena. His parents had exposed him to the tough plantation life in Tonga as a young child. Then he was sent to live with an uncle in NSW where he was given regular and explosive beatings. It was bad enough for the young pre-teen to run away and hide under a house where he ate dog leftovers to stave off hunger and borrowed people’s line washing to stay warm.
“They do believe in the smack,” Palelei says of his upbringing. “And that kind of toughened me up a bit. Sometimes when I’m in the Octagon ready to fight, I kind of think to myself about my opponent, ‘Well, you haven’t been through what I’ve been through. So what can you do to me that is worse?’.”
Palelei says he cannot recall ever getting into street scraps as a kid, and, remarkably, doesn’t like confrontation out of the ring.
His sporting prowess started with basketball, then moved to rugby, while he also trained in freestyle and Greco wrestling, followed by Brazilian jiu jitsu under noted Perth trainer Habby Heske, who had appeared in films with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Jacky Chan.
“I wanted to go and train with this guy,” Palelei explains. “He was only, like, a 90kg frame and I was 120kg and he was beating me everywhere, taking me down. It used to bother me — I’m so much bigger than this guy. So I started to learn.”
Palelei’s body is not only his tool of trade, it’s a work of art. His father took him to get his first tattoo at 15, a rite of passage that would be repeated through milestones in his life, the patterns portraying significant Tongan symbols.
“Different parts of the tattoos mean different historic things. Tonga and Fiji were fighting, me and (AFL star) Nic Naitanui were having wars,” he laughs. “Back then it was cannibalism.”
Palelei began competing in lower-rung MMA bouts before leaving Perth for a shot at the UFC. That was 2007 and it would prove to be a defining experience. It was a crushing defeat.
“I had a fight and it was one of the worst kinds of fight ever,” he says. “It was in Las Vegas. You’ve got 20,000 people packed into an arena, not to mention the millions and millions of people watching on TV. It was like a Freddy Kruger nightmare — the stage fright got to me.
“When I fought in 2007 my coach Ryan Parsons was looking after (Hollywood star) Kevin James, and Kevin and Adam Sandler flew in to watch my fight. So then it was so disappointing. They’re like massive fans.”
After the fight, Palelei was cut from the UFC and returned home, his dream in tatters.
“I think I sat on the couch for eight months or something eating ice cream,” he says. “But I learnt from that experience . . . I had to prove that wasn’t (the real) me.”
And so began the fight to get back in the ring, one punch at a time, with publicity hound Nidia Liguan at his side.
“The last three or four years we pushed every angle to get back in the UFC. We started to push our Hulk brand — I was always Palelei ‘The Hulk’,” he says. “I was taking fights in other MMA competitions and ended up having eight straight wins with no losses.”
Of his 23 bouts in MMA contests, Palelei has won 20, 16 by knockout (his “Hulk Smash”).
In the cage, every fighter has a beast to unleash, green or otherwise.
“When you unleash, you unleash 100 per cent,” Palelei says. “I’m always thinking in my head, ‘I’m going to go three five-minute rounds, so always keep back-up, always keep some petrol in your tank’.”
To see his colossal right fist pounding the face of an opponent on the ground, four, five, six times before the referee calls it does beg the question as to how someone pulls back once they’ve unleashed?
“What’s going through your mind is ‘Get it done — finish it as soon as you can’. My strength is ground and pound, hit but don’t get hit. If I’m on top of you, I can finish the fight,” he says.
“I’ve been on the receiving end once on the ground. It’s not good.” But, he adds, “with all that adrenalin in there”, you don’t feel the pain as much.
But why do it in the first place?
“Money is a lot of motivation — it’s work and the more wins, the more money,” Palelei says. “It’s putting food on the table for my family.”
The fighter met and married his wife of Italian extraction, Adrianna, at just 19. The couple have three children — Iesha, 15, Hannah, 14, and Jonah, 8.
“If I wasn’t getting paid, then I wouldn’t be doing this,“ Palelei adds. “When people say they do it for the love, they’re bulls****ing. You don’t get hit in the face and not get paid.”
Payment varies. Some fighters might get $6000 to fight and $6000 to win. Some names might get $120,000 for the fight and $50,000 to win. A knock-out or performance bonus of $50,000 to $100,000 can be earned as well.
Then there’s the fame. And Palelei is well aware of what message he wants to send out.
“I don’t want to be known as a person, ‘Oh he had a fight’,” he says. “I want to be great at fighting, great at the movies and have my kids be proud of what I do.”
In WA and Victoria, the State Governments have banned the use of the Octagon in mixed martial arts. WA’s Sport and Recreation Minister Terry Waldron says the ban on cage fighting is in the best interests of the community “as well as the safety of competitors”.
“However, we will continue to closely monitor both the growth of the sport in WA and the impact of the cage ban,” Mr Waldron says.
The ban is hotly contested by the MMA world and the UFC contest promoters who say the cage is a vital safety measure.
UFC Canada, Australia and New Zealand managing director Tom Wright says the ban on the Octagon is “subjective, narrow-minded and remarkably short-sighted”.
“Even the paid bureaucrats in WA’s Combat Sports Commission agree that the ban is wrong and lacks all objective credibility,” he says.
“The health and safety of our highly trained and disciplined athletes and the competitive fairness of our sport are the UFC’s first priorities — which is why our sport is so highly regulated and governed.
“Our sport is violent but no more violent than many of Australia’s most popular sports such as rugby league, rugby union and the AFL.”
Palelei believes the lifting of the cage ban is inevitable.
“James Packer was front row with (UFC owner) Dana White at the last UFC event,” he says. “I know for a fact he’s trying to push UFC into Melbourne. Obviously with the casino, the money, it’s only a matter of time. Eventually they’re going to have to overturn the bans. It brings in a crazy amount of mainstream money. And there’s a massive fan base.”
There have been four reported deaths in the wake of sanctioned MMA contests in the past seven years — all but one of them due to head injuries. The last was in February. None of them was in a UFC bout.
“The medical profession has an uneasy relationship with boxing and probably an even more uneasy one with MMA,” Dr Nathan says.
“We’re very concerned now about the long-term impact of concussion as being more serious than previously realised and that repetitive concussions can accumulate damage that may not be evidenced immediately but may cause problems in later life.
“Sports that continue to have a concussion as a goal — rather than as a tragic accidental outcome — are probably regarded as endangering the health of the participants.”
Combatants like Palelei, however, do not believe more regulation is required — not even something like an AFL “blood rule”.
“With the blood situation, the doctor on the side determines whether a fighter is able to go ahead,” Palelei says.
“Sometimes guys bleed profusely from the nose because they’re boxing. But if it’s anything like a broken nose or a deep cut, the doctor will call it. Everyone bleeds.
“It’s a combat sport. Because there’s grappling on the floor, there’s blood on the floor.
“Everyone gets tested. The testing you have in the UFC is on another level — blood tests, eye scans. If you lose a fight, you normally have a 10-week period suspension. If you get TKO’d, they give you a three-month suspension where you’re not allowed to fight within that three months. I’m satisfied the rules are strict enough.”
Ask Palelei why cage fighting is so loved by the fans and he smiles.
“We’re the modern gladiators,” he says. “Perth has banned the cage — because they think it’s like it portrays putting two dogs in a cage. But I feel if they had more education as to why the cage is a safety measure they would change that view.”
But doesn’t it glorify violence in the era of the king hit or one-punch attack?
“The guys that fight in a gym and train are not the ones who are going out king-hitting guys,” Palelei says.
“The street violence — that’s fuelled by alcohol or drugs. You can’t blame those actions on a sport that’s 80 per cent wrestling.”
Perhaps the only thing that could sour fans on the growing sport is the idea of contests being rigged — a notion furiously rejected by the UFC.
And Palelei says: “I’ve never heard of match-fixing in the MMA world.”
The Cockburn contender has a four-fight deal with the UFC. He has already won his first two fights. Saturday’s bout against South African heavyweight Ruan Potts is important for Palelei. If he wins, he expects his contract to be renegotiated.
Palelei thinks he has another four years in the UFC cage and then he wants to focus on his other dream — films. “Why acting? I know I can do it and I can smash it,” he says.
Only five Australians compete in the UFC alongside Palelei, who was swamped on the streets of Japan when he fought there.
“We’ve got followers who tweet from Germany, from Iraq. I can’t believe how popular it is,” he says, flashing those gold teeth — one of which is made from his late grandmother’s wedding ring.
He reflects on his big loss and what he learnt.
“F*** everyone else!” he says. “Worry about yourself, you’re number one. Keep pushing, keep grinding, keep hustling. Keep hustling every day to get to where you’ve got to get.”
* Soa Palelei’s fight against Ruan Potts airs Saturday, May 10, on Foxtel’s Fuel TV and Fox Sports at 10am WST.
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