My next fight was a title match with Jeremy Horn in Mobile, Alabama. It was kind of a mess, and there were a lot of miscommunications. Our sport was having a really hard time. We were getting shut down and pinched off everywhere. We’d been thrown off Time Warner cable and some other outlets. The sport was really popular and it was growing, but we were being seen by a smaller and smaller audience.
Bob Meyrowitz, the first owner of the UFC, wanted to change that. He had worked in the music industry and understood how to create a public image. They asked me to come to New York to talk about how we could grow the sport. They had the idea to make me an MMA sports personality and commentator. They said for the next show they couldn’t afford an entire pay-per-view card but wanted to do a show titled Night of Champions along with a never-before-seen fight with Frank Shamrock. The plan was to fight the first fight of the night (for the live crowd only) and then change into a suit and commentate the rest of the fights as if nothing had happened. Then we could sell a pay-per-view show without the cost of producing one.
I said that was OK with me. I had three weeks to get ready. I thought I could figure out how to be a commentator in three weeks. But I told the organizers to make sure to pick me someone to fight that I actually could fight and then still be OK to go and commentate for the rest of the night.
They put together a good group of fighters. They had Dan Henderson, Chuck Liddell, Pete Williams, Allan Goes, Tank Abbott, and a whole bunch of other guys. For me, they picked Jeremy Horn. Jeremy was a very tough up-and-coming UFC guy. He’d had ten or fifteen fights already, and he’d beaten almost everyone he’d gone up against. He had fought Dan Severn to a draw not long before—and Dan was a 250-pound fighter. This was not my idea of an easy fight. But they wanted a competitive match. That’s what they got!
I hadn’t been training very hard, and the moment I saw the picture of this tall, pasty, knock-kneed kid, I really let off the intensity. He looked like he couldn’t fight his way out of a wet blanket. I thought I was getting ready to be a commentator. I didn’t think I’d have to fight anybody serious. It was just supposed to be a warm-up bout. But he almost beat me. My whole style at that time was based on athletics and conditioning. It requires a huge amount of energy. If I’m out of condition, I lose energy fast. Well, this kid had my number. The fight was brutal. It was a sixteen-minute hug fest. Jeremy held me down and tried to control me, and I didn’t have the energy to put him away. In the end, I got lucky. I just happened to knee bar him, and scraped away with a victory. I learned a good lesson. I couldn’t mix my talents. I could be one thing or another thing. But being good at one thing required all of my focus. Luckily I was good on the microphone that night and the show was a huge success on pay-per-view.
My next fight—a revenge fight—was with John Lober. I hadn’t forgotten the first one, in which I had taken an ass-whupping, and then taken that walk and had an epiphany about having a career. In that first fight, John had beaten me by controlling the striking and the stand-up position. I didn’t want that to happen again. So I trained hard, mostly with Maurice. He got me tight on the striking. We did sessions three times a day. I ate and I took a nap in between— nothing else. We worked on striking and striking power because I really didn’t have any. Maurice was working me up, making me strong. He had me running in water, swimming, running intervals. I was also doing resistance training for striking and kneeing and kicking. This would have been a tough training regimen for anyone. For me, it was extra tough. I don’t swim. I am terrible at it. I don’t have a swimming body—I have a sinking body.
But it was really good training. I hadn’t been taking care of my body because I didn’t know how. I had no idea what effect the high-endurance sprinting was having on my spine, for example. I didn’t know what the running was doing to my knees and hips. I was just beginning to understand the effects of all this damage to my body. When you’re fighting, every blow does a little bit of damage. You kick a guy hard and bang him up a little, but the kick does some damage to you, too. When you’re fighting, this is a big part of the fight. You’re trying to do damage, but you’re also trying to manage your body so you can stay in the fight. When you’re training, too, you’re trying to stay healthy so you can go to war.
Over the years, I had learned a lot about my own body. I had become a sort of gym doctor. Once, when I was in Japan, I got a cauliflower ear. Someone had grabbed my ears and banged them around. One of them got purple and swollen and felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t touch that side of my head or sleep on it. So I went to see a doctor. All he did was stick a needle in my ear and drain off all the blood and pus. Then he iced it and sent me home.
Your ear is basically just some skin around some cartilage. When it gets abused, the skin gets irritated and separates from the cartilage. Your body responds by sending blood and gluey stuff up there to try and heal it. If you don’t do anything, the ear will fill with gooey blood and turn purple. After Japan, I discovered I could do the work myself. When I was working at the Lion’s Den and didn’t have any money for doctors, I found out I could go visit the veterinarian and tell him I needed some needles to give injections to my dog, and he’d sell me 5 cc needles. When someone would get his ears all banged up, we’d take the needles and drain the blood and pus, then ice the ears, and send him on his way. I treated all the Lion’s Den guys that way, and all the guys on all my IFC teams, too. (The secret to avoiding this is to never let anyone grab your head. That’s a golden rule in fighting. If your opponent tries, the defensive move is to rotate your shoulders very quickly and spin your head out of the hold. It’s not that hard, because it’s tough to hold onto a ball that’s rotating. After my experience in Japan, I never let anyone grab my head again.)
I learned some other home medicine techniques. When I was still teaching at the Lion’s Den, I worked with a guy named Haggar Chun Li. He was doing leg locks in training and he broke his leg— the little bone on the outside. You could hear it snap in the class. I had broken that same bone, so I knew what had happened. I took him to a chiropractor we knew and had him X-rayed. The chiropractor said, “Yep, it’s broken. You’ve got to go to a doctor and get him in a cast.”
I was living in Ken’s guesthouse at the time. I didn’t have any money. Chun Li didn’t have any money. But I was his teacher. I was his mentor. I had to help him. So I went to the library and took out a book on broken bones. I studied up. I saw that it was just some plaster of paris and some fabric. So I went to the store and got the stuff and came home and casted his leg. It healed great. He went on to fight a Hawaiian guy who broke both his eye sockets. He left fighting after that. He’s an FBI agent now.
I also learned how to use superglue to close a cut on a guy’s face. I saw a doctor do it once. I asked him about it and he told me that superglue was invented for this, in Vietnam, as a way to close cuts in a hurry. I later found out that wasn’t true at all, but it was good enough to get my attention. I started using superglue in the gym to close cuts when guys got injured.
If you are fighting or training and you get in close and take an elbow, you might get a one-inch gash on your forehead or eyebrow. That’s very common. If you go to the emergency room, getting that gash tended to can be a five-hour procedure costing thousands of dollars. And if you don’t get a doctor who really knows his stuff, you could wind up with a pretty ugly scar. Or there’s superglue, which will close a cut immediately and perfectly. But you have to be careful. One time I saw a doctor who was nervous and shaky and he superglued my guy’s left eye closed. It took about a gallon of Vaseline to get it open again.
By necessity, I got pretty good at emergency medical situations, to the point where I had my own doctor’s bag, which I would constantly refill in emergency rooms and locker rooms around the world. I’ve popped fingers and wrists and elbows back into place. I’ve taped up broken toes. I’ve helped guys with broken noses. For a nose that is still straight you just lean the head back, put a lot of ice on it, and wait. And don’t
blow your nose. That’s a massacre and your whole face will turn black and blue. When your nose is on the other side of your face, it’s a quick crack with your thumbs to align it with your mouth.
The really horrible broken limbs you send to the doctor. I saw a guy get his whole forearm snapped in a telephone lock. That was an ambulance ride.
Otherwise, I learned a lot about active release and contusion relief massage. If you take a lot of kicks, or you get a lot of bone-on-bone damage, you have to do this, and you have to do it right away. The blood accumulates and everything gets stiff and hard, and if you don’t massage it right away you can get into real trouble.
I remember when Brian Ebersole fought Cung Le; Cung kicked the shit out of Brian’s leg. When it was over, he could hardly walk. I thought he had taken care of it, but I found out that after the fight he’d just had a few beers and gone to bed. Five days later, his leg was dark purple from his butt to his toes. He couldn’t get out of bed. So we sat down with him and, for the next three days, massaged the dead blood out of his leg. We iced his leg from butt to foot so it wouldn’t hurt. We froze water in Styrofoam cups, and used the cylindrical ice tubes to squeegee and massage the dead blood out of his leg, like squeezing sausage out of its skin. We could see the leg changing color as the dead blood drained out and the new blood flowed in. It’s a very slow process, and horribly painful, but it works. It works better if you do it right away, and if you do it in public, immediately after the fight. Otherwise the guy’s going to start crying and go home.
I knew a lot about pain—my own pain. Running had become hard and painful for me. Maurice understood that, so he got me into the water, which was a godsend. It took all the impact of training out of my knees and shoulders. But it also meant I had to train twice as hard because my swimming technique was so terrible. The training put me in a bad mood, especially the swimming. It was the only time I ever got mad at Maurice, and the only time he ever yelled at me. Maurice’s biggest strength is that at forty he has the energy of an eight-year-old. He has this old man strength, and this old man knowledge, but he’s enthusiastic like a kid. He brings all that to the training.
For the swimming, we were working with this Brazilian guy who’d been a water polo champion. We were swimming in competition, for conditioning. Maurice didn’t think I was trying hard enough. He kept teasing me. He would say, “Come on, Frankie. Come on, Frankie.” Finally I lost it. I screamed at him. I stormed out. It’s the only time in my life that I’ve ever yelled at a coach, or walked out of a training session.
I sulked for a while and came back. We went back to training.
Maurice really helped make me strong and helped me stay healthy doing it. Part of my strength as an athlete was that I was always good at erasing everything in my mind, once I got going on something. Once I started training, my body would just go until it fell apart or broke. Maurice was very good at helping me go hard but not break down. I needed someone to stop or slow me down sometimes.
The training had been extremely effective. By the time the fight came around I was really ready. And I was mad, too. The fight was going to be held in Sao Paolo, Brazil. We flew down there—Maurice, Angelina, some of my guys, including the disc jockey Big Joe from 94.9 FM, the biggest morning radio show in the Bay Area. He was going to do a live broadcast of the fight during his show.
Right away, Lober started messing with me. He started doing stupid, childish things, like ordering me wake-up calls in my hotel room and ordering room service to my room at weird hours. He sent me dirty e-mails. He was being nasty. He said he was going “to strangle me like JonBenet Ramsey,” the six-year-old girl from Boulder, Colorado, who’d been murdered a year or so earlier. I thought that was extremely crude. It really upset me, way more than it should have. As soon as the fight started, I found I had this heat in my head. I had almost never felt it before. It was as if my brain was on fire. So I decided to beat the shit out of him.
The fight started like the first one. He came out and got ready to go, standing up. He thought his strength would be controlling that. He thought he would be able to knock me down and get on top of me. But I had been training hard with Maurice. My stand-up game was strong. I’d figured out the striking thing, for the first time, and I was really making it work.
So he came out and got squared up and ready to strike. I kicked him in the leg. He threw a punch. I hit him with a punch-kick counter. I did that every time he threw a punch. Pretty soon I was making him fall down. I’d motion for him to stand up, and then I’d knock him down again. I did that quite a few times. I enjoyed it. I didn’t want it to end. I was pissed off, and I wanted to hurt him.
It’s not good to get that angry. That’s why fighting on steroids is such a bad idea. When you’re angry, you can’t fight rationally. Your body chemistry is all messed up. Your energy goes to all the wrong places. You can’t do anything well except get angrier. That’s why I like fighting guys who are pumped up on steroids. Fighting is all about relaxing and releasing tension, so your body is flexible and fluid, able to bend and flex quickly, like water. I like fighting angry guys who are really tense. They can’t think right, and they can’t fight right.
I’m not sure any of the other popular medications are good for fighting, either. Except for ice, which should be the pain medication of choice in any situation, it’s all bad for you. There was a time when all the pro wrestlers were taking the painkiller Nubain. There were guys using Percocet and Demerol. There were guys who ate Vicodin like it was candy. Then there was a wave of steroid use and then designer growth hormone use. If you get into any of that shit, you’re done. You’re finished.
Then there’s weed. In the Brazilian MMA culture, particularly, that’s the first drug of choice. There are guys who smoke pounds of weed and then go run twenty miles. The problem is that pain, in our sport, is important. Pain is what tells you that you’re doing something wrong, something damaging. You need to know, in this sport, when you’re doing something wrong. It’s an important teacher.
Being angry didn’t seem to hurt me with Lober. I just beat the hell out of him. After a little while, he didn’t want any more of that. He started falling down, and falling into the cage to get out of the way, and holding onto me to catch his breath. I could have finished him, and I should have finished him. Two or three times I had him in a guillotine hold, and that could have ended it. But I let him go so I could beat him up some more. Because I wanted to beat him down. I kept making him stand back up.
Finally he’d had enough. I pinned him against the cage, and I was hitting him hard. His face was split open. He was fatigued from falling down and getting back up so much. He was done. He said, “OK, Frank. I’m done. You can stop.”
No way. I said, “I’m not going to stop, you motherfucker. I’m going to beat you to death.” Maurice had never seen me like that before. He loved it. I could hear him laughing his ass off in my corner.
I really wanted to knock him out. The fight ended. I won.
Right after that Angelina and I finally got married. We decided to get married in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai. We booked the wedding at a historic plantation, in the middle of a butterfly farm. The wedding ceremony included a butterfly release. It was a very small wedding. Angelina’s mother and brother and stepfather were there. My son was there. He was living with his mom in Utah at the time, so I flew him out.
I didn’t have much of a relationship with my family then. My mother was still with Joe. They had settled into the Morro Bay area. I had an on-and-off relationship with my sister Suzy. I had a minimal relationship with Robynn. I wasn’t seeing my brother Perry at all and didn’t even know where he was living at the time.
I didn’t see much of anybody. I didn’t have much of a social life at all. I was always getting ready for a fight, or fighting, or recovering from a fight. If you’re really doing that, you don’t have much room for anything else. It’s a full-time job.
I don’t think I realized that. And it put a strain on
my relationship with Angie. She liked being a fighter’s wife. She liked the fights. She loved all the noise and the crowd and the lights and the attention. She liked getting dolled up and being the beautiful woman with the champion. But she didn’t like the lifestyle much. It wasn’t as glamorous outside of the arena. My life consisted of training, mostly, and napping. I was working out two or three times a day. That meant I needed to eat three or four meals a day—big meals. I needed clean clothes, too, because I went through two or three sets of workout clothes a day. So for the person not training the day was about cooking food and doing laundry. She wasn’t into that stuff. She wasn’t interested in being a housewife.
I sat down with her and had some serious talks with her, which was very uncomfortable for both of us. It wasn’t that important to me that she be a housewife, but that had been our lifestyle, and she had said she was OK with it. I had made all kinds of decisions and arrangements based on her being a part-time housewife. I depended on her to help me. But I was living on Costco frozen burritos and frozen orange juice. That was my training diet, because there was no food in the house.
She wasn’t working outside the home. This was her job, or that’s the way I saw it. We were married. She was my partner. I was training. She was supposed to help me. I was totally happy in my relationship, other than that. I thought she was, too. But there were things that bothered her. She didn’t like my snoring, for example. I was always working on my stand-up game and my striking at that time, so I was getting hit in the face a lot. My nose was smashed in all the time. So when I went to bed, I snored.
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