Any conversation with Brennan Ward should be prefaced with something along the following lines:
Warning: Adult language and mature subject matter.
A 20-minute conversation with the Bellator welterweight will likely contain more F-bombs than you can count. Every sentence is strewn with them, because Ward has turned cursing into something of an art form. One can imagine a public relations staffer on the other end of the phone line, silently wondering if Ward’s colorful and prolific language is a good thing or something that needs addressing.
Ward’s mastery of adult language is just one of the things that have turned him into one of Bellator’s more interesting homegrown prospects. He also happens to be a pretty good fighter, having run up a 13-3 record since making his pro debut at the age of 20 in 2008. Like so many others who grace cages around the world, Ward had wrestled in high school and college, and so it didn’t take very long to adapt to the fight game.
Or rather, to make the fight game adapt to him.
Ward has this kind of attitude, the kind that so many other fighters claim but rarely actually exhibit. He says he’ll fight anyone on the Bellator roster, regardless of weight class, and the difference between Ward and everyone else is that you instantly believe he means what he says, because he’s just crazy enough to do it.
For instance, when Bellator matchmaker Rich Chou approached Ward and asked if he’d be interested in fighting former heavyweight Ken Hasegawa at 179 pounds on the first-ever Rizin show in Japan? No hesitation. None whatsoever. Ward’s previous four fights were at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut, largely because he can sell tickets to local friends and family.
But it was time, as Ward says, for Chou and Bellator to get him out of there.
“Obviously he came through. F–k, man,” he says. “You can’t get any farther away from home than Japan.”
Rizin, the new promotion from former Pride head Nobuyuki Sakakibara, is intended to be the rebirth of Pride, if only in spirit. It has all of the same production elements. It has the ring. It has giant, fat sumo wrestlers fighting Bob Sapp. It has all of the things that helped make Pride the biggest fighting promotion in the world in its heyday and now an enduring memory spoken fondly of in reverent tones.
Ward missed all of that Pride stuff back in the day, though. He wasn’t an MMA fan. Until recently, he really didn’t watch much MMA, and he only started so he “could know who’s who.” So he hadn’t heard of Pride until a few years ago, when he trained with former star Wanderlei Silva.
“I’m a huge Wanderlei Silva fan. Man, I f–king love that dude,” Ward says. “So I watched some of his fights from there, and he’s out there soccer-kicking dudes in the face, stomping dudes in the head. And I was like, f–k, man. This is f–king rad.”
And so Ward agreed to go to Japan, a place with vast differences in terms of both general culture and in mixed martial arts.
“I’m not really shocked by too much, because I really don’t f–king care about s–t like that. But it was a lot different. The crowd was f–king huge. The fans were psycho in a good way. I must’ve signed about a million f–king autographs in there,” Ward says.
At this point, he breaks into his best impersonation of a Japanese person asking for an autograph; there is no point trying to reproduce this moment in text form. “And I was just like, man, who the f–k am I? S–t. It was f–king awesome.”
Then came the fight. Other than being surprised by how long the 10-minute first round felt, Ward seemingly took to Rizin’s ring with ease. Wearing wrestling shoes gave him more traction on the mat, and more traction meant he had a firmer base from which to throw his trademark haymakers. He feels like he lost a good portion of the first round because he was holding too tightly onto chokes that ultimately proved fruitless.
But he put on one hell of a fight anyway, which was important for him. Though he came to Pride later than most, Ward knew that the Japanese fans valued entertainment above all else, including wins and losses. So he was satisfied that he got the win, but even happier about thrilling the Japanese fans while doing so. He hopes that Rizin will truly take off and help the stagnant Japanese MMA market reach the heights it once attained.
“If it takes off, I wanna be one of those f–king mainstays in Rizin who is known for putting on f–king nasty fights. I want them to view me as this kid who puts on his f–king wrestling shoes and goes out there and throws bombs,” he says. “So I wanted to go out there and f–king do work, throw f–king bombs and hard punches and throws.
“I even soccer-kicked that fool in the head, dude.”
The soccer kick was a moment that brought about something like a self-examination for Ward. After the fight, he and his teammates sat around joking about how easily that particular icon of violence came to him. Much like his favorite fighter Wanderlei Silva, Ward—aided by a Japanese rules that are far different from the ones we experience in other parts of the world—discovered that he had a brutal side that he wasn’t aware of.
“I just naturally pushed this dude down and kicked him in the head. They were almost making fun of how animalistic my tendencies are, because I did. I stood right up and kicked him in the f–king head,” Ward says. “Like it was nothing. I didn’t even have to think about it.”
Hasegawa survived the soccer kicks and the knees and Ward’s violent punches but could not survive his submission game. After forcing Hasegawa to tap out, Ward instantly reflected on what turned out to be not just a tough battle but one that may mark a turning point in his career. He’d love nothing more than to see his career intertwined with Rizin, in the hopes that one day he’ll be remembered, right there alongside Silva and other Pride legends, as a guy who comes to entertain and does so in violent fashion, even when facing a durable and equally gritty opponent.
“That dude was so f–king tough, man,” Ward says. “I earned that one. For sure.”
Jeremy Botter covers mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report.
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