Hominick’s Ultimate Homecoming

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St. Pierre may have gotten higher billing at UCC 10, but the young striker was seen by promoter Stephane Patry -- who also promoted Hominick in the TKO organization -- as an equally bright star.

“Honestly, Mark meant everything to TKO,” Patry says. “Mark was by far the most exciting fighter in the history of the UCC and TKO. If you ever see a boring Mark Hominick fight, go for a checkup, because he is never boring. Even if you put him against a boring fighter, he’ll find a way to make it exciting. It’s his time now. It’s his time to shine, and it’s his time to prove what he was thinking and what I was seeing back when he was our champion.”

St Pierre, it turned out, took a cue from Hominick in those formative days on the Canadian MMA scene. Patry remembered Hominick, a university business major with a plan to work for his father’s sales company, showing up to his first pro fight in a suit.

“Do you know when GSP starting wearing his suits at press conferences? After he saw Mark Hominick do it,” Patry says. “The next press conference, St. Pierre was wearing a suit, telling the other guys [on his team], ‘We should always wear a suit.’”

At that stage of his life, Hominick had no choice but to be businesslike in his approach. His fight career was blossoming while he was pursuing his business degree, and he did not want to half-ass either pursuit. So, he would get up at 5:30 a.m. to train at a boxing club in Windsor, go to class and study in the afternoon, rest, train again at 6 p.m., study more, sleep and do it again the next day. On the weekends, he hopped a bus home to train with Tompkins.

“It was crazy. Looking back, I don’t know how I made it through those four years,” he says. “This training camp has been very similar to that. I’m training for this huge fight, the biggest fight of my life. All the extra media demands have been going on. My wife’s due within five days of the fight. It’s just one of those times where there’s no down time. Everything is on the schedule. Nothing can be missed and nothing can be put aside. I like being structured like that, and I feel I perform best on that.”

Tompkins, who came to Ontario from Las Vegas for Hominick’s latest training camp so Hominick could keep his domestic responsibilities, is confident that his longtime charge is on point for Aldo.

If it were a boxing match, Tompkins claims, analysts’ view of the fight would be speed versus power.

“I believe Mark has the fastest hands in the sport,” Tompkins says. “You could maybe say Vitor Belfort, but you’d have to go to Vitor back when he was 19 years old. If anything, [Hominick] has gotten more precise with his speed. Mark probably throws six punches to Aldo’s two, but Aldo’s punches are very dangerous because he throws with power.”

Hominick believes he has built off of each of his losses, particularly his swift submission defeat to Josh Gripsi in February 2008, which he followed with his current five-fight win streak. The key, he says, was in concerning himself less with defending his opponents’ strengths and more with visualizing what he was going to do in a fight.

“This is the best, physically and mentally, that I’ve ever been,” Hominick says. “I just needed the string of wins to remind people. I’ve been fighting since 2002, professionally, and I just think this is my time.”

Hominick and his wife, whom he met in high school, bought a house in Thamesford last year and are expecting their daughter to be born within a week of the fight. His father passed away four and a half years ago after a battle with cancer. His mother is ready to retire from her job at the hospital this year and lives around the corner with Hominick’s grandmother. His older sister still lives in Thamesford. He opened a gym, Adrenaline Training Center, in nearby London with Chris Horodecki and Sam Stout.

Now 28, Hominick is taking the helm on the home front, where he scrapped in street hockey, fell in love with MMA and defied the odds as a small kid in a developing sport.

He has earned many more accolades than he could have expected to back when he was sitting in university lecture halls with marks on his face from the past weekend’s fight.

To date, it has been all scrapping and hard work and perseverance for Hominick. But the beauty, the poetry, comes in the Joe Carter moment, when Mark Hominick enters what used to be SkyDome, 90 minutes from his home, with much more than just his individual aspirations riding on the outcome.

“I can say whatever I want. I’ve got to go out and prove it; that’s it,” Hominick says. “I know what I’m capable of doing.”