Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  I learned the same lesson about conditioning when I was fighting Allan Goes, a Brazilian fighter. We didn’t know anything about Brazilian fighters except they had some sort of grappling style. Because we were Pancrase and we were fighting and training in the Japanese tradition, we didn’t worry much about anyone from outside the system. Any time you were scheduled to fight someone who wasn’t Japanese, you figured it was going to be an easy month. You didn’t train that hard.

  It was Allan’s first professional fight in a ring, but he had fought in a lot of street fights and challenge matches in Brazil—fights where you show up to another school and duke it out with the top guy. I was hanging out, I was goofing around. I was screwing up in every way possible. I thought I had nothing to worry about.

  When the match started, Goes threw me on the ground and kicked the shit out of me. It was going to be a little harder than I had thought. I managed to get away from him and we grappled. When he was on my back he fishhooked my eyeball—which was really illegal, but the referee couldn’t see it. He used that to put me in a rear naked choke. It was scary and not at all part of my plan for the fight. Somehow, before I went to sleep, I got to the rope and escaped. We started in again. I got him in a leg hold. I thought he’d quit, but he didn’t. So I pressed it. I turned his ankle. I could feel all the tendons rip. The pain must have been unbearable. But he broke free somehow and got to the rope.

  It turned out I had broken his leg. The fight went to the cards and ended in a draw.

  My record was OK, but I wasn’t learning the lessons I should have been learning. I fought Bas again a third time and lost about ten minutes into the fight. I got really tired. I had tried to get him on the ground, and failed. My only skill set in those days was on the ground, and he figured out ways to stop me from getting him down. I was getting desperate, so I tried a shoot to his knee. Somehow I got my forehead involved, and I hit his knee really hard with my eyebrow. It opened up a cut and the fight was ruled a TKO. It was a fluke, but honestly I was pretty tired, and I wasn’t going to make it. He beat on me pretty bad in that fight, and I would have had a hard time beating him.

  I had an easier time with a few other fights. I had a second match against Funaki, the master of Pancrase. I got him into the same hold he had beaten me with, a toehold, about ten minutes into the fight. I got a win by submission. There was no way, though, that I beat him. I couldn’t have comprehended that at the time. I was fighting my ass off. I was fighting for my life. But I didn’t really know much about fighting. I did not understand that someone else’s skill level could be so high that they could let me win without me knowing it. Later, when my skill level was as high as that, I knew something fishy had happened. I think Funaki let me get him into that hold and let me beat him.

  Pancrase was still new. The founders knew they had to have more drama. They had to bring up the young fighters, and they had to have compelling matches. They knew it was important for young Frank to win a fight or two and be seen as a challenge to the old men. I think it’s possible that Suzuki put me over, too. I beat him twice, once on strikes and once on a knee bar. I was named king of Pancrase after the second one. But maybe he let me win.

  I had already declared that I would beat everybody. My first interview with a sports reporter was around that time, in 1995. I told him I was going to be king of Pancrase, just like Ken had been. He asked me about the no-holds-barred (NHB) fighting (the original name for MMA and UFC) that was just starting to take place. I said there was no way I was going to do any of that stuff. It was way too violent and way too crazy and way too dangerous for me.

  I went on to fight other fights with Pancrase, all over Japan. I beat Takafumi Ito, Ryushi Yanagisawa, and Osami Shibuya—all guys I had trained with at the Yokohama dojo.

  The Shibuya fight had one weird element to it. He was the latest big thing at the time in Japan. He was experimenting with steroids, I think. He had muscles growing out of his ears. I knew he didn’t really know how to fight, but he was incredibly strong. I had moved into this lazy, partying stage of my Japanese experience. I had fought six or eight fights. I was doing well. So I was screwing around. I wasn’t training so hard. I wasn’t preparing so well. I went into the fight with Shibuya really dehydrated. The fight went on longer than I expected and the dehydration caught up with me. I was dry. I couldn’t swallow. I felt like I was dying of thirst. All I could think about was getting something to drink. I was getting tired, grappling with this big steroid-pumped guy. I couldn’t finish him.

  Then I suddenly saw that he was wet. He was all sweaty. We were down on the floor and I was hanging onto him for dear life. There were these big golden drops of sweat on his neck, these glorious big drops of water. So I just licked them off his skin. I sucked those drops down. It worked. I got the hydration I needed. Three minutes later I got him into a shoulder lock and won the fight. I don’t think he ever knew what I did. I didn’t tell him. It seemed like the kind of thing you should keep to yourself. But I figure, where there’s a will, there’s a way. That’s how you can tell if a guy really wants to win a fight. Will he do anything? Lick the sweat off some guy’s neck?

  I fought some other guys, too. I beat an American fighter, Vernon White, who was recruited into Pancrase by Ken a couple of years before me and who went on to have a long career. He was the first person I fought who was also a training partner. Then I threw my forehead into Bas Rutten’s kneecap and lost the king of Pancrase title.

  Things back home were weird. Ken had lost his king of Pancrase title to Suzuki a couple of years earlier. He was becoming disenchanted with the Pancrase organization. They wanted him to “lose” his title to another fighter so that if he lost in the UFC it wouldn’t make Pancrase look like the weaker league. He had fought in a few Ultimate Fighting Championships, going back to 1993 and the first-ever UFC events. The Brazilian Royce Gracie beat him by submission in less than a minute in their first fight, setting up a Gracie-Shamrock rivalry that continues to this day. By 1996, he had stopped fighting for Pancrase altogether. A little while later he signed a contact with World Wrestling Entertainment.

  But a lot of his Lion’s Den fighters were still Pancrase guys, and someone had to train them. This increasingly became my responsibility. The master plan seemed to be that Ken would go do his thing and I would stay home and take care of the business. I was a good teacher, but I didn’t really know what I was doing yet. The sport was evolving. We had all these guys who had been good at one discipline—who were good boxers or good wrestlers—and were now trying to become mixed martial artists. No one had taught me how to do that or how to teach that. I only knew what ten fights and a lot of mistakes had taught me. But I was personable, and I could sign people up for classes, and I took the job seriously. The Lion’s Den was successful. We had a strong fighting camp, with some amazing guys fighting with us—Jerry Bohlander, Guy Mezger, Tre Telligman, Jason DeLucia, Mickey Burnett. Those were some very tough young guys.

  I wasn’t teaching them the way Ken had. I didn’t have my thumb on them. His system was: if you were breaking the rules, or not respecting the system, he’d bring you in, tell you what you had done wrong, and then make you get in the ring with him. Then he’d beat the shit out of you. You trained hard out of fear, out of the knowledge that he would beat the shit out of you if you missed a training session or showed up late.

  I was a little subtler. If a guy was screwing up, I’d get him in the ring and wrestle with him and tire him out and make him keep going until he puked, and then make him go some more. If a guy showed up late, I’d say, “Hey, you’re ten minutes late.” Then I’d let him warm up and get him into the ring. Thirty minutes later, when he’s vomiting and bleeding and about to pass out, I’d say, “Take a break. And by the way, we are never late to class.”

  After a while, I stopped doing even that with most of the guys. They were professional fighters. This was what they were doing for a living. They were adults. My attitude was, you’re a pro. I’ll help you,
and good luck to you, but I’m not going to keep my foot on your neck.

  I was a little distracted. I had met a woman, and we had gotten pretty serious. Her name was Angelina Brown. We met in Hawaii, when I was there working as the trainer for some of Ken’s Lion’s Den team. We were in Waikiki because some of the guys were fighting in a Super Brawl match. I went to work out in a Gold’s Gym while the fighters were cutting weight, and that’s where we met.

  She was super athletic and really good-looking. She had just graduated from UCLA with a degree in marketing and had gone to Hawaii to work with T. Jay Thompson, the promoter of the Super Brawl fights.

  I was already seeing someone else, a former Miss Teenage Hawaii named Angel. She had been my sort of unofficial Hawaiian girlfriend; I saw her whenever I was over there. But I met Angelina and that changed. Angel was out. Angelina was in.

  In January 1997 I was scheduled to fight John Lober. I had trained a bunch of guys for Super Brawl fights, but now I was getting my shot. Ken or Bob, with their Super Brawl relationships, had arranged the fight. I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it or prepare for it. It just sort of came up. I had seen Lober fight a few times. He was known as John “the Machine” Lober because he had a reputation for being able to take a tremendous beating and just keep plowing forward like some kind of robot. He could just keep going. But he didn’t scare me. I figured that with my submission holds I could annihilate him. I’d get him down, get him in a hold, and he wouldn’t get up. I saw the whole thing play out in my mind. I trained medium hard. I wasn’t worried. I was on the beer and oatmeal diet, which meant I was drinking more and eating more than usual. I got really big and puffy looking, but it made me sort of slow and sloppy. I weighed two hundred pounds, but physically I wasn’t ready. Mentally, I was OK but not great. I had lost my last two Pancrase fights, to Yuki Kondo and Kiuma Koniuka. That part of my life seemed to be ending. I didn’t see any future in Pancrase anymore—the company treated me differently after Ken left for the UFC. But my relationship with Angelina was going strong. She liked the fighter’s life, or at least she liked being the fighter’s girlfriend. She seemed really into it. She liked being in the limelight, or at least near it.

  The Lober fight was held in Honolulu. It was a straight-time fight, one round, thirty minutes, no holds barred—very different from what I’d been doing. For one thing, there was more striking and boxing. There was no rule about closed-fist hitting to the face. I hadn’t had too much experience with that kind of fighting. I didn’t think it would be any big deal, though. I’d been hit in the face before. I’d been kicked in the face. I’d had my nose broken a couple of times.

  John was a stocky white guy with a shaved head and a goatee, with “Machine” tattooed on his stomach. He had just come off a draw against Igor Zinoviev, who was very tough. I should have been more scared than I was. But I had confidence. I came out strong. For the first three minutes, I kicked his ass. I had him on the ground in the first ten seconds, and I held him there a long time. I had him pinned, and he was struggling, and I was head-butting him hard. I landed a heel to his face that must have hurt.

  Then I got tired. My plan wasn’t working. It was taking too long to work. I had him in a submission hold, and he was supposed to give up, but he didn’t give up. I realized he was not a sportsman. This wasn’t Pancrase. I was going to have to do something serious, like break his arm or leg. So I did. I broke his ankle. I hit him so hard that I knocked out two of his teeth. But it hardly even slowed him down. He wasn’t going to give up. His tooth was literally on the mat, and at one point he took out his mouthpiece, threw the other tooth into the crowd, and went back to fighting! He must have been on drugs. It was insane for him to keep going.

  After three minutes of totally dominating him, I was so tired I couldn’t get my hands up. He started beating on me, and he kept beating on me for the next twenty-seven minutes. He hit me with a left jab that knocked me down, and then he hit me hard with his right a bunch of times. He knocked me down again with a left. He used my head like a punching bag.

  We went the whole distance. Then the judges conferred. When they were done talking it over, I had lost by a split decision. Two of the judges were jujitsu guys, and they’d called it for Lober. I wasn’t all that surprised. I was disappointed, but I was already disappointed by the way I’d fought. I had wanted to finish him, and I thought I was going to. The judges weren’t wrong. If I’d been judging the fight, I’d have gone that way, too.

  Lober was smiling, even though his front teeth were gone.

  Angelina didn’t seem upset that I was all beat up and my face was all mushy. But I was. I felt humiliated and embarrassed. Plus there was the money. I had been on salary with the Pancrase organization, so a victory didn’t mean getting paid more. But this was different now that I was a prizefighter. I got $10,000 for fighting, but I would have gotten another $10,000 for winning. At that time in my life, $10,000 was a lot of money.

  I wasn’t injured. I was drained, emotionally and physically, but I wasn’t actually damaged. The part that hurt the most was my pride.

  We were staying in downtown Honolulu. I couldn’t sleep and was up early the next morning. I put on some clothes and left the hotel. I walked across Waikiki, and then hiked as far as I could up Diamond Head—which wasn’t very far because I was so beat up. I had a jug of water and a cell phone. I decided to sit down and think things over. I ended up sitting there for a couple of hours.

  I turned the fight over in my mind. I thought about why I’d lost. I realized that I should have won. I could have won. Several times I’d been in a position to break Lober’s arm, or break his leg, and I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t been willing to injure him. I had wanted to fight him, and I wanted to beat him, but when it came right down to it, I hadn’t been willing to actually hurt him. I realized I had a problem. I had a lot of guilt and fear about hurting people. In sports, as a kid, I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. I was always worried about it. I think it may be because I had been hurt a lot myself. It also came from my fear of what would happen if I hurt someone—my fear of Joe’s anger, of what Joe would do to me if I hurt someone and caused trouble, or if I fought back and hurt him.

  I understood that was why I had lost the fight. It was a revelation, an awakening. I hadn’t been emotionally ready, and I’d let myself be beaten. I felt completely devastated: emotionally, physically, and financially. And I saw that it was completely unnecessary. I could have won. I didn’t have to lose. I just had to change my mind about what I was doing.

  I came down off Diamond Head a different person. I made a decision that, in the future, I was going to approach fighting in a different way. When I fought again, I would understand that the other guy was agreeing to fight me. He was offering to fight me, and participating in fighting me. I wasn’t taking advantage of him. We had agreed to play a game, and there was going to be a winner and a loser. There were rules, and we were going to play by the rules. If someone got hurt, it wouldn’t be my fault, it was part of the agreement. Coming off the mountain, I knew. I had that moment, and very few people ever have that moment, when I absolutely knew. This is what I’m going to do with my life, and if I die doing it, I will die doing it.

  I accepted it totally, and it was incredibly exciting. I came down the hill ready to roll. You could have sparked lightbulbs off my fingertips. If sawing off my arm had been the solution to fighting and winning, I would have sawed my arm off and come out with a nub, ready to roll. I was that committed.

  I went back to the hotel. To this day, I’ve never been back to Diamond Head. I’ve never needed to go back. I had my moment, and I understood.

  That was the true beginning of my life as a fighter.

  8

  GOING SOLO

  Almost nine months passed before I fought again. The loss to John Lober had created some drama and some problems. Ken had been in my corner for that fight. He had been a big supporter, and he thought I was going to destroy Lober. I think he was
kind of disgusted with me that I lost so badly.

  He saw that I was screwing around in training and in leading the team. Ken was off doing WWE and pro wrestling at that point. He wasn’t happy about what was going on back home with the Lion’s Den. I thought I was doing everything for the team, and the gym. But I believed what we were doing in the gym and in our training was not the best way. We were working with old ideas, on an old model, but we were fighting in a new sport. I felt we needed a new approach. I voiced my concern about this. I was very vocal, and I kept on talking about it, saying what I believed. I kept telling the guys, “Look, we’ve got to change. There’s a better way to do this.” I tried to tell Ken, but no one tells Ken anything! Ken wasn’t interested in my ideas about change. He wanted me to run his gym and train his fighters his way.

  We were invited to participate in a thing called Rings Extension Fighting, which was a kind of Japanese hybrid fighting. I took over the training of some of the guys from the Lion’s Den. They were all really out of shape. I was out of shape. I started to have some ideas about conditioning. I felt we should be doing more in that area. Maurice Smith went to Tokyo to fight a guy named Tsuyoshi Kohsaka. Maurice did pretty well, too, but Kohsaka seemed to be carrying him the whole way, and Kohsaka won. Pete Williams fought a fighter named Joop Kasteel and beat him but it was not a spectacular fight.

  Kohsaka was the up-and-coming star in Rings, and I was looking for a fight for me, so I contacted the organization. They set me up with Kohsaka for September 1997. We fought in Tokyo. It was a thirty-minute fight, one round, no breaks. I didn’t fight all that well and I got tired. But I won by decision.