We did that all day, six days a week. On Sunday, the young boys slept. They didn’t go out, or hang out, or visit their families. They stayed in bed. I was left on my own.
There wasn’t really anyone to hang out with other than the young boys. I couldn’t talk to them anyway. English is the second language in much of Japan, but these were rural country boys who hadn’t had much schooling. None of them spoke English at all. Funaki and Ito spoke just a little. It was really lonely for me. I tried to learn Japanese for the first few weeks, but it was too difficult. Japanese is one of the toughest languages out there to learn.
It was weird. I had been in prison only eight months earlier, but this made me feel more alone and isolated. In prison, at least there were people to talk to. Here, I felt like I was totally alone.
So I got into the habit of borrowing a bicycle on Sundays and pedaling down to the Shin-Yokohama train station. I’d park the bike and go hang out inside. If I saw anybody who looked like they spoke English, I’d say hello. I tried to make friends that way. If I saw a white person, I’d say, “Hey! How’s it going?” I didn’t make too many friends that way.
There was partying at the dojo, but I wasn’t really part of that. I was still in that weird class status where no one really knew who I was, so everyone deferred to me as a higher class. I would have to speak up if I wanted something. The fighters would all drink heavily after a fight. The young boys weren’t allowed to drink, and the rules in the dojo were very strict. No one broke the rules if they wanted to stay. One kid told someone no one day during training. It was all very quiet and subtle, but two hours later his family arrived to pick him up, and no one ever saw him again. There was no sneaky drinking or drugging there, like there had been at the group homes where I’d lived.
But in the Japanese culture you are not allowed to refuse a drink. So after the fights it was a tradition for the fighters to get the young boys drunk. Then the young boys would screw around and act like idiots. One of them fell off a beam one night, broke his neck, and died. After that, they hung his picture in the hall, and we bowed to him, too, every day when we began our training.
The other difference between my life in Japan and my life in prison is that in prison you always know what’s going to happen next. In Japan, I had no idea where anything was going. I was just training. I didn’t know the plan. It was just one day to the next, training hard without any idea of what I was training for.
Then, after several months of training, I was told to prepare for my first fight. It was scheduled for December 18, 1994. I didn’t know who I was going to fight, but I was told to get ready. We traveled to Tokyo. A little while before the fight they told me I was going to go up against a Dutch guy named Bas Rutten. This was insane. Bas Rutten was one of the top fighters in the world at that time. He was a veteran, six or seven years older than me. He was also a lot bigger than me—six foot one and about 205 pounds to my slimmed-down five foot ten and 185 pounds. I had basically no chance of beating him. Bas was favored to win the whole tournament. It was my first fight! I was just the appetizer portion. I was sure I was going to get killed.
It was supposed to be a ten-minute match. I was wearing black. He was wearing red. I had hair. He was bald. My brother Ken had come in from Lodi, to fight and to watch me fight. Funaki was there, along with all the other Pancrase guys. This was a tournament fight to crown the first Pancrase champion and bring some credibility to the year-old league. I was making my big debut.
We came out to the ring. I was completely scared. I could feel the lights in the building like electricity running through me. Then the referee shouted, “Fight!” The bell rang. The crowd started screaming, mostly in Japanese, except for some American who kept yelling, “Punch his head!”
I felt his strength, right away—this superhuman, experienced strength. He was very muscular and wiry, and his muscles were incredibly dense. Mine aren’t like that. When I get big, I get these full, perfect muscles, which are very good for fast reactions and fast recovery. They’re very elastic, so I don’t get many injuries. But they’re not that strong. They don’t have that density and that super strength. Bas’s strength, compared to mine, was enormous. When I hit him I felt how strong his body was. So I knew he was going to hurt me. I knew he was going to win. I was afraid it was going to be serious—I was afraid I was actually going to die. He seemed really dangerous to me. Then he hit me really hard five or six times and I was sure of it.
Because of that, I fought like a crazy person. I had nothing to lose. I didn’t pace myself. I threw everything I had, just to try to keep him from murdering me. But first he had to mess me up some. Right at the start of the fight, he got me with a front kick to the face and broke my nose. He got me right on the tip of it with his shoe and snapped the cartilage.
My plan had been to get him on the ground. I tried really hard to do that, but once I got him down, it didn’t work right away. He threw a front choke on me and said, “Aha! I’ve got you!” But I could feel myself slipping out of the choke before he was finished saying it. I snapped free and we grappled. A minute or so later, I got him in a headlock. He started saying, over and over again, in his heavy Dutch accent, “That will not work. I am so strong.”
He wasn’t actually talking to me; he was talking to himself. He was trying to pump himself up. I thought, “OK, this guy’s crazy.” That made me fight harder—not better, but harder. I kept taking him down, and taking the better position. The next few minutes happened like that. They rang the bell again and suddenly it was over.
I went to my corner. Ken said, “OK. You did good.” Good? I was just happy he hadn’t killed me. I said, “He broke my nose!”
Then the decision came down. I had won.
It was a huge upset. I wasn’t supposed to win. I was just the bag boy. I was the guy who carried everyone’s equipment, or the warm-up you beat on while you got ready for your real fight. People knew I was Ken’s brother, but other than that I was relatively unknown. It was a huge victory.
In those days, everyone on the card was scheduled for several fights. My second one was with a guy named Manabu Yamada. It was supposed to be a twenty-minute match, but it was over in about eight. He got me with a leg lock and finished me. Then he went into the finals and fought against Ken and lost. Ken was named first champion of Pancrase.
It didn’t matter to me that I didn’t win my second match. I was on the map. I had fought my first fight, and I had won. I became an instant superstar in Japan.
We all went out that night to the Roppongi section of Tokyo— Bas and me and all the other fighters—and drank like fish. We went all night long. That was the tradition. In Japan, after a fight, you drink. The moment the training is over, you celebrate. I had been doing nothing but training for months and months—no drinking, no smoking, nothing but hard training. Now the event sponsor took us all out for an evening on the town. We sang karaoke and drank gallons of whiskey.
I became friends with Bas that night. I would make a lot of friends that way, bonding after a fight. That’s a human tradition. Whenever two people share a stressful event, it brings them together. It gives them something relevant to share.
I was just blown away. The whole experience was huge for me. Training in Japan, fighting in Japan, winning my first fight were all huge. Just being in Japan would have been the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. I was a small-town kid. I’d never been anywhere in my whole life. Travel, to me, meant getting into trouble and going to a new group home. Taking a trip meant being in handcuffs, riding on a bus, going from one jail to another. So this was gigantic.
I was on top of the world. I was blown away for weeks by the experience. I got my paycheck, and I went home with $1,800 in my pocket. To me, that was a fortune. I was rich! But when I got back to the United States in December, I learned the IRS had put a lien on my wages. I owed $4,000 in back child support, so I had to work out a payment plan for that debt. I didn’t get all the money. But I was now a professio
nal fighter.
7
PANCRASE AND THE ROOTS OF MMA
After my first victory in Tokyo, I was placed on the Pancrase circuit. The fighters were all scheduled to fight every six to eight weeks. Fighting became my life. I’d stay in Lodi, living at Ken’s house, training at the Lion’s Den. Then I’d go back to the dojo in Tokyo, work out for two or three days to break the horrible jetlag, and prepare to fight. Afterward, I’d come back to Lodi. After a few months, I moved out of Ken’s house and moved in with another fighter, Jason DeLucia.
It was a good time. I felt like I had arrived. I was part of something: working with Ken, training at the Lion’s Den, beginning to train other fighters there, too.
Bob Shamrock was proud of me. He asked me if, like Ken, I wanted to become his adopted son. I was humbled and flattered by that and I said yes. We did the paperwork and I officially changed my name from Frank Juarez to Frank Shamrock. I got a new birth certificate that lists Robert Conrad Shamrock as my father. The line that reads MOTHER is blank.
The Pancrase people gave me a contract. Each month, they’d put $5,000 in my new bank account. I got a credit card. This was the first time I’d had anything like that. I bought a car. I started to realize this was how people actually lived. This was what people do. I had been mowing lawns and doing odd jobs and stealing things since I was nine years old. But this was the first time I actually had money in my pocket and money in the bank. I began to think this could be an actual job for me, a career.
But there were parts of the job I really didn’t like. Weird as it is to say it, the thought of hurting other people as part of my job seemed bad to me. For the first ten fights or so, I mostly worried that I was going to get killed. But after that I mostly worried that I was going to kill someone else. I was really afraid I was going to hurt someone. I think it was because I had come from a home of physical abuse, and I viewed anything physical toward another person as violence. Maybe I was afraid of that kind of power. Anyway, in some fights, I could feel myself pulling back.
In the Pancrase organization, I was among real martial artists. It was an art and a sport. There were a lot of official rules, but also a lot of things you just didn’t do. You could legally hit a guy when he was on the ground, but you didn’t. It was not cool.
Maybe because the sport was so small, I knew everyone I was ever going to fight. If I fought a guy tonight, I was going to fight him again in six weeks. So we all followed these unspoken rules. We beat the shit out of each other, but we didn’t want to injure each other. There was more honor and respect in it than that.
We fought all over Japan. The touring circuit took us everywhere from Kobe to Sapporo. We mostly fought in ten-thousand-seat arenas. Some venues were as small as two thousand seats. Some were as large as fifteen thousand. We played Korakuen Hall in Tokyo because that’s where all the wrestling and boxing events in Tokyo are held. We played NK Hall, near Tokyo Disneyland. After an earthquake in Kobe, the whole city had toppled over except for this brand-new shopping mall. So we came down the escalators and held our fights right in the mall.
We were treated like royalty, like rock stars. We were modern samurai. I was a big celebrity—over there. At home, I spent all my time training hard in a sport that no one knew and no one really wanted to see. But I’d go back to Japan, and we were big and everyone knew us. They respected us. Everyone knew that pro wrestling was fake. We were something new, this new kind of hybrid fighters, and we were famous.
I missed a lot because I didn’t speak Japanese and I didn’t really get all the cultural cues. Girls would come up to me, after fights or in the street, and give me their business cards. I thought that was a little weird. Then a friend of mind looked at the card and said, “This isn’t a business card. It’s a personal card. That means she wants to spent personal time with you.” After that, I was a young man on a mission to meet as many women as possible. I had always been the goofy, out-of-place kid who never knew anyone at the party. Now I was the star. I really enjoyed it. Being with American girls I had felt all these layers of weirdness and guilt and shame. That wasn’t the case with the Japanese girls I met. They were eager to come over and take care of me and cook me noodles and sleep on the floor while I slept in the bed. They viewed their role in the relationship very differently than American girls. They’d buy me things. I had a whole bunch of Japanese women fans who bought me gifts— T-shirts and underwear and all kinds of weird stuff.
Back in Lodi, life wasn’t that colorful. I was training hard and beginning to train other guys. I always read a lot. I became obsessed with The Book of Five Rings, which is an ancient Japanese book about martial arts. It is basically a textbook on how to live the simple samurai life. The writer was a Japanese samurai warrior from the 1600s, and the book has lessons about how to live, how to train, how to fight, and how to win.
But I was also reading books about serial killers. I got kind of obsessed about those—the more vicious, the better. I’m not sure what that was about. On some level, maybe it made me feel better about what I was doing. I still hadn’t dealt with the whole business of hurting people for a living. It was hurting me, to be hurting people. So the books made me feel like less of a monster. I mean, at least I wasn’t cutting people into pieces, filleting their faces, or hanging them off a fence.
Meanwhile, I was learning how to live. That was my real education. I’d read these books and exhaust my body and learn from my own mistakes. I’d train all day, go out and drink all night, and then get my butt kicked bad the next day. Lesson: I better not drink all night if I don’t want to get my butt kicked. That was my whole education: screw up, get hurt, learn a lesson, do something different the next time.
My second fight was a Pancrase event in Nagoya, Japan. It was only about a month after my first fight. I fought Katsuomi Inagaki and won with a submission hold after six minutes. Two months later, I fought again, in Yokohama, against Masakatsu Funaki. I lost. Funaki was the big cheese in our dojo. He was like the Ken Shamrock of Japan—an older guy, very tough, very respected. He was the guy who had trained Ken. He was a cofounder of Pancrase. He was the first man who gave me some idea of the spiritual aspect of martial arts. So it was to be expected that he beat me.
But a month after that I fought again, in Nagoya, against Minoru Suzuki. I beat him. He was another cofounder of Pancrase. He had been named second king of Pancrase, which was the equivalent of champion. (Ken was the first king, and Suzuki had beaten Ken and taken the crown a year before this. A month after I beat Suzuki, he beat Ken again.) It was a huge victory.
I fought six more times that year—eleven fights in one calendar year! One of them was a rematch with Bas Rutten. A few things had changed since our first fight. I had gotten a little complacent about training. You see that happen with fighters. After they win a few fights, they want to train a bit less. In my case, I had met a really pretty girl. I started seeing her regularly whenever I was in Japan for a fight.
In the beginning, I was very serious about training. I wouldn’t do anything before a fight. But after a while it got to where I’d even go over to Japan a little early—not for extra training, but so I could start partying with my girlfriend in Japan. I had always smoked pot but I started smoking hash a lot in those days, mainly because it was the only hard drug that you could buy in the Japanese subways. And I was drinking quite a bit. I remember thinking one night, “Hey, you gotta fight tomorrow!” I had another glass of wine and said, “Ah, you’ll be fine.”
The second fight with Bas was in Tokyo, about six months after I beat him. I felt pretty comfortable going in. I was a superstar! But I realized after about five minutes that I was in trouble. My strategy was to get him down—Bas is from Holland, and those guys are all really good strikers—and finish him on the ground. But he was even stronger than I remembered him being, and he had much better conditioning. I was getting tired, and I could see he wasn’t. I realized I didn’t have the gas to finish the fight. I knew he was going to kick my
ass unless I figured out a strategy to win.
The takedown strategy didn’t work. He anticipated it, and I hadn’t really developed my takedown skills yet. I attempted something, and he saw it coming, and we literally flew out of the ring, between the ropes and into the first row.
I whacked my head. I was dazed. There was no way I was going to be able to beat him. So I went to Plan B. I would get him mad and make him hit me in the face.
You get points against you in Pancrase for various things. I had one against me for getting knocked down early in the fight. I figured if I could get Bas mad at me and get him to lose his temper, he’d forget himself and make a fist and punch me with it. Then he’d lose a point for hitting me in the face. I knew I could survive that; there wasn’t much time left. It was a fifteen-minute fight. I knew I could take whatever he could dish out for the last few minutes.
As soon as he got me into the next hold, I started making these clown faces at him. I stuck my tongue out at him. I called him names. And it worked. He went insane. He’s a very emotional fighter to start with. He has a problem with his temper. At that time he always had a big R written on his hand before the fight. The R was for relax, because he’d get all tense and angry and use his energy the wrong way. That’s why I knew I could make fun of him and get him to lose his temper. I had asked him about the R, so I knew.
He lost his temper, and he started bashing me in the face with his palm, totally legal. He hit me a bunch of times. It was a bad strategy, but it worked and he got pissed and closed his punch. I used my face as a battering ram against his fist and he got a warning and lost a point for the illegal strike. We got to the cards. It was a split decision. He got the point for the knockdown. I got the points for him hitting me in the face.
A smarter fighter would have said, “Dude, you can’t use your face like that.” Other people got what I was doing, but they thought it just wasn’t cool to make fun of someone. But I had to do something. I knew I couldn’t beat him down. I wasn’t going to just let him beat me down. So I found some psychology and made a little tweak.
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