Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  Also, she was ambitious. She had dreams that she felt she wasn’t able to pursue. She had always wanted to be a model, and I was all for that. I said, “Be a model! Go for it!” I put her into things when I could. If there was a photo shoot, I’d say, “Put her in the picture, too.” I encouraged her to go up for jobs and auditions.

  All these little issues came to a head when I fought Tito Ortiz. The fight was set for September 1999, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was UFC 22, and it was billed as “Only One Can Be Champion.” I had been the only UFC middleweight champion, so I was there to defend my title and retain my belt. Also fighting that night were Chuck Liddell, Jeremy Horn, and a bunch of other fighters. The event was going to be broadcast over pay-per-view. It could have been the last of those for a long time, as the UFC was struggling to keep its finances in order.

  Not long before the fight, I got a call from Bob Shamrock. From his tone it felt like he was just calling for no reason, just to say hello or something. But then he got to the bottom line. He didn’t want me to fight Tito. He said he thought Tito was going to hurt me, and he didn’t want me to take the fight. I was surprised. Tito was an up-and-coming guy, and he had fought a couple of people and won. But I was the champion.

  Bob was serious. He said, “Ken says he’s the wrong style for you. He’s going to beat you. He’s too big and he’s too strong for you.” I said I understood and I thanked him, but I didn’t get it—at first. Then I realized that half the guys Tito had beaten were Ken’s guys. He had fought these Lion’s Den fighters, like Jerry Bohlander and Guy Mezger, and destroyed them. After his fights, he would do this thing where he flipped everyone off and act like he was digging graves around his defeated opponents. So he had disrespected Ken, and Ken didn’t like it. He may not have wanted me to fight Tito and lose. But he didn’t want me to fight Tito and win, either.

  It made me more determined than ever to fight Tito. I couldn’t see any reason not to take the fight. Everything in my life was working for me. I had been annihilating everyone I fought. I felt good about my chances. I trained hard. When I got to Louisiana, I was in great shape. And I had a plan.

  Some years before, Angelina’s stepdad, Al, had introduced me to an L.A. lawyer named Henry Holmes. Right from the start I thought he was the coolest guy. He took my call, and we met at his office. It was a big corporate office, but Henry had pictures of himself with every important person in sports, including Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, and George Foreman. I told him my plans. He gave me some advice on how to protect myself and plan for the future as an athlete and as a brand. I didn’t think that much about it. But I started hitting him up for counsel every time I needed business guidance. Finally he asked me if I wanted to be his client. I said I did. But when he offered to negotiate a deal for me, and I found out how much it would cost, I couldn’t afford him.

  Later on, I needed him enough to afford him. I asked him to give me some direction and negotiate the Tito Ortiz fight. I had made a decision about my future. I really believe that MMA was going to make it and become the greatest sport in the world. But I was pretty sure it had to die first. The people making it happen had picked a horrible marketing tactic. The concept was “Eight men enter, and only one man leaves. And one of the men might die.” It was very scary and very dangerous. Maybe it was good for pay-per-view; it drew a certain kind of audience. But it also drew the politicians, who were going to kill it. I saw the end was coming.

  I wanted to get out and wait for it to be reborn. I wanted to fight Tito, to defend my title. But I didn’t want to fight after that. My master plan was to retire, stop fighting, make some strategic moves, and in about five years be ready to come back as a fighter in a reconfigured sport. If I had to keep fighting those five years, while waiting for the sport to come around, I’d have to take the risks involved with all those fights. I could die waiting for my sport to mature. I wanted control of my own destiny, and I couldn’t have that fighting for the UFC.

  I took my problem to Henry. He said, “Fine. Put it in the contract.” This sounded like an old pro-wrestling move. I didn’t know I could do something like that. Henry showed me how it could be done. If I fought Tito and lost, I would continue with the UFC. If I fought him and I won, though, I could retire and get out of the contract. I would be a free agent.

  That’s all I needed. Now I was ready to fight Tito Ortiz.

  Tito and I were similar in a lot of ways. We’re both from California, and we’re both from Mexican blood, and we’re both tough. But Tito was much bigger than me—six foot two and well over two hundred pounds. He had a lot of height and a lot of reach. Also, we have really different styles. Tito is a wrestler who is willing to strike. He likes to stay on his feet and box and then take the fight to the ground to pound on you. I’m more of a shooter. I like to take you down and force you to submission on the floor. But at this point in my career I was turning into more of a striker. My ground game was so solid that I didn’t care whether it went there or not, and I was happy to throw power, too. But when a guy has thirty pounds and four inches on you, that’s not as easy as it sounds.

  Because he was so much taller than me, I was going to have to punch up to hit him. And I was going to have to punch first. If he punched first, he was going to have weight and volume moving forward, and I was going to have to absorb some or all of it. So my plan was to punch first, then grab him and make him wrestle me. So instead of punching, staying inside his range, and giving him a shot to punch back, I was going to get in fast, punch first, and make him wrestle me until he got tired. And I knew he’d get tired before I did. I was at the top of my physical condition. I knew I could outlast him. The only issue was making sure he didn’t hit me really hard in the first ten minutes. If I could do that, I knew I could beat him.

  The referee was John McCarthy again. The crowd was huge— something like twenty thousand people, not counting the pay-per-view audience, which was the one of the biggest pay-per-view audiences in MMA history, and at the time it was the biggest money-earning fight in MMA history, too. Right before the fight, though, something weird happened with Angie. I was ready to go out. I was all pumped up. I had the towel around my head. I was going out in two minutes to fight the fight of my life. It was on. Angie was all dolled up, with the clothes and the hair and everything, the way she always was for the fights. But all of a sudden, she stepped in front of me. Her hand went out. She said, “Hold on, hon. Let me go first. Then everyone can see me.” It really caught me off guard. I didn’t know what to say. It was a bad idea, and it was a bad time to discuss it. So we didn’t. She just strutted out ahead of me into the arena. I thought about it for two seconds, and then I remembered I was about to go and get my ass kicked. I decided to think about Angelina later.

  Tito and I came out strong. We traded blows for three rounds. Somewhere in there Tito hit me hard. I started bleeding badly over my left eye. But I had the center of the ring and was pushing Tito around the edges, closing the distance, controlling the canvas. I was doing this by punching first. He wasn’t able to hit back, which frustrated him, and the wrestling was tiring him. It was still brutal. He was still big, and he still had more than twenty pounds and four inches on me. It was a tough, tough fight.

  It got tougher. In the third round Tito kneed me in the head and opened a cut that would later need sixteen stitches to close it. When we came back in the fourth, he actually grabbed at the cut and tried to tear it open. I could hear his corner yelling at him to tear it open! Who was his corner man? John Lober! He must have still been mad about that second fight.

  After the third round, it became the longest fight Tito had ever fought. He had never gone more than fifteen minutes. Conditioning was starting to become a major factor. But he wasn’t finished yet. I ducked under a big right hand and got in a couple of strong shots to his head—but then he took me down. He had me on the mat. I was on my back, with my legs locked around his waist, protecting my head with my arms. He had me around the neck.

&
nbsp; The crowd seemed to get pissed off when he took me down. Maybe they wanted more stand-up. I couldn’t tell. I also wasn’t sure whether they were rooting for me or for Tito. I just heard them screaming. I could hear my coach Maurice Smith screaming, too. He kept telling me to get my feet inside, on Tito’s stomach, and kick my way free. I was trying. But I was tired, too.

  It wasn’t a very effective hold. Tito had me down, but he couldn’t do anything but hang onto me. He was trying to conserve his energy and get his wind back, but it cost him a lot. He was getting hurt. Every time he relaxed a little, I boxed his ears and the side of his head and moved to another position on my back so I could hit him more. He was paying a big price for maintaining the hold. He was getting really tired. I could feel the fight leaking out of him.

  I guess he could feel it, too, because he got impatient. He loosened his hold and tried to finish me with a couple of wild punches and some elbow shots to the head. They all missed, and took a lot of energy, and that gave me the opening I needed. I flipped him over with a leg sweep, did my famous breakdancing turnaround, and then we were both on our feet. I got in several jabs and a knee before Tito shot me again and we were back on the floor. I got Tito in a one-armed guillotine choke and squeezed. He was hanging on, but it was almost over. He used everything he had left to wriggle free, but then I was standing over him and striking hard while he ducked and covered. Tito started tapping the mat. The ref waved me off and rolled Tito over. He was done. The fight ended about fifteen seconds before the end of the fourth round. The announcers were shouting themselves hoarse. I was the best under-two-hundred-pound fighter in the world, they said. I was still the best.

  Tito went to his corner. I went to mine. The crowd was insane. My corner guys started plugging up my bloody forehead with Vaseline to stop the blood. Tito came out of his corner wearing a FRANK SHAMROCK T-shirt—a great show of respect. He always put on a T-shirt right after a fight, with a customized message on it. One time it said, RESPECT: I DON’T EARN IT, I JUST FUCKING TAKE IT. Another time, after he beat Ken Shamrock, it said, I KILLED KENNY.

  This T-shirt had my name on it, and on the back it said, UFC MIDDLEWEIGHT CHAMPION. It was an old T-shirt, but it was the truth. I had defended the title and retained the belt. I was still the only man alive who had ever been the Middleweight Champion.

  Later on, someone asked me how I was able to beat the bigger man. I said what I always say. I bring everything I have to the fight. I don’t leave anything at home. When I fight, I’m fighting all the way. I am absolutely willing to die, if that’s what it takes to win. It’s hard to beat a man who’s willing to die. It took me my whole fighting career—and everything that came before it—to become that guy. It took a lifetime of abuse, neglect, mistreatment, and violence before I learned how to fight back and take care of myself. By the time I fought Tito, I was ready.

  I was the champion, the undefeated champion. It seemed like a good time to retire. So I did retire, during a live pay-per-view event. I handed Bob Meyrowitz my belt and told him to let me know if he found anyone who could beat me.

  10

  GOING HOLLYWOOD

  At that time, my master plan was to move to Los Angeles and become a TV and movie star. So right after the victory over Tito Ortiz, that’s what I did. Angelina and I packed up our stuff and moved. We got a place in Los Angeles, in Marina Del Rey. I got my first acting job about two weeks later. It was a guest appearance on Walker, Texas Ranger.

  I had met Chuck Norris at a social function, over lunch at a sushi restaurant. It turned out that Henry Holmes was Chuck’s attorney, too. He said he had a script about cage fighting for his TV program Walker, Texas Ranger, which at the time was the top-rated show on CBS. There was a part in it that he thought would be perfect for me. So I followed up. Two weeks after I fought Tito Ortiz I was shooting an episode of Chuck’s TV show in Los Angeles. I actually still had the stitches from the Tito fight in my forehead, which Angie took out on set.

  We shot the scenes in Texas, in an abandoned Nabisco cracker factory. The episode was called “Fight or Die.” I played a character named Hammer of D Block. In the episode, Walker finds out about an illegal cage-fighting ring at Copperhead Maximum Security Prison. Guards are staging fights to the death. I play a guy who was a Mafia enforcer but who’s now in jail fighting for money and girls. In the first few scenes, I fight a guy inside a cage, inside the prison. I choke him out while an undercover cop is trying to expose the illegal cage fights going on inside the jail. When the guards find out he’s a cop, they throw him in the ring and I kill him, too.

  When Walker learns what’s going on, he decides to go undercover as a convict, with one of his fellow Rangers going undercover as another convict and one going as a guard. Walker and I wind up in the ring together. I have some memorable lines. I say to one fighter, “You’re gonna die real slow.” When Walker pushes me in the chest and says, “Me first,” I say, “You’re gonna die even slower.” When we get into the cage together, I say, “I’ve been waiting for this.” And Walker says, “Let’s get it on.”

  Walker’s sidekick calls for help. The inmates start to riot. The guards freak out. They decide to stop the fight by shooting Walker. One of them is about to blast him with a shotgun when one of the inmates grabs the gun. The guard shoots me instead.

  It was fun. We shot eleven fight scenes over about ten days. The producers had brought together an amazing group. Chuck had been one of my childhood idols. He was really interested in martial arts and very connected to that world. He had trained in jujitsu with the Machado brothers. One of them was a stunt coordinator on the show.

  The stunt coordinator had a general idea about each of the fights. He’d say, “What about something like this?” and the fighters would work out the details. I got a lot of good advice about doing stunt work from Vic Quintero, an amazing stunt guy who’s been doing movie work since the 1980s. I thought it was so cool. I thought I was so cool. I was going to be on a TV show! Then the 5:30 A.M. call time came, and it didn’t seem so cool anymore. Those TV guys work hard. The show was broadcast a month or so later. The fight scenes had kung fu sound effects, like a Bruce Lee movie. It was great.

  Everything went according to my plan, or even better than my plan. I got an agent right away. I got a manager right away. They got me auditions, and then I got every job I auditioned for. I got three commercials in a row. One of them was a national commercial for Burger King.

  The whole experience for that was weird. I showed up horribly late for the audition, but they loved me. Two weeks later, I got the word that it was on. We set the date and I got all prepared. I showed up on time for the shoot—at 11:00 in the morning. The director came running over to me. He was a huge fight fan. He introduced me to everyone. He set me up in front of the cameras. I danced around. I punched a bag. I did some kicking, and some moves. Then suddenly the director said, “OK, Frank. That’s good. We’re going to break for lunch.” So we went to lunch. The director took me around the facility. I think I ate once with him and once with the crew. Everyone wanted their picture taken with me, so I posed for photos. Then the director had me sign some papers, and he said, “OK. You’re done.”

  I had been there about two hours. I had worked about forty-five minutes. I started getting checks, and in the end that commercial paid something like $25,000. I said, “Making commercials is good!” So easy! This is obviously the way to make money.

  Things weren’t going so well at home. Angelina and I fought a lot. When we lived in Los Altos, I was fighting or training all the time. She and I didn’t spend very much time together. So it was easy for me to think things were OK, that we were compatible, that our relationship was a good one.

  It wasn’t a good one, and we weren’t compatible. I found out a lot of things once we were able to spend more time together. I saw that she wasn’t really interested in me as a person, that she was not really very loving or caring or honest. I don’t know how I had missed that, but then I saw it clearly.


  I knew she was tough and smart. She had these ideas about being an actress or a model. I knew she was ambitious. But I really didn’t know how ambitious. Now I thought back to the night of the fight with Tito, and how she stepped out in front of me. I honestly didn’t understand how badly she wanted to be famous—more famous, in that moment, than me. This was one of the biggest moments of my life, but she wanted it to be about her.

  The moment stuck with me. Every time I thought about it, all I could see was how fake she seemed—fake hair, fake eyelashes, fake smile, fake everything. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It only lasted two seconds, but it completely changed the way I thought about her. I think she genuinely loved me. But I think she loved the idea of being famous more.

  The timing was terrible. It was as if someone had pulled back the curtain and I could see her, really see her, for the first time. When we got to L.A. and things started not working out, I found it had stuck in my craw. It seemed like a really bad sign of things to come.

  I was going to auditions, getting jobs, working out, and doing my thing. Angie was mostly shopping. She bought a lot of expensive furniture. She was always buying clothes. She liked money and she liked buying nice things with it. I tried to get her to slow down. I was making pretty good money with the acting jobs, but we weren’t rich. I had worked really hard to put away some savings and I didn’t want to go through it all at once. So we fought about money a lot. Pretty soon I was sleeping on the couch—an expensive designer couch that she’d insisted we buy for our place.

  I was still getting a lot of work. I did an episode of Oz, the HBO series about life in a maximum-security prison. (A veteran stunt guy, Douglas Crosby, helped me get that gig.) That went well, so I did another. I loved the work and the people. I met Chuck Zito, and he became a friend. Chuck had been a badass dude in New York, a boxer, and a president of the New York chapter of the Hell’s Angels. Then he’d become a professional bodyguard and parlayed that into an acting and stuntman career. He was my first celebrity friend. He was into MMA and really opened the door for me and brought me inside. He started introducing me to people. I was teaching a session in New Jersey and he said, “We’re going to a boxing match.” It was a prizefight at Madison Square Garden. He and the boxer Arturo Gatti snuck me in pretending I was their security guard. It was an extraordinary fight and an amazing night for me, and we had a lot of fun together. Then one day I got a call from my old friend Douglas Crosby who had Mickey Rourke on the line. Mickey just wanted to say hello! Mickey Rourke!