Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  I also made my first motion picture. I got a job in a movie called No Rules (2005). It was supposed to be the world’s first MMA picture. It was directed by Gerry Anderson, Pamela Anderson’s brother. It was his first film, and it was kind of janky. All kinds of people were in it—Gary Busey, the fighter Randy Couture, and even Al Pacino’s father. I thought that part was pretty cool. But the movie was terrible. I knew it from the start. I had been around cameras enough at that point to know this film was bad. I remembered all the continuity issues. I was always saying things like, “I wasn’t wearing this watch in the last scene.”

  At the end of the day they didn’t release it. The UFC threatened to sue them over the use of the octagon cage, which the UFC claimed they owned exclusively. (This was the new UFC era, when Dana White was running things.) The movie came out overseas. Later on it was released on video under a different title.

  Then I made a mistake. I auditioned for a huge commercial, and I got offered the part—a national ad campaign for Old Spice aftershave. At around the same time, I got offered a commentating job for UFC. There was a scheduling conflict. The two jobs were happening right at the same time. I couldn’t do both. So I asked my agent which one paid more. She said you never know about these commercial things. Straight money, the UFC gig paid more. So I booked that one. I didn’t understand about residuals, I guess. The UFC gig was just a regular job. I got paid some money to do the gig, and that was that. But the Old Spice commercial was a national commercial, playing all over the country. It was on television forever. The actor who got that job is probably still getting checks.

  One day Angelina and I were talking about something, and it turned into a fight, and the fight turned into a huge screaming match. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was already sleeping on the couch. We weren’t getting along at all. So I said, “You know what? This is uncomfortable. I’m unhappy. I don’t want to do this anymore.” My sister was living in Redondo Beach. I said I’d go stay with her for a while. Angie was very calm about it. She said that was OK with her. I put my gym bag together and went to work out.

  But I couldn’t work out. I was fuming. I felt miserable. So I went home. Angie wasn’t there. But two hours later she came home. She was dressed real sharp, in a business suit. She said, “Guess what? I just finished emptying your bank account. I’ll see you in court.” I lost it. I told her she had to leave. I threw her out. Then I packed my stuff and left, and moved in with my sister.

  Angelina had, in fact, taken all my money. I had saved about $180,000 from fighting. That was my entire fortune. It was going to be the money that financed my movie career. Well, that was gone. She had taken every penny. I had two retirement accounts that she didn’t know about, that I’d set up before meeting her. I cashed those out. That’s what I lived on while I stayed with my sister.

  We wound up in divorce court. By then, the money was almost all gone. Angelina told the judge she had spent $160,000. She couldn’t say how. But she wanted more money to live on. That pissed the judge off. He told her to get a job and to come back in two weeks and be ready to account for all the money she had spent. The following day, she offered to settle. She told me, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was doing.” She said she didn’t have any money left, not even to pay her attorney, who ditched her after the judge’s demand. She asked me to forgive her, and said she would come back to me if I wanted.

  I didn’t. Paying her attorney fees and mine cost me my last $7,000.

  A couple of years before, at a wedding in Hawaii in 1998, I had met a really nice woman named Amy. I knew her brother-in-law, a chiropractor in San Jose. For the past three years he had been giving me treatments for my bad back. Amy was married at the time, and so was I. But by the time we met again, both our marriages had fallen apart. Now, suddenly, we were both living in California, both living with our sisters. I was still seeing her brother-in-law regularly for treatment. I would go up to Los Altos to work or to train and to see him. He took appointments at his house. I’d go over there to let him work on me. Amy was living in his guesthouse. We started hanging out. I was back and forth between L.A., Japan, and San Jose. I was training and trying to get acting jobs.

  Over the next six months, I started getting really serious about Amy. Things with Angie were over. I told Amy, “We need to be hanging out more.” I had some work in L.A. that was going to last a few months. I asked her if she wanted to come live with me down there. She had a high-paying marketing job, but she quit to come to L.A. and be with me.

  I saw Angelina once more after that. I was in San Jose. She called me and said, “I need to see you. Can you meet me?” We arranged to meet in a park. She showed up, looking all dolled up and hot. She said, “I’ll do whatever you want if you’ll take me back.” I told her, “No. I’m sorry. I’m not interested. You’re not pretty to me anymore.” She wasn’t. I had seen what she looked like on the inside.

  I had always kept in contact with my son. I tried to call him once a week no matter what. I tried to maintain a relationship with him. He was a flighty kid; his mother was a flighty person and I am his dad. I never got to see what she was like as a mom; I was in prison at first, and then we were separated. And I never really got to be a dad. My son was four when I got out of prison, but during the time after that I was working a lot, or running around and being irresponsible.

  I had changed, but my ex-wife hadn’t. She and little Frankie were living in Salt Lake City. I didn’t know at the time, but she was addicted to meth. She was always disappearing. The phone or the lights were always getting turned off because she hadn’t paid the bill. I never knew what was going on, but every once in a while I’d have to send them $200 to get the phone turned on just so I could talk to my son.

  By the time little Frank was seven or eight years old, he could travel by himself. So I would fly him out to meet me. It was important for me to spend time with him, and I thought it was important for him to have a healthy role model in his life. His mom always had men around. There was usually a guy living with them. She had a couple of husbands after me. She had children with four or five men. My son has half-brothers whose names he doesn’t even know.

  It was hard for him and hard for me. On paper I was not very fit to be his father, with my record and history. I always figured he was better off with his mom. I worried about him a lot. By the time he was twelve, I was able to get him a debit card and his own phone. Before that, I’d send him money and it would just disappear. Now I could send money to his account and be pretty sure he was using it for himself, for the things he needed. We had a rule: you always call home on Sunday. I started hearing from him more regularly.

  Things were going well with Amy. For the first time in my life, I was with someone who was a really good person. She had had a normal childhood, with a mother and father who were truly present. She had a real family—very tight and loving. So she’s very normal, stable, and together. She’s caring, in a way that I had never experienced. She’s honest, and she’s fair. I’d never had that in a relationship. It made a huge difference in my life and in how I felt about myself.

  I had some business ventures that didn’t do as well as I’d planned. My acting career wasn’t taking off the way I’d wanted it to. I got invited to do some MMA training seminars, and that was cool. Amy and I went to Japan and Denmark to do some fight training workshops. That was good, but it wasn’t going to sustain me as a career.

  So I decided to return to fighting. I went to work for the Japanese Yakuza. K-1 is a powerful Japanese combat sports organization, and at that time it was the top kickboxing organizer in the world. But everybody knew it was controlled by the Yakuza, or the Japanese Mafia. All the big combat shows in Japan were financed by the Yazuka. It was common knowledge in the underworld who provided the money for the shows. In Japan the Yakuza touches nearly every corner of normal business. Right out of a cheesy foreign film, they all dressed in black leather trench coats and drove black AMG Mercedes. I knew that, too. But I went to
work for them. I agreed to fight Elvis Sinosic in December 2000 in Tokyo.

  Kickboxing rules were similar to MMA rules. You couldn’t strike your opponent with your head or your elbow, and you couldn’t use choke holds or submission holds, and you couldn’t attack when the other guy was on the ground. Pretty much everything else was OK.

  I trained hard. I got ready. I studied Elvis Sinosic. He was known as “the King of Rock ‘n’ Rumble.” He was big—six foot three, 205 pounds—and he’d had a lot of success in his own country, Australia. He was the first MMA champ there and had beaten pretty much everyone in that part of the world. The fight in Tokyo was going to be his first fight against an American champion. He wasn’t expected to do very well. I didn’t think he’d last more than one round. I knew he was tough, but I knew he had a breaking point, too. I thought I could get him to that point quickly, and I thought I could break his spirit.

  I had watched his fights. I had watched his reactions to adversity. You can learn a lot, watching that, if you know what to look for. Some guys, when faced with real adversity, don’t wilt. A real tough guy automatically steps it up. A so-so tough guy ramps it up, but there is a sort of dip before he ramps it up. A not-so-tough guy, it goes flat. It bottoms out. It may ramp up after that, or it may not, but you can see it go flat.

  I had seen Elvis get into a bad spot during a fight, with some real adversity, and then question himself and experience that dip— and then recover. I thought if I pushed him further I could push through that dip and beat him. So I wasn’t too worried about beating him. But three weeks before the fight, while I was training, I got a SLAP tear in my shoulder. I was training in San Jose, boxing with a lightweight guy, and after a few frustrating rounds had finally trapped him in the corner. When I went to smack him, he stepped out of the way and my arm just kept going. I was wearing eighteen-ounce gloves, and the ligaments and tendons in my shoulder just snapped.

  I told the doctors I had to fight in three weeks. They told me to forget it. I went to see my chiropractor. He said no go. Then my coach, Javier Mendez, took me to see this dude named Calderon, who ran a tire shop on the east side of San Jose. Javier had taken me there once before to get treatment on my neck. Calderon was about seventy years old, and he had this back room at his tire shop. He took me in there and put me on the table and moved some stuff around. It didn’t seem to do anything. Javier said, “Give him twenty bucks.” I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. But the shoulder injury was serious, and I didn’t know what else to do. So when Javier said, “We’d better go see Calderon,” I went.

  Calderon took me into the back room again, and put me on the table, and moved some stuff around. He told me to boil a pot with the herb arnica in it and soak a rag in the mix. I had to put it on my shoulder for a half hour, several times a day. He told me not to punch anything for a while. I gave him another twenty bucks.

  I wasn’t able to do any more boxing training before the fight. I did the ice thing and the arnica thing. I wore a sling until a week before the fight and then took it off so no one would know I was hurt. When it was time to go to Japan, Amy went with me.

  The fight was a big deal. It was the very first MMA-style fight ever broadcast on Tokyo TV, which is like the CBS or NBC of Japan. The Tokyo Dome was full. There were sixteen fighters on the bill for the night. Ours was billed as the “Superfight.” The reigning K-1 champion, Ernesto Hoost, kept his title. Elvis and I were going to go for five three-minute rounds.

  This was probably one of the largest martial arts events in history. There were eighty thousand fans in the arena waiting for MMA action. But it turned out they weren’t ready for it. They’d never seen anything like American-style MMA. I came into the ring and the fight started, and I foot-kicked this guy in the face and I could hear that they didn’t like it. I could actually hear it. All eighty thousand of them seemed to get really quiet, like … this was bad.

  The fight went my way right from the start, except that my shoulder hurt. I thought Elvis was going to give up. But I didn’t know he wasn’t going to give up until the end. I found out later that he went to his corner after the first round and told them he was done. He told me so, himself. But his corner guys screamed at him and called him names and made him mad. So he came back out. We had to go the full five rounds. I won by decision. I thought it was a good fight, even though I could hardly lift my arm and was not very effective on one side. But it was still a real battle. I came out and stomped his head and kicked his face and won the fight. But it was the last one I ever fought in Japan. People weren’t ready for it. The sport was still too new.

  When it was over, I went back to California and saw the surgeons again. They opened my shoulder up, cleaned it and sewed it and reattached it. I don’t know if I made things worse fighting Elvis with an injured shoulder or not.

  One of the main reasons I fought Elvis was that I’d made a deal with the K-1 guys. They were going to use that fight to launch a huge MMA league—our MMA league. They were going to give me a bunch of money for that. They were going to use my name and image to brand it, and we were going to build an MMA empire in Japan and come back to the US to compete against the UFC.

  But I hung around for a year after the Elvis fight while they tried to get things going. I went to endless meetings at which there was a lot of talk and never any decisions. I learned about the Japanese way of doing business. Finally it became clear that they didn’t know what they were doing in MMA, and they didn’t have any money. Before that, I’d always gotten paid in cash. After a fight, the promoter would invite you to his suite where he would sit at a table with two leather-clad guards behind him and enormous stacks of money in front of him. He was always smoking a cigarette, and he always handed you a tiny paper bag filled with cash. It was always clean, fresh, sequential one hundred dollar bills. He’d always present me with the bag and ask me if I wanted to count it.

  It didn’t matter how much I was getting paid. I always got paid the same way. Sometimes it was $10,000. One time it was $80,000. In cash. That was a big bag. But now there were money problems. No more gobs of cash. I told them it was time for a change—they were using my name and they weren’t paying me! Luckily, when I first began studying Japanese business methods I learned about a common business practice to help guide a business decision or dispute. It’s called the Naniwambashi strategy. It’s the melodramatic story of how you have sacrificed so much for the company and without this decision in your favor, you and possibly your whole family will be on the streets. The more drama the better!

  Now it was time to tell my story to Master Ishi and the heads of K-1. Then the checks started coming, and it was good money, but after another year or so it was obvious they weren’t going to be able to make it happen. I was very serious about branding, and about moving my brand forward. I had giant hopes for my sport. I knew it was going to be huge. But I couldn’t be tied up with people who weren’t able to make it happen. So in 2002 I told them I was out, and they let me go do my own thing.

  I realized that I would have to get the money myself. I would need to study financing, and understand distribution. I had been relying on them to do that. I would have to rely on myself. So I started studying business.

  Some time before that I had started talking to gyms. Partly on Angie’s advice, because she was so into fitness, we looked at expanding the MMA idea into gyms. We started pitching Gold’s Gym, which had been the original sponsor for the UFC. The Gold’s Gym people told us to come on down to Venice Beach. Angie and I met them and started training with them. They were wonderful to work with. They sponsored me for a few years with clothes and equipment, and I’d get to pose for pictures next to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  Nothing came of the Gold’s conversations but some great friendships, and they eventually sold out to another company. But I started thinking about teaching and ended up doing a huge amount of it. This wasn’t new for me. I had taught a lot of Ken’s guys in the original Lion’s Den in Lodi. I had opened Ken’
s gym, Lion’s Den Submission Academy, in 1997. In San Jose, I started teaching at the American Kickboxing Academy. Any time I wasn’t fighting, I was teaching. I taught the judo students at San Jose State. I taught the tae kwon do guys. In 1998 I started going overseas, teaching in Japan, teaching in Denmark. I was expanding my brand and increasing my teaching ability. I started doing seminars in Europe.

  I did one pro wrestling match in Japan, too. It was what I call “stiff” pro wrestling. In Japan, the line between fighting and wrestling is very thin. It’s a kind of soft fighting. There are kicks, and you can use your knees, and you can use all the submission moves. It’s just like a real fight. You do all the moves. You just don’t finish them. And you know who the winner is before you start. It’s not exactly staged fighting. It’s like real staged fighting. They took real fighting, which is dangerous and unpredictable, and gave it an ending. The winner is determined ahead of time. But everything else, 90 percent of the fighting, is real fighting. You decide ahead of time who’s going to win and how. For example, I’m going to finish with a leg lock. For the next ten minutes, you beat the hell out of each other. Then you do your leg lock and it’s over.

  I fought a guy named Daisuke Nakamura. It was my last pro wrestling match. I didn’t fight again for another couple of years, but I was busy. I always had a fighting team that I managed and traveled with. (That was how it always was with me. When I left Ken and the Lion’s Den, I had started a team of guys almost at once. We trained together every day, ate together every day. That was how I always worked with fighters. We became family.) We fought all over. One time we got a contract to do a fight in Wenatchee, Washington. That’s an apple-growing area, out in the middle of nowhere. We arrived to find everything all messed up. Everyone at the hotel had been drinking. My guys and I tried to go to bed, but we all kept getting woken up. There were fighters running in the hall, knocking on doors, acting like idiots. Someone set up a bucket over my door so that when I opened it I’d get soaked.