UnderGround Forum >> attn: mmaguy30 - Re: Mark Bailey the Fake Fighter

In Bailey's autobiography, he describes a childhood of abuse and deprivation, which ended at the age of sixteen when he left home to begin his fighting career. He began training shooto in Japan at the age of nineteen. His career in underground fighting continued until some point after his mid-twenties, at which point he began to deal drugs as a way of making more money than he could at fighting. Eventually he was arrested and convicted of dealing drugs. When he finished serving his sentence, he found that he had been stripped of his underground rankings and had to start over.

Mark Bailey resides in Gwinnett County, Georgia, which makes criminal records available online to the public. Bailey's first recorded offense was in 1980, when he was a codefendant in a criminal case [...]. Since he was born in 1961, he would have been nineteen at the time. According to his autobiography, he had been out of the country between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. The court record invalidates this claim, and casts his shootfighting career into doubt.

The claim was impossible in any case. Shooto [...] was not formed until 1985, and it was a sporting organization, not a style of fighting. Even if Bailey trained specifically for shooto events, he could not have started in 1980 or 1981, as he had claimed.

Bailey's claimed twenty-seven titles in the "World Fighting Championship" are also impossible to verify. The only known organization to use that name is the Mixed Martial Arts World Fighting Championship, which held its first championship match in 2007. At this writing, MMAWFC has held only eight championship tournaments, none of them in Japan. They do not list Bailey as a fighter in their organization.

Since he claims that these fights were underground, it is difficult to falsify the claim entirely. However, why would such an organization keep track of titles, much less take them away when a champion goes to prison? And if they took the titles away, how can he still claim them?

He does not provide enough detail in any of his other claims to check them. In his entire autobiography he never gives a full name for one instructor, one opponent, or one fellow inmate. He does not name the martial arts schools he attended, he never specifies absolute dates for events, and he does not say what seven martial arts he holds black belts in. Even his mother, father, and brothers remain nameless.

The reader may draw their own conclusions.

What a tale! This man deserves to be spoken in the same breath as Bruce Lee and Helio Gracie. A man who won enough fights to essentially mean he fought over 5 times a day for years of his life, Mark Bailey's story is incredible. This fella went over seas, where there is no record keeping, no proof of existence, and no documentation of any fights occurring whatsoever. But wow, to win them ALL! What a hero to us all. He even beat fighters whose names sound an awful lot like UFC Hall of Famers such as Kint Shamrock and Roy Gracie (no, I'm seriously not making this up. This was really in the book.) Not only that, but HE WAS A NAVY SEAL TOO! They don't have any record of him as a member of the US Armed Forces, but that's only because he was part of a super secret sect of the military that not even the military knew about! A true hero in almost every way! You just can't make this stuff up!

Except that you can. This story is unreal. It is something that even the makers of C rate video games would never pick up. Unfortunately for Mark Bailey, the story is in fact fake. All of it. The guy made up all of this stuff and actually expects people to believe him too, which is really what makes it so funny. If you are looking for something to read and nudge your buddy about saying "Check this out, he KILLED almost 100 people with his bare hands, won 5 shoot fight FOTY awards, and we get to read about it! How lucky are we?!?!?!" then you should definitely buy this book. The shipping costs more than the book itself, but let me tell you, it is so worth it. It's great in the same sense that listening to a kid tell absolutely bogus and transparent lies is really great too. If you actually search Mark Bailey on YouTube, you can watch him fight in a no-name production in Alabama. Boy is he something. This is one of the best unintentionally funny books on the market, and it is a can't miss stocking-stuffer for any fighter or fan of the sport! And as for your loved ones fighting to protect our country, I really would not show them this. They would probably not find posing as a soldier and lying about military service to be so funny as fighters find it when people say they're good but aren't.

Reviews of his book.