Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  I came home from the Enson fight to my new home with Angelina in Los Altos. She had found me a new wrestling coach, a guy named Eric Duus. He was the only guy in the world who could beat Kevin Jackson in a wrestling match. I did some more training with Javier Mendez. I trained with Maurice. I also began studying Bruce Lee’s philosophies in Jeet Kune Do, in particular the idea of being like water.

  I felt confident. I knew I was going to destroy Kevin, even though he was undefeated, and even though he had annihilated everyone he’d fought—including John Lober, who’d beaten me so badly. After beating Enson, whose strengths were stand-up and ground, I knew that my understanding of the game was better than his. My strengths were the ground game and conditioning, and I bested Enson in both. I felt involved in the sport in a new way. I had so much new confidence in my conditioning. I felt like everything had connected for the first time.

  I studied Kevin’s game. It was obvious that he was an incredible wrestler. He had won the freestyle Olympic gold medal in 1992! But I also saw that because he was such a good wrestler he would do the same thing, over and over again, in every fight. He was going to get you down, and beat you as a wrestler. He beat everyone because he was such a good wrestler. He understood wrestling better than anyone. And everyone tried to fight that. Their strategy was to outwrestle him, to push back against him, but no one could do it and they all ended up in bad positions after they lost the wrestling game, positions that they could not escape from.

  But I realized that he used the same tactic every time. He takes you down, and then he gets you into a control position. What I noticed was a moment: when he was doing that, finishing the takedown and getting the control position, his arms were straight. You could go for an arm bar if you timed it right. I watched the tapes of his fights over and over, and I saw that moment. I became convinced that I could do this, that I could catch him in an arm bar. I went to the next training session with Eric to practice this split-second submission hold and to test my new theory and concept of flowing like water. I wasn’t going to fight the takedown, I was going to accept that I was going to lose that part of the game, and try to get to the arm bar position while he was finishing the takedown.

  So I went over to the gym and told Javier what I was going to do. He kind of laughed and patted me on the back, telling me, “Don’t focus too hard on one thing.” So the next day, I had Eric come to the gym and asked Javier to watch us wrestle. He immediately changed his tune and was 100 percent on board from that moment on. It was his idea to come out in a southpaw stance to force Kevin to reach across his own body. Later on, I told the press, “I think wrestlers need a lesson in submission, and I am the man who’s going to teach it to them.”

  I could see Kevin was extremely arrogant about the whole thing. I knew he was going to do what he always did, because he had total confidence in it. But I had confidence, too. Part of that came from the fact that I had so little experience. Everyone else came from boxing or wrestling. They had all kinds of ideas. They had to undo something they had learned, and depended upon, in order to learn something new. I didn’t have that. If something didn’t work in one fight, it was gone. I had nothing to undo. I took a scholastic approach. I learned that a fireman’s carry equals a leg choke, so I got rid of it. It was simple and linear. Things that I learned went from theory to application to law really quickly.

  Kevin was five foot ten and 199 pounds. I was five foot ten and 193 pounds. He was wearing these red-white-and-blue American flag trunks. I was wearing regular black shorts. He was undefeated, and a three-time UFC champion. I was making my UFC debut. On paper, I wouldn’t have bet on me at all.

  The bell rang. We came out of our corners. The referee said, “Get it on!” We danced around. We exchanged a couple of blows. Then he did exactly what I knew he was going to do. He faked a punch and shot at my waist and tried to take me down. Driving my back to the cage, he scooped my legs out from under me and when he did he left his arm straight. I swung my legs up and caught his arm. I began to turn my hips, and I arm barred him.

  And his arm was like butter. It was like an old lady’s arm. I didn’t have to break it. I had a perfect, perfect hold, and he knew it, and the referee knew it. He tapped. He had to. His arm was popping pretty good. Once I got my hips up, he was done. But when I turned my hips over, it was dangerous. The weight of my hips and legs was on his elbow—the backside of his elbow.

  The fight lasted sixteen seconds. Sixteen seconds! It was over! I jumped up and started running around the cage with my hands in the air. The guys from my corner jumped in and grabbed me. Someone picked me up. Maurice was screaming. The crowd went nuts. I ran across the ring and jumped onto the cage and pumped my fists in the air, first on one side of the hall and then on the other. It was surreal. It shouldn’t have been that easy. He shouldn’t have left his arm there. I couldn’t really believe it.

  Neither could Kevin. He left the ring. I never talked to him. He was the only man not to shake my hand after a fight, ever. I don’t know what that was about. It didn’t seem very Olympic-caliber to me. Maybe he was just embarrassed. He should have been. I had only been brought into the fight because I had sort of a big name in Japan. I wasn’t supposed to win. I didn’t have strong stand-up skills. He had destroyed John Lober and John Lober had destroyed me. I was being paid to let him give me a butt-whomping. But it didn’t go that way. He lost. I won.

  In fact, I earned a Guinness World Record for it, too. I have a certificate at home that says, “The fastest UFC title fight to be won by submission was sixteen seconds, achieved by Frank Shamrock (USA) at UFC Japan, Yokohama, Japan on 21 December 1997.” That record still stands today. My other Guinness record doesn’t. I held the Guinness honor for the fastest knockout in a championship fight for a twenty-two-second victory that came a little later in my career. That record held for almost ten years, when it was broken in 2007 by Andrei Arlovski’s victory over Paul Buentello (fifteen seconds).

  I stood there waiting for the referee to announce the verdict, bouncing around on my feet like I was still fighting. I was on fire. I couldn’t stand still. The announcer said, “Middleweight Champion of the World, Frank Shamrock!” I did a lap around the cage, and bowed to all four sides of the area.

  A Japanese woman came over and interviewed me. She said, “So quick!” I said, “Ah, I got lucky. I was prepared, and everything worked out right.” She asked me how I liked fighting in Japan. I said, “I love fighting in Japan! I love the Japanese. I love the fighting spirit. And I was just glad I could pull it off tonight.” She translated my answers, and the fans went wild some more. She said, “And now you are the middleweight champion?” And I said, “Yes! And I’m going to be that way for a long time!”

  I was paid $25,000, plus I got the title. That was huge. And it was also terribly, terribly disappointing. It had happened so fast! He was such an athlete, and I had built up in my mind this amazing battle we were going to have. I’d had a huge design for the fight. Plan A was my secret weapon, which was the weakness I had found in his style. Plan B was the knock-down battle that I was going to win because I was smarter and tougher and in better condition.

  I’d had so much energy, and so much intention. Losing the fight to John Lober had really changed who I was and how I thought about myself. It made me very focused on not letting anyone ever kick my ass again. And now the Jackson fight was over. I thought, That’s it?

  I went to dinner with some of the UFC bigwigs. I wanted to celebrate and do something crazy. But I didn’t. I had stopped drinking after the Lober fight, and I’d been sober for a couple of years. I was off everything. I have a very addictive personality, so this left with me a lot of extra energy. I took my obsessive nature and put it into fighting. For two years, I’d been doing nothing but fighting. So I experienced a letdown. Angelina had come to Japan for the fight. She was always there for my fights. After the meeting with the UFC guys I just went back to her at the hotel room.

  My disappointment about th
e Jackson fight lasted a while. I had been so focused on the battle, and I thought it was going to be huge. Every moment of my life seemed to be about preparing for this huge fight to the death. After Lober, I never ever wanted to lose again. My whole mind had readjusted to that new reality—that I would never lose again. But the fight shouldn’t have been that easy.

  So I scheduled another fight right away. I agreed to fight Igor Zinoviev at the UFC 16: Battle in the Bayou, outside of New Orleans. I had less than three months to prepare.

  After the Jackson fight, I was on fire. The Enson fight had been so important. That qualified me for Jackson, and that had been super-important too. Now I was at the next level. At that time there were two leagues, and two “best guys in the world.” At the moment those two were Zinoviev and me. He was the Extreme Fighting champion. I was the Ultimate Fighting champion. He had fought John Lober to a draw. He had beaten Enson Inoue. So we were natural rivals. The winner of the fight was going to be, pound for pound, the best fighter in the world.

  The fight was scheduled for the Ponchartrain Center. I went down there almost a month before the fight on my own dime, which was unheard of at the time. I had an idea about how I could beat him, and I needed to develop it. Zinoviev was a really good striker, and he had very good judo skills. He was better than almost anybody at striking. It was very hard to get him to submit. He could just stand there and be better than anyone.

  He was a Russian guy from St. Petersburg. He had come up through a Russian sports academy, and he had trained in boxing, judo, and other fighting techniques. But I had seen a hole in his game. I was so deep in my game that I saw a nuance in his technique. I saw that in the midst of him standing there and beating people up, he made a mistake. When a guy would attempt to take him down by grabbing him around the hips or waist, he would grab the guy’s head. He would always grab the guy’s head. It was like I was having a dream, and I woke up, and said, This is how I’m going to beat him. I just knew that if I could pick him up and take him down, at that moment, and stun him, then I could beat him. I started telling the media I was going to knock him out and I started practicing this lift and slam move. My plan was to pick him up and throw him on his head. He’d be so damaged that I could just choke him out and win.

  I practiced hard. I spent twenty days in Louisiana, in a hotel room, with no one supporting or sponsoring me. I trained at local gyms and I had people coming in every day to work out with me. We put the word out. “Frank says he will let anyone who shows up with gloves hit him in the head.” I did that for an hour a day for twenty days. Sometimes I had fifty people lined up. They were driving in from thirty or forty miles around. I was preparing for a horrible brawl, and I wanted to be ready for it.

  The fight was on March 13, 1998. The referee was John McCarthy, the same guy who had refereed my fight against Kevin Jackson. It was a big crowd, maybe a sellout one. John said, “Are you ready? Let’s get it on!” We came out of our corners. We were both in black. I was really pumped. He had a military-style haircut that made him look like even more of a madman than he really was—and he was a madman already. I thought he was going to kill me. But I had a plan.

  I tried three or four kicks. He moved in. I reached around his waist. He grabbed my head. I hoisted him up and dropped him hard. My plan went great, except that when I turned him upside down and stovepiped him, I broke his collarbone and exploded his shoulder and knocked him unconscious. I threw one more punch but it was unnecessary. I had broken some vertebrae in his neck. I heard the bones break. I will never forget the sound of it.

  The fight lasted twenty-two seconds. Zinoviev was not getting up. The announcers were screaming. One of them said, “He’s out cold! He’s out cold! He dropped him on his head and he’s out cold!” I ran around the cage a couple of times, but then I looked over and no one was moving. I got down close to Zinoviev to see how he was doing. He wasn’t doing well. He was out. I thought, It worked! I won! I am the greatest fighter in the world! And I have single-handedly destroyed the sport in a single night.

  In those days there was no padding under the canvas. The floor was made up of a piece of plywood on top of concrete. It was really, really hard.

  After the fight, I had the same sense of letdown as after the Jackson fight, for the same reason. Igor hadn’t even punched me. He never landed a blow. It was just like my dream, to a T. He felt like he weighed five pounds. He hit the mat and it all crunched. And the fight was over and he was done.

  They gave me the belt. I thought, It was really that easy? I had barely expended a breath of energy.

  He never fought again. I always felt bad about that. He was a good guy, a real, honest, look-you-in-the-eye kind of guy. A soldier of the fist and spirit. And he never fought again. I knew the minute the fight was over that he was really mashed up. I felt horrible. I knew what I did to him would change his life but I was not ready for how that feeling would stick in my heart and mind. I can’t watch the fight even to this day. Yes, I was strutting around the cage flexing in celebration, but it was all an act—I felt sick inside. I had been determined to win the fight. Before, I had been afraid of hurting people. Now, I accepted that winning the fight meant hurting him and I understood that this was my job. I had to be willing to be hurt, and I had to be willing to hurt the other guy.

  Years later, he was coaching some students in the International Fight League. I had a team in the IFL, too. I found myself sitting next to him at a team dinner. I said, “I just want to say that I’m really sorry I hurt you in that fight. I was just hoping to stun you. I didn’t mean to hurt you so bad.” He started laughing. He laughed so loud! He said, “Frank! It’s a fight! That’s what happens in a fight!”

  Maybe he had hurt a lot of people, too. His style was to go hard and punch hard. I was relieved that he had no hard feelings, because I know he never recovered right. I ended his career as a fighter.

  For me it was a great victory. In some ways, it was the fight I feared the most, and it was by far the toughest fight of my life. I thought Enson was going to beat me down and choke me out. I thought Kevin Jackson was going to outwrestle me. But Igor was the first hybrid striker guy I’d faced. I knew I didn’t have that much stand-up skill yet. I couldn’t just smash people. So when I beat Igor, I knew it was a big moment. I knew there was no one on the planet who could beat me.

  But I was still figuring it all out. My boxing skills were terrible. My kicking was still off balance. I was still evolving. I wanted to be the best. That meant I still had to figure out the mechanics and make them right.

  I got paid $30,000 for the Zinoviev fight. That was good money, but it wasn’t money you could retire on. Besides, I’d spent twenty days in a hotel on my own dime. So my expenses were high. But I knew, after this fight, that this was my only chance of ever doing anything big. I knew with fighting I could go anywhere in the world.

  9

  AMERICAN CHAMPION

  By this time my relationship with Bob Shamrock was completely zero. I had found that out on the Internet. I read an interview with Bob and Ken. They were saying all kinds of terrible things about me. The article said I had betrayed him, that I had screwed Ken over, and that I turned against the family.

  I wasn’t surprised that Ken was saying these things, but it hurt me to see Bob’s name in there, so I called him. I told him I had read the article and that I was confused. He said he hadn’t seen the article but that what I was saying didn’t sound right. He said he was probably misquoted. He said he’d look at it, and I could call him back. When I did, a few days later, he said he’d seen the article and that everything in it was pretty much true. “It said everything I meant to say,” he told me. “You’re not part of the family anymore. You chose to leave. And you know what that means. If you’re not part of the family, you’re out. You’re not with us. You’re against us.”

  He made some more references to the family, and how the family is sacred, and how the family had secrets that could never be told. I didn’t even
know what he was talking about. What secrets? Were we some kind of Mafia organization? Maybe it was something to do with him and Ken. They had a very strong bond, a very deep relationship. But I didn’t even know what there was to betray. I had no secrets and nothing to hide.

  It had been less than a year since I’d left the Lion’s Den and started training on my own, but it was obvious that Bob was finished with me. So I was surprised when I saw him at the Zinoviev fight. He and Ken had come down to Louisiana to support one of the Lion’s Den guys, Jerry Bohlander, who was fighting Kevin Jackson on the same UFC 16 card. I just ran into him. I had just beaten Zinoviev. I was the champ. I was there with all my guys, with Maurice and Angie. Bob was by himself. He gave me a hug. He seemed happy to see me. I took him aside, and said, “What happened? What changed?” “I don’t know,” he said. “But you have to make it up with Ken.”

  I told him I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t have anything to apologize for. Ken had basically thrown me out. I told him I had been forced to go my own way. “No,” he said. “That isn’t how it works. There’s only one way, and it’s our way. It’s the family way. You chose to leave the family.” I didn’t want it to end like that. I said I wanted to have a relationship with him. He told me I couldn’t. He told me again that no one would help me or talk with me. I had chosen to be on my own, and now I had to be on my own. “But congratulations on the championship,” he said.

  I was really hurt by this. And then I got mad. I felt more determined than ever to prove them wrong. It was obvious that the only future Ken and Bob could see for me was training Ken’s guys in the Lion’s Den. Maybe Ken had persuaded Bob to think that. Maybe he had made Bob choose. Ken’s a very forceful guy, and he’s a control freak. Everything is black or white, right or wrong. He has to have things his way. Bob is a little like that, too. But it killed me that they couldn’t see it any differently. They still believed that I didn’t have what it took, even after I’d beaten Enson, Kevin, and Igor. I was the champion! I had the belt! But they still thought my job should be serving Ken and training his guys. The only thing to do was prove them wrong and prove myself right. I had to become the greatest fighter in the world.