A Life Beyond Cage Rage: New Book Goes Inside the British MMA Scene

Because of his relationship, marriage to and now apparent separation from infamous glamor model Katie “Jordan” Price who herself became a mainstream celebrity mostly since her stint on the reality show “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here” which was on ITV, one of the main terrestrial TV networks here as much as CBS and NBC are in America.

Basically Price was a media darling verging on heroine with the masses until she had an ugly break up and divorce from husband Peter Andre whom she met on the reality television show with their relationship wedding getting tons of mainstream attention. The public and the press sided with Andre in the split and Price became a national villain. Then enters Alex Reid, a failed TUF 9 contestant and middling MMA fighter who is introduced to Price via a personal trainer / MMA coach and former British Welterweight fighter who had been working with Price by the name of Sol Gilbert (UFC Welterweight Jon Hathaway’s first MMA coach before he moved to London Shootfighters).

Anyway, the introduction is made and they end up dating, and of course the tabloids are all over it and Reid becomes famous and hated over night and ends up largely being guilty by association to Price. As a result of being with a national villain it’s soon picked up on that he’s a “Cage Fighter” and you can imagine the tabloid hatched pieces that were printed as a result causing many UK MMA fans, fighters and journalists to declare Reid a bad representation of the sport. Now Reid is hated by MMA fans in the UK as well as the masses that buy into tabloid gossip.

Reid then becomes more famous by appearing on Celebrity Big Brother on Channel 4 (another one of the main terrestrial networks) and ends up winning the show. The show is watched by millions with the first episode garnering something like twice as many viewers as Kimbo on CBS did, just to give you some scope. Incidentally more of Reid’s actual character comes through due to the live unedited nature of the show and actually wins a lot of the public over. Unfortunately he’s still with Price at this point.

To prove he’s not a joke he wants an MMA fight that legitimizes him in the public eye. Enter Tom Watson who unofficially represents the UK MMA community as a real fighter who takes the sport seriously and show what MMA is all about. In the run up to the fight Reid films a documentary series of him training different martial arts around the world and seeing what he can use for his up coming fight with Watson. Essentially it’s a version of Fight Quest or Human Weapon. During an episode when Reid is in the US and is training with Erik Paulson and Josh Barnett, he visits some Armed Forces and rolls with the troops but ends up badly hurting his knee and has to cut the TV series short but more importantly has to pull out of his fight with Watson. You can imagine the uproar from the UK MMA community of Reid ducking Watson, Reid’s not a real fighter and is more interested in being a celebrtiy et cetera.

So the fight gets postponed, another TV series following Reid and how important the fight is and how he doesn’t want to be a choke, national media exposure for the fight that headlines BAMMA 5 and is broadcast live on now defunct digital satellite channel Bravo (very similar to Spike TV).

Many expected Watson to crush Reid and embarrass him. However Reid just 2 weeks prior took a fight with Jesse Taylor of TUF 7 fame (whose rampage in Las Vegas had him forfeit his finalist placement to win the series). Watson lost the fight but was relatively unscathed due to the Lay’n’Pray nature of the bout and was still expected to handle Reid.

Instead for the BAMMA Middleweight title we ended up with a 5 round slugfest that had many calling it the UK’s Bonnar vs Griffin. It wasn’t technical and was in fact sloppy a lot of the time, but it was full of grit and heart with Watson winning a close decision but Reid gaining UK MMA respect for being battered and bleeding for 25 minutes but without giving up the fight. And in fairness it was a better fight then the UFC were capable of producing that same weekend (I wrote a piece for Cageside Seats with links to the video.)

The whole fight and aftermath got national media coverage, and Alex Reid became a worldwide Twitter trending topic for several hours afterwards.

So there you go.