The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) (13 page)

B
ORN IN
1961, John Brawn grew up in Westport, County Mayo, Ireland, where he still lives, and is Ireland’s leading self-defence instructor and recognized internationally as an expert in both
self-defence
and security. Humble, polite, respectful and a father of two, John is also undeniably one of the toughest men in the country.

Having started his martial-arts training in the early 1980s, John was appointed as a coach with the Irish Amateur Boxing Association in 1989 and three years later became a black belt in karate Kyokushinkai. In 1993 he became an instructor with the Association and Register of Self Protection Instructors. In 1995 he reached second dan black belt with the Irish Karate Kyokushinkai and started his successful security company providing security and close protection (bodyguard) services, as well as teaching practical
self-defence
and self-protection techniques worldwide. That same year he earned his Certificate of Completion in Advanced Learning Technologies for Close Combat and became an instructor with the US-based Rape Awareness and Prevention Organization.

John is currently the Irish director for several of the world’s most advanced self-defence and protection techniques such as the Blue Maxx and Bulletman. He is also an exponent of kettlebell techniques of fitness and organizes regular seminars in Ireland and worldwide.

Living up to his surname, this chapter – written specially for this book by Irish writer Barbara Preston – is part biography of John Brawn, Ireland’s toughest man, and part anecdotal tales from his sixteen years working the doors.

There are many excellent, tough security professionals, martial arts experts and instructors out there; so what qualifies John Brawn to be included in a book about hard men? A quietly spoken man with a shy smile, John is modest and self-effacing about his abilities, but says that when it comes to security and protection “the smile sucks them in and then the explosion happens”. It isn’t looking or acting tough that’s important, it’s knowing how and when to
be
hard that matters.  

The small town of Westport on the shore of Clew Bay, County Mayo, produces more than its fair share of Ireland’s poets, artists and musicians, but it’s not the kind of place where you’d expect to find one of the hardest men in the country – but John Brawn is exactly that. Recognized worldwide as an expert in both self-defence and security work, Geoff Thompson (award-winning writer and
martial-arts
expert) describes John as “one of the most powerful strikers and experienced martial artists I have ever had the pleasure to work with”.  

John Brawn grew up in the 1970s, attending the local Christian Brothers’ school. Those were the days when heavy-handed teachers and playground bullying were the norm and John wasn’t one of the bigger boys in his class. Around the age of twelve he decided that he needed to learn to take care of himself. With little opportunity to join a club, he got some Bruce Lee videos and some weights, hung a punch bag in the shed and started to train. It didn’t take long to work out that he needed a more methodical approach to reach his goal of being good at self-defence so he bought a book on karate and began his life-long love of martial arts.  

After a couple of years training on his own John wanted more. There was no karate club in the town so he joined the (now famous) local boxing club, St Anne’s, to further his training. He says he was a mediocre boxer without the psychological edge to do well in
tournaments
. He would lose bouts on split decisions, or find himself matched against the eventual championship winner, but John is proud of the fact that he was never knocked out in a championship and only hit the canvas once! He did win the title of Best Boxer in one tournament, though.

Boxing did improve his physical fitness and ability to look after himself, and, more importantly, helped enormously with his
self-confidence
because during his teens he needed to grow up fast. His father died when he was only fourteen and, being the eldest of five children, he had to help his mother and work in the family butcher’s shop. He continued his training when he went to college in Dublin for a year but his boxing career came to an end at the age of
twenty-five
when he had his appendix removed. By the time he had
recovered
from the surgery, the boxing club was on summer break so John joined the newly formed Shotokan karate club in the town and never boxed again. From then on martial arts were to become the cornerstone of his life.

In 1987 the Westport Kyokushin karate club was founded – the first Irish Karate Kyokushinkai (IKK) club outside of the capital – and John was quick to join. He had made contact with (now) Shihan Kevin Callan of the IKK Dublin branch, who came down with some of the other members to help with training. John was delighted to be able to train in full-contact karate at last and, at the end of the first year, got his second kyu, later going on to become one of the first Kyokushin karate black belts outside Dublin along with his friends James O’Malley and Ger Dawson. Local interest in karate was growing and John and his two friends were not only training hard but teaching big groups of youngsters as well. In 1992 John set up dojos in Clifden and Letterfrack (County Galway), and he, James and Ger were also running successful summer camps in the Westport area and Connemara.

Brawn ran the family business until he was thirty, but after fifteen years he decided it was time to break out on his own. To earn a living he began to work on the doors of local pubs and clubs. He was getting more and more offers of door work and this led to him setting up his own security company – JB Security. He was regularly covering at least three nightclubs and seven pubs as well as festivals and race meetings. A year after getting his black belt, John became an instructor with the Association and Register of Self Protection Instructors and, besides teaching IKK, started training as well as employing doormen. In those years there was no formal training of any kind for the doors so he started his own programme and began giving courses on door security.

After reading Geoff Thompson’s book,
Watch My Back
, John realized that he had found the next step forward to develop his skills for working in the security industry. He travelled to England and over the course of a few years trained with Geoff Thompson and Peter Consterdine, joining the British Combat Association and even bringing Geoff and Peter over to Ireland to train the guys he was working with. John also studied close-quarter combat
techniques
with Marcus Wynne and Dennis Martin, which he says was a life-changing experiencing for him: “In one day I learned more than I had in over twenty years of traditional martial arts. He was using NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) to instil the techniques and I came away with a high level of skill. It was fantastic. There was a lot of edged weapons training and we were starting to come up against this more and more on the door so the relevancy was very high.”

The practical self-defence training made all the difference on the doors and his security company became highly regarded for its professionalism and service.

During the 1990s John completed about thirty courses in Britain, including Peter Consterdine’s Body Guarding Course, as well as his driving and surveillance courses, and Close Quarters Battle Training with Dennis Martin. Brawn incorporated all that he learned in
practical
self-defence into his work and his training courses for doormen. Currently, as well as the security training, John runs fitness and kick-boxing classes, gives private self-defence and kettlebell training, and has made three DVDs on power-punching.

Years of dedication and training have made him highly skilled and incredibly tough. Here’s a day in the life of the Irish hard man.

In John Brawn’s sixteen-year career as a doorman, one day stands out as the perfect illustration of his stature as one of the hardest men in Ireland.

The day started off with a trip to the next county to give a karate demonstration at the dojo he had set up. It was a great success and went down really well with the spectators. John was on top form and upped his game to break two one-inch roof tiles with a single punch. However, despite his conditioned knuckles, he came away from the event with an injured, swollen hand and had only a few hours before he was on duty at a well-known nightclub.

As Brawn arrived at the venue for work, he saw two guys arguing with one of his team on the door. To have people causing trouble early on in the night wasn’t unusual so John quickly manoeuvred himself past the men, noticing that one of them was already blind drunk and the other, was “nasty drunk”. As he was now standing closer to them than his colleague, he started to talk to them, taking on the “good cop” role to try and diffuse the situation. Generally an effective technique to avoid trouble, this night it wasn’t working. The two troublemakers still tried to push their way into the club, one using the body of his drunken mate almost as a riot shield. Both doormen were at a disadvantage where height was concerned and, thinking that John’s “nice” approach was a sign of weakness, the more dangerous of the two men pushed his friend into John and started raining blows down on him. No more Mr Nice Guy! Brawn grabbed his attacker by the front of the hair, leaving the other man for his partner, and intended to move him round to the side of the building. A thirty-foot drop around the corner meant an
instantaneous
change of plan so John quickly slammed the man on to the ground and gave him three or four rapid punches to the head, with a chop to the meridian line on the back as the
coup de grâce
– the would-be tough guy “lost all interest in fighting after that”,
remembers
John. Turning to help the other doorman, he saw that drunk number two was down but trying to get up. After such a start to the night John was in no mood to take anything from the second guy but, thankfully he says, his partner stopped him before he lost the plot altogether as he’d have “taken his head off!” The last the two doormen saw of the men was them crawling on their hands and knees twenty yards down the road and round a corner.

It was a quarter past eleven. John looked up and saw that there was a full moon and thought to himself, “This is going to be a long fucking night.” He told the other doorman that it was going to be a “shit-house” and laid out the plan – Martin (not his real name) would man the inside door, John would stay outside, and they would watch one another’s backs. The nightclub had hired only six doormen for the night (two of them Brawn describes as “toilet attendants” – likely to hide in the bathroom if a fight broke out!). Brawn would have brought more if he had known what the night had in store for them.

With the earlier karate demonstration keeping him busy, John had forgotten that in addition to the usual weekend revelries, the Irish soccer team had been playing that day and, unexpectedly, had lost to a much weaker team. This had meant that many of the punters out on the town had been in bad humour and, fuelled with drink, they were spoiling for a fight. Just to make matters worse, in a venue with a capacity of 650, complimentary passes had swelled the crowd to over 750 – basically, a recipe for trouble.

The club was filling up but the next thing John had to deal with was a couple coming up to him and asking him if he had seen a fight outside the club earlier. John said he hadn’t but they were insistent, saying that two of their friends were in hospital after being badly “beaten up”. As he was physically involved, Brawn could truthfully answer that he didn’t “see” a fight but that only served to enrage the man, who started screaming abuse, calling Brawn every name under the sun. Before anything could kick off, the door of the club burst open and a brawling fight spilled out from inside. John excused himself (in very impolite terms) and said he had to get to work. The doormen pulled the fighters out of the entrance and dumped them out on the street where they quickly lost interest in fighting. Quickly, the team went back inside and were met with what Brawn describes as a “scene from the Somme”. There was broken glass all over the floor, blood everywhere, people lay all round the place and there was an all-pervasive ugly mood in the air. And the night was only starting.

A man staggered towards John and Martin, blood streaming down his face from where he had been glassed in the toilets. He was taken to the first aid station for treatment and the team headed back into the mêlée to get those responsible and eject them from the club. From then on, until about three o’clock in the morning, Brawn spent the night fighting. He and his team were constantly moving through the crowd to where the latest fight had broken out, circling the protagonists, and then pushing, pulling and, if necessary, punching them through the room and outside. They worked in pairs, John and Martin targeting the ringleaders, watching each other’s backs. Brawn reckons he punched more people in that one night than the rest of his career on the doors. “Anything that came into your zone you punched it … elbowed, kneed it, whatever way it was. It was a fight for survival,” he recalls.

As the night drew to a close and the music was finishing, the crowd was still milling around on the glass-strewn dance-floor and finishing up their drinks at the bar counter and tables. Brawn was walking through the room, hoping that things would now quieten down, when he witnessed one of the worst acts of violence of the night. A man took a run at a girl and kicked her squarely between the legs, leaving her screaming in agony on the floor. John couldn’t believe his eyes but went instantly into action. He grabbed the man in a headlock but, unfortunately, he was so slick with sweat that the hold didn’t take. When one of his mates grabbed John’s arm, the man got out of Brawn’s grip and landed a head-butt on the side of his face. This is where all the training and experience came into play. Brawn wasn’t going to take any chances so he changed to a trachea hold, gripping tightly along the nerve pathways so that his opponent had to stop struggling or lose his windpipe. The girl was still screaming in pain and Brawn was in no mood to be gentle. Following a swift head-butt, he started towards the main door, knocking and bumping the assailant against all the stationary
furniture
they passed. He got him as far as the entrance, slammed him against the door and then outside, where he gave him six more head-butts. As the man was sliding to the ground, lapsing into unconsciousness, another doorman had to stop John before he found himself up on a murder charge!

Then all hell broke loose at the door. Somehow the team had to get the doors shut, and get everyone else who was fighting out and keep them out. This wasn’t easy because the door opened outwards which meant John had to lean out into a crowd that was punching, kicking and wrestling to grab the door and pull it closed. At the same time, the other doormen were pushing, punching and
manhandling
those fighting inside out through the same door. It was complete mayhem. At one stage Brawn remembers seeing something coming at him out of the corner of his eye. He instinctively ducked and felt a kick going along the side of his head. If he hadn’t moved he would have been seriously injured or even knocked unconscious. That would have been disastrous because once he was down he would have been used as “a can of coke”.

Finally, the door was closed with all the fighting now on the other side. Brawn turned round and lo and behold, there was the club manager! He didn’t get a chance to say a word. The danger and tension of the night had Brawn incensed; feeling as if he was a foot off the floor with adrenaline, he lambasted the manager for
overcrowding
, lack of sufficient doormen to control the crowd and goodness knows what else. John says he didn’t know what he looked like at that moment but he certainly felt like another person altogether.