Straight Blast Gym has had various homes, of various sizes, since John Kavanagh began as a Mixed Martial Arts coach in a lock-up shed in Phibsboro.
SBG now has its headquarters on Dublin’s Naas Road and 12 affiliate gyms dotted across the country. It also boasts multiple UFC champion Conor McGregor and a host of others fighters – such as Paddy Holohan, Aisling Daly, Gunnar Nelson and Cathal Pendred – that have appeared in the promotion.
Holohan was forced to retire from competitive action 18 months ago, cutting short his quest to one day challenge for the UFC flyweight belt. He is now a coach at SBG D24, in Tallaght, and he joined SportsJOE Live to look back on an incredible decade for Irish fighters in MMA.
“We take photographs at the end of our classes [now],” he said, “and I somehow can’t but imagine in my head, ‘Is this like that photo we took, all those seven years ago?’
“There were some great photographs that we took, with me and Conor and John, Gunni, Ais, Cathal Pendred and Chris Fields. All these legends of the sport, d’you know? We didn’t have anything. When we were starting off, it was just a few blokes in a shed strangling each other.”
Not many from outside that small MMA enclave/shed could have predicted the great deeds so many of them would go on to achieve, but Holohan says they did.
“When we started – and people see Conor as they do now – Conor was running around the mat screaming, ‘WE ARE MULTIPLE WORLD CHAMPIONS! WE ARE MILLIONAIRES! WE OWN OUR MA’S GAFFS!!’ Mad stuff.
“This was seven, eight years ago and you can’t knock that. And when I was in that little group, I just believed – ‘Something’s going to happen, something has to give, we have to keep [going], it has to give’. And it did.”
Making a reference to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Holohan describes Kavanagh as ‘Master Splinter’ to the SBG crew and credits him for pouring so much of himself into the project of putting Irish MMA on the map. McGregor had a different role. Holohan says:
“Conor would have been the general of our team. We were going after this.
“We weren’t turning up to these events to take part, as they say, we were showing up to win and to make an impact. We didn’t want to be the token Irish guys and for them to put on the diddly-eye music. We didn’t want that. We wanted to be there and we were serious about it.”
Tom Egan and Norman Parke were one of the first Irish fighters to compete in the UFC [Antrim’s Steven Lynch and Colin Robinson were the pioneers] but it was McGregor that smashed through, on talent and merit, and was at the vanguard of an impressive Irish swarm on the promotion.
Holohan, Pendred and Daly have all stepped away from actively fighting but ‘The Hooligan’ believes the next Irish invasion may not be far away. “I get to see a lot of the guys at youth level,” he said, “and to me, there’s a lot of teams coming up.”
That next Holohan, or McGregor even, may not be far off making the big breakthrough.
