🇳🇴 Norsk

500 fights

“500 fights, that's the number I figured when I was a kid. 500 street fights and you could consider yourself a legitimate tough guy”, says Vin Diesel’s character in the film The Knockaround Guys. I remember thinking of that for a second when I clocked up 500 rounds of sparring before I got ready to leave. There had been days when I’d forgotten the way home when I got into the car, but I found my way home in the end.

Twelve weeks of preparation were done: alternating days of a 10-kilometre distance run / 6–12 rounds of sprint intervals. I was in top shape. It was worth it. I’m sure Bjørn Dæhlie would have nodded in approval at the result when my GP measured my resting heart rate that summer in 2014.

But my pulse was anything but calm as I stood there alone in the summer breeze, about to open the door to Chris Dolman’s Pancration Gym in North Amsterdam. I’d found my way from the city centre. Before that, the gym had been called Chakuriki/Pancration Gym and had been responsible for producing fighters such as Peter Aerts, Badr Hari and Jerome Le Banner.

I reminded myself of what my mentor of many years, Kru Nash, had said six months earlier. (Pong Kru, sir).

“Your getting old, if you want to get pro you got to cheat the system. Jump te que. Get a ton of sparring in you. Get super fight fit. Then fly to Holland, find the best gym for heavyweight withing walking distance. Go up to the reigster and tell them that your are not there to pay for classes, you don't want any training. You just want to spar with the best guy they have.... They wont risk the guy who is in peak condition because he had a fight in the next few days. But they will put someone there that has a lot of pro fights to deliver the punishment disrespecting the trainers like that deserve. But you will have the best gas tank, if it gets to heavy clinch them, use the tool the thought you and keep movin and when you fell they get tired you up the tempo. They will try to kill you, but if you survive the rounds, now you have jump the line of fighters having to go the traditional route to get noticed.....”

Easier said than done. You should have seen the expression on the old bloke at the till when I delivered that line. I had to repeat it twice before he believed me. A phone call in the back room, a bit of laughter, then he came back and said: “Be here tomorrow morning at 10.00. We wil have someone for you.”

I called my trainer in Norway. “Good”, he said. “Get some rest. Big day tomorrow.” Then he hung up. There was little sleep.

And the atmosphere was intense as I entered the gym the next morning: Rick Ross on the speaker and “Black Panther” skipping rope beside his trainer. Otherwise it was empty ... Game on.

Five rounds of war later I stood there smiling, yellow, blue and bleeding. I thought of the mentor I respected so much that I’d just said “Yes, sir” six months earlier, without thinking about what I was agreeing to.

Tommy Harnnick (RIP) had just offered me a few weeks as a sparring partner. Free training. Black Panther had a fight coming up in Suriname and needed as much good sparring as possible. Before I went home to Norway again, he told me I could represent their gym, skip C-class and start competing in B-class. Kru Nash had been spot on.

So it wasn’t very well thought through when, a week later, strapped to my snowboard, I approached the big jump at Folgefonna and thought it would probably be fine. It didn’t matter that it had been 15 years since last time. It was eight months bedridden before I could run without pain again.

The next time I landed in Holland, Tommy Harnick had sadly passed away. RIP. And without the cardio and sparring rounds under my belt, Mike’s Gym was less of a success, to put it mildly. Haha. But thank you to Big Mike for the week in his camp.

It’s been 28 years since Bård Trones at the old Bergen Kampsportsenter in Kanalveien gave me my first taste of instruction, and Trevor Ambrose at Fitness First by Bystasjonen saw me through to my first amateur fight on Nordnes. I’ve learned a lot at Fighter in Oslo or down in the basement at Bjølsen. I’ve competed in Bangkok and Pattaya.

And once Sombat Banchamek himself, the legend who became known by the ring name Buakaw Por Pramuk, noticed me. He stood there for a while before saying “very good” to me as I hammered away at a worn-out bag in his first gym in Bangkok. He was cool enough to give me a little nod and a smile when I walked past him later. For a nerd like me, that was big. His K1-Max fights were what got me seriously interested in Muay Thai.

But that was as far as my credentials went. That’s life. So you haven’t heard of me. I have no belts to show for it. But I have enough experience to know what a good trainer is and isn’t. I know the value martial arts can bring to young people who want to train and learn. I know it can be the way out of crime.

So I’d taken on a couple of selected young hopefuls with the right humble, eager-to-learn attitude. I saw it as my duty to help them, and I could give them the sense of achievement and positive lifestyle martial arts can offer those who thirst for knowledge. But the warnings had started pouring in.

I’d been using the big blue mat that lay under the climbing wall down in the cultural building for a couple of weeks on my own – stood on its edge as my faithful psychologist – when Sebastian made it clear there’d be a report if I continued. And the senior officer in department C made it clear the following morning: if I went to my psychologist again, it would mean isolation on the West wing and losing all my time with my daughter on leave.

When my students and I were caught in my cell by a young trainee who thought she’d caught us practising criminal acts while we were training footwork, the final warning came from the senior officer in department C: “Teach anyone anything at all again, and it’s straight to the West wing.”

I raised it with officer Timothy. We brainstormed and agreed that some organised training could help, for example in the room LAR uses to poison the whole prison in the mornings. The training could be run by me and perhaps even officer Christer or Styve, who were both accomplished competitors. It would have been a positive contribution, and conditions could have been added. To take part, the requirement could, for example, be three months without reports or positive drug tests. A breach of the above would mean losing access.

I could try applying. Below is my application and the reply. If you’ve got something you want to say to Bergen Prison, use the comments.

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Original application and original reply, with names blacked out.

Norwegian article and source documents