Known as the Joker, Jess Liaudin had little to smile about growing up

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This article was published 17/01/2008 (6828 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEWCASTLE, England – Like many fighters, Jess (The Joker) Liaudin’s nose tells a few tales. But the back story of this particular busted beak is more tragic than most.

The 34-year-old Frenchman says he was 10 the first time his nose was broken. His dad hit him.

“My dad used to be quite physical,” Liaudin explained in English on Thursday. “He punched me the first time, I was nine months. My grandfather came with a shotgun, put it to his head and said ‘If you ever do that again, I will kill you.’

“So he didn’t do it ever again – in front of my grandfather. But he was doing it quite regularly at home.”

Hit Liaudin at your peril today. The 170-pounder (12-8 and 2-0 in the UFC) takes a five-fight win streak into his matchup Saturday with American Marcus (The Irish Hand Grenade) Davis at UFC 80: Rapid Fire at the Metro Radio Arena. Davis (18-4 and 5-0 in the UFC) is an exciting fighter who has won his last 10 outings.

While Saturday’s main event pits B.J. (The Prodigy) Penn against Joe (Big Daddy) Stevenson for the UFC lightweight title, some believe Liaudin-Davis could steal the show.

It’s a high-profile bout for the five-foot-nine Liaudin, who has gone from part-time dishwasher and fighter to entrepreneur and budding mixed martial arts star. Now based in London, he has opened his own gym (Pancrase London in Bethnel Green) and dabbles in movie stunt and extra work when not training.

He fights for money and fun, saying getting in the cage or ring is just a natural follow to training.

“A lot of people think ‘Oh you’re fighting because your dad used to beat you up.’ Not really because I’m not very aggressive at all. I’m actually a pretty chilled-out guy. And even when I fight, I don’t look like I’m hurting my opponent. For me, it’s like a video game. Each time I punch and kick him, I’m taking a little life out of him – like a video game.”

But as a kid, he fought for survival.

Liaudin and his mother left the family home when he was– and lived with fellow homeless people in a church, eating food left over from markets.

“It was a very tough time,” he recalled. “We lived like that for six months, like bums.”

They graduated to an apartment in the roughest part of Bourges in central France. Surrounded by impoverished immigrants, Liaudin says he was “the white boy in the neighbourhood everyone wanted to beat up.”

“I was fighting every day. When my mom sent me to the grocery store to buy bread, I knew I would have to fight. It was pretty rough.”

Liaudin’s nose has taken a few more turns since then, literally. He had a bad year recently, when he broke it four times in a row – once in training and three times in fights.

Today his nose has, let’s say, character with a slight detour to the side.

“Yeah, but women like it, so that’s good,” the charismatic Frenchman, who is not on the market, says with a smile.

Liaudin quit school at– although at 16 he got involved in a cooking apprenticeship that alternated between three weeks working and one week at school. He spent two years doing it, working six days a week, 12 hours a day. His cooking, he says, remains “pretty good.”

“You need time to do it,” he said. “But if I want to impress someone, I have the skill to back it up.”

Liaudin, who made his combat sports debut at 16 in a Thai boxing bout and started as an MMA professional in 2000, saw a tape of the first UFC card back in’93 while in the U.S. for a kickboxing bout. Not sure if it was real or fake, he returned to Europe and kept watching MMA tapes sent to him by a friend in the U.S.

When he saw an ad soliciting UFC fighters back in Black Belt magazine in’94, he applied. He finally made it- years later, at UFC 70 last April in Manchester, England.

Fighting has taken Liaudin around the world. He has lived, trained or fought in Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan and the U.S., among other places. These days, if he goes on holiday, he makes sure he can train wherever he goes.

“For me, training is my life,” he says.

A trip that stands out was one to Hong Kong some years ago. His English wasn’t as good as it is now and so his message that he just wanted to train got mangled. He thought he was just sparring with one of the locals until his opponent started hitting him for real.

Liaudin knocked him out. “And then ran very very fast because I didn’t want to be killed.”

He started his MMA career with five straight wins and has won his last five. In between he went 2-8, a bumpy road he attributes in part to a drop in concentration and having to do other jobs to pay the bills. Breaking his nose repeatedly didn’t help either.

He eventually chose London as a base because mixed martial arts, which is not sanctioned in France, is quite popular there, and because he didn’t need a visa.

When he moved there, he made three pounds an hour as a dishwasher. At one point, he was a dishwasher, waiter and personal trainer.

“I was working 15 hours a day. But you know what, when you’ve got no money and you want to start building something up, that’s what you have to do. I started from scratch. I came to this country, I couldn’t speak a word of English and I had no money. Right now I’m doing quite successfully.”

He’s even made it to the big and little screen after an acquaintance introduced him to the movie world. His stunt credits include the Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies” and he played a villain in the popular British TV police series “The Bill.”

These days, Liaudin trains for his fights at Team Quest, the highly regarded camp run by Dan Henderson in Temiculah, Calif. He wanted a gym that did not have another UFC welterweight and one that did not have attitude.

“I’m not a flash person, I’m not all about glitter. I’m a simple guy who just trains . . . We (Team Quest) don’t talk about fighting outside of the gym. We don’t like to go to clubs and nightclubs and be called cage fighter. That’s not what it’s all about.”

Announcer Stephen Quadros labelled Liaudin “The Joker” after seeing how loose he is before fights. “Then he thought my smile was maybe a little bit evil . . . He said I reminded him of The Joker in ‘Batman.”‘

At Thursday’s news conference, Liaudin used his time in front of the microphone to explain to Davis that some pre-fight comments had been exaggerated in the English media.

“Right now I’m in no place to disrespect him,” Liaudin said. “I’ve always had very great respect for him. Me, I’m the challenger, I want to be who he is right now.”

But he added: “When the cage closes, the respect goes.”

Davis, who branded the French fighter a liar on Wednesday for reportedly saying he would stand and strike with the American rather than take him down to the ground to avoid his fists, accepted the olive branch.

“We’ve been talking smack. Fighters do that,” he said.

Notes(at): The UFC announced Thursday it has scheduled a news conference for Feb. 4 in Montreal with UFC president Dana White, Montreal’s Georges St. Pierre and welterweight champion Matt Serra to reveal the April’ fight card at the Bell Centre. … News that Newcastle United has reappointed Kevin Keegan as manager dominated the local paper Thursday. The Journal, a tabloid, had 17 pages of coverage plus an editorial. There was no mention of the UFC.