FEATURED: Rising from Ash

1. Bellator 155 fight card
2. Straight Blast Gym of Montana
3. Spike TV

Hamilton Ash thought he was a pretty tough kid.

Raised in the border town of McAllen, Texas, Ash moved to Portland, Oregon as a teenager and began training with Rick Davison at the renowned Straight Blast Gym, dreaming of a career as a professional mixed martial arts fighter.

He was on his way as a youngster, too, winning five straight amateur fights, when he stepped into the cage with Jacob Morris at the Roseland Theater in Portland on May 2, 2009.

That’s when Jacob Morris broke Hamilton Ash’s jaw.

Serious injuries are hardly unusual in MMA, among the most brutal sports in the world. It’s been less than a month since Portuguese fighter Joao Carvalho died from injuries suffered in the cage in Dublin, Ireland, and the violence associated with the sport is no doubt part of the reason for its still-growing appeal.

But when angst-filled teenagers like Ash first decide to make professional fighting a career — much like boxers, football players and others who feel invincible — many do so without understanding the gravity of their decisions. Ash was no exception.

“I was so young, and when you’re young like that you don’t think about consequences, you just think about being the tough guy,” he said.

“Like what’s the worst that can happen? I’ll get knocked out? No. You could die … you could get your jaw broken. You could get paralyzed. There’s a lot of bad things that can and will happen to that one percent of people that don’t prepare themselves for that and I was that one percent.”

Ash, his jaw broken and his ego battered even worse, drifted after the fight with Morris. He drifted a long, long way from home.

A little more than a year after the injury, in 2010, the then 20-year-old Ash was in Iceland, working as a bouncer at a couple of Reykjavik nightclubs and helping run a tanning salon with his wife.

Ash still got in fights, although they didn’t have anything to do with a cage or a ring. He described himself and his fellow bouncers as “the worst best doormen”, who danced while they worked but weren’t shy about a little physical contact.

Ash’s wife, Rebekka, is a native of Iceland, although the two met in Portland. Without many options in the states, the pair moved, had a daughter in Reyjkavik and tried their best to find happiness, however fruitlessly.

“Living in Iceland was depressing,” Ash said. “I needed a change because it was starting to wear on our relationship.”

Change would finally come in the form of a familiar name. Travis Davison, Rick’s brother, was running a growing gym, Straight Blast Gym of Montana, and eventually Hamilton was given a path back: both stateside and to his still flickering passion.

“My wife, she forced me to seek the opportunity,” Ash said. “She was at the breaking point.

“She was like ‘we’re going to end in divorce’. I was so miserable. I was making everyone around me miserable.

“When the offer came from Travis that was a golden ticket.”

Ash has worked for Straight Blast Gym ever since, first as a coach with Travis in Kalispell and now as the head coach at the gym’s Whitefish location.

Somewhere along the way, Ash’s love for mixed martial arts fighting was rekindled, too, and the memory of his brutal defeat turned from fear to motivation.

“I was always thinking about fighting but never did anything about it,” he said.

It took more than five years for Ash to get back in the cage, despite the fact that he continued to train both in Iceland and in Kalispell. The memory of his broken jaw was overwhelming, and as Ash waited at the Hilton Garden Inn in Kalispell for his return bout, he was terrified.

“I was so scared to go out there,” he said. “After the fight, I went back stage and started balling. I was so scared.

“But you know, I went out there, I knocked this guy out in 21 seconds, made it look easy.”

And all of a sudden, Hamilton Ash, aspiring professional MMA fighter, was back.

“After that, there was really a shift in my attitude,” he continued. “Like, imagine you’re so scared to do something in your life that you just can’t stop thinking about but you’re too scared. Like you’re paralyzed in fear to do it but you just face it anyways and you do it. And you succeed.

“It was like, at that point I knew this is what I wanted to do. That’s it.”

In just 19 months since that knockout of Wes Ogan in an amateur bout, Ash has won five of six fights, including four straight first round stoppages as a professional. That most recent stretch has earned the 145-pounder the first major promotion of his career.

On May 20 in Boise, Idaho, Ash will fight Vince Morales on Bellator 155, a nationally televised card put on by the second-biggest MMA promoter in the world, Bellator. Only the Ultimate Fighting Championship is bigger.

The Ash-Morales fight is one of 13 total bouts on the card and will be broadcast live on www.SpikeTV.com. The main event will be featured on Spike, with an outside chance for Ash’s fight to be added to the televised card if the main events are quick bouts.

Morales brings a 3-1 record into the fight, and his lone loss was to another Straight Blast Gym trainee, Josh Wick, by arm bar in September. Morales is about four inches shorter than Ash, standing 5-foot-6, but brings a strong pedigree as a wrestler and striker.

For Travis Davison, who is now not only Ash’s boss but also his manager and promoter, Ash’s skill in Brazilian jiu jitsu, the kind taught at Straight Blast Gym, is his fighter’s biggest advantage.

“Vince (Morales) knows, everybody knows, that on the ground it’s not even a contest,” Davison said. “The fight hits the ground it’s kind of a no-brainer at that point. It really becomes academic … Hamilton’s jiu jitsu is head and shoulders above not just (Morales) but probably the majority of people at the highest level.”

Davison, too, has another trick up his sleeve. He’s paired Ash with Kalispell chiropractor Kevin Wilmot, who was an All-American wrestler at the University of Wisconsin. Wilmot and Ash have been working one-on-one to make major improvements to Ash’s wrestling repertoire.

“Hamilton’s wrestling is going to be on par with Vince’s as well and I think that Vince is going to be surprised,” Davison added. “The only place (Morales) thinks he has an advantage would be on the feet and I think he’s going to find out that’s not the case either.

“I think if Hamilton comes out, gets in his face, uses his range and is aggressive, Vince will turn into a wrestler which is a mistake because he’ll probably get outwrestled. If by some miracle he puts Hamilton on the ground he’ll get submitted.

“I think first round would be my prediction. That would make five in a row.”

Ash was no less modest.

“That sounds pretty accurate to me,” he chirped.

The hope now for Ash is that an impressive performance in front of Bellator representatives can springboard him even further in his career.

Ash, who is 26, is older than most fighters with his experience as a result of his five-year hiatus from the sport, but the father of two has gained a lifetime of wisdom over the last quarter century of twists and turns and is once again dreaming big.

“I want to be a champion,” Ash said. “Every time I fight, I believe in myself a little bit more.

“Being a champion,” he said with a pause. “I’ve never out and said that until recently because I didn’t know that I could. I never had that self belief from the get-go. I’ve learned, I’ve trained myself and I’ve had help training myself to become that way.”

But does Hamilton Ash know he can be a champion now?

“Oh yeah, I know I can. For sure. There’s no doubt.”