He looked serious. So I ran. I was in my sandals, but he was fat. I figured I had a chance. I also figured he wasn’t crazy enough to chase me around the Home Depot parking lot with a bloody face and an eight-inch hunting knife, but I was wrong. He was crazy enough. I ran and he chased me. I got near my car. I was thinking I’d jump in and lock the doors and drive away. But then I remembered I was driving my Camaro—and it was a convertible. He’d cut my throat. So I kept running.
We did two or three laps around the parking lot. He kept coming, with his bloody face and his knife in one hand and his cell phone in the other. Was he calling for backup? I don’t know, but he wouldn’t give up. Finally I ran back into the Home Depot itself and lost him somewhere. I made my exit through the garden shop. I got into my car and then, because I couldn’t help it, drove around until I saw him. I beeped and yelled, “Hey! I just kicked your ass! There’s nothing you can do about it!” Then I drove home.
I remembered Bob Shamrock telling me not to street fight. He was right.
Periodically someone would ask me about Ken, whether the two of us ever planned on fighting each other. They wanted to talk about our “relationship.” I tried to explain that I had never had a relationship with Ken that was about anything except fighting. We’ve never had a serious conversation about anything else. He was my mentor. I owe my life in martial arts to him. I will always honor that. But that’s pretty much it. I’ve never received a Christmas card from Ken. He didn’t come to my wedding, or send me congratulatory notes when my children were born. We would see each other every six months or so, usually at a fight. “Hey, bro, how’s it going?” I know my next-door neighbor better than I know Ken Shamrock. That’s just the way it is.
By 2003, I had been away from fighting for almost three years. In March, I was scheduled to meet Bryan Pardoe at a fight in California, organized by World Extreme Cagefighting, that was billed as “Return of a Legend.” I was already a legend. We were going to fight for the WEC light heavyweight title.
Bryan Pardoe was a big heavy dude who was known as “Pain Inducer” Pardoe. He weighed about 220 pounds. I had bulked up from my usual 185 and weighed in at 205. (In truth, I weighed in wearing slacks, covering my legs, because I had three-pound leg weights on. I am not sure if this was cheating; I was trying to weigh more so that I could fight someone who was bigger than I was. I knew that the WEC 205 title was vacant and would look great on my resume. Our fight was on an Indian reservation, so I knew the commission would be lax. No one said a word about the Hugo Boss slacks I was wearing. But it boosted my weight up; I only really weighed about 194.) But Bryan was tall. He had four or five inches on me. When we met in the ring, he looked down on me—but I noticed he couldn’t look me in the eyes. I felt like I had him beat before we even started. The announcer said, “We’ve waited years to see this. The return of Frank Shamrock…starts now.”
And it was on. I threw a kick or two. He threw a punch—and landed one, hard, that rang my bell. When I blinked my eyes to recover he rushed me into the cage and ripped my legs out from under me so he could get on top. He held me there and tried to hit my face for a full minute, but it cost him a lot. I was hitting him hard in the side of the head, boxing his ears, and he had to spend a huge amount of energy just keeping me down and staying out of the way.
When he got tired, I was able to swing my legs up and over him, flip him over, and trap his arm in a straight arm bar—an upside-down version of the arm bar hold I had used to beat Kevin Jackson. The fight was stopped at 1:46 in the first round.
Bryan was cool about it. He congratulated me and we hugged. The announcer said, “He’s ba-a-a-ack.”
By accident, I acquired a nickname. Everywhere I went, people would say, “Hey, what’s up, Legend?” The title of the event, the pay-per-view title, and the title of the DVD from it was now my nickname. Before that, I was just the guy who came out, kicked your ass, and sauntered off. I didn’t take a nickname out of pride; I wanted the fans to give me one, and they did after the Pardoe fight. I became Frank “Legend” Shamrock, or Frank “the Legend” Shamrock, and it stuck. It would be a while before I fought again after that win. But I was busy. For one thing, I got married.
Amy and I had put ourselves on a five-year plan. She wanted to get married and have children right away. But I was just coming off a tough marriage and bad breakup. I didn’t feel ready. I was traveling the world, fighting and teaching, and I dragged her along with me. It was great, but I was still stung from my last marriage. So I suggested a five-year plan. We went into the hanging-out phase. The theory was in five years we’d get ourselves together and be ready to get married.
I knew right away that I loved her and wanted to be with her. (Here’s one way I knew: at night, when I stayed over at her house, after I was already asleep, she would put toothpaste on my toothbrush for me so I wouldn’t have to do it when I woke up.) I knew we were going to be together. After five years, I was ready.
It was a very private event. Amy had come from a Jehovah’s Witnesses background, just like me. She had a lot of issues with the church and religion. So we didn’t want to have a church wedding. Because of that, her family wasn’t going to attend. My family was scattered all over the place. So we decided to save our money and have a dream wedding and honeymoon all in one. We went to Jamaica. The wedding was attended by a preacher, some singers, a guy playing a ukulele, and a girl with flowers. No guests, just us. It was August 12, 2005, and it was incredibly beautiful.
I think we got our groove going even better once we got married. We started thinking about raising a family. We bought a house in south San Jose. I was training and fighting. I was ready for the whole thing. I could see the future. I could see the industry was finally turning around.
I was still working to bring MMA up to the level I thought it could reach. I became a coach with the International Fight League. The IFL was the brainchild of two investors who were huge fight fans. They raised $150 million to start a company that they thought could challenge the UFC for MMA dominance. The theory was to create a league of fight camps and bring them together for face-offs. They got the best people in the business as coaches, and the coaches pulled together the best fighters.
They had all the top names. Ken Shamrock’s Lion’s Den became the Nevada Lions, based in Reno where Ken and Bob were living. Maurice Smith was coach of the Seattle Tiger Sharks. Igor Zinoviev was coach of the Chicago Red Bears. Renzo Gracie was coach of the New York Pitbulls. And I was coach of the San Jose Razorclaws.
We had a lot of trouble setting the whole thing up. The UFC sued. IFL countersued. Threats and counter-threats flew around. It took a couple of years for IFL to get a TV contract, on Fox Sport Network’s My Network TV. When the first fight was televised, the IFL became the first MMA show to have a regularly scheduled time slot on broadcast TV.
The promoters took advantage of my relationship, or lack thereof, with Ken. They advertised my camp versus his camp, brother versus brother. “Two brothers! Two legends! Too bad they hate each other!” They quoted Ken saying, “I would have no bones with punching him in the face.” They quoted me saying, “I equate it to going out to war.” They billed it as a fight “for family honor.”
We didn’t meet in the ring, but our teams did. I had Josh Odom, Donny Liles, Jeff Quinlan, Brian Ebersole, Vince Lucero, Raphael Davis, Brent Beauparlant, and Ray Steinbeiss on my side. But Ken’s guys beat us three fights out of five.
For a long time, people had talked about matching me up against Ken as fighters. With the two of us faced off as coaches, that talk got a little louder. The IFL produced a promo spot, in fact, advertising the fight as if it were already happening. The ad was mostly Ken talking. “Frank has been talking about fighting me for years,” he said, looking serious. “But every time I tried to make it happen, he’s disappeared. Well, I made sure it’s in the contract this time, so there is no disappearing. On his part.”
There were pieces of video cut into it, including some of me
. But Ken kept talking. “I don’t dislike my brother. He’s my brother, and I love him and I wish the best for him. This fight is about Frank coming of age. And Ken Shamrock putting his little brother back where he belongs.”
He didn’t dislike me. He just wanted to kill me. But in a loving way. “I’ve fought many, many guys,” he continued. “I mean, I’ve fought everyone in the world. I’ve made a lot of people a lot of money, fighting with me. Why not, I make my brother money? I beat him up anyways. For free! So why not put him in the ring and let’s do a brother-on-brother thing. It’s never been done before.”
So it was just about him trying to make me some money.
“Fighting is not a dirty thing,” he said. “Brothers fighting is not a dirty thing. It happens every day in this world. They just don’t get paid for it. So now I’m gonna bring my brother into the ring. I’m gonna beat him up. And I’m gonna pay him for it.”
I never made an ad to say what I thought about it.
Over the years there were many attempts made to get us into the ring together. At one point, we actually got really close to doing it. I had met some Silicon Valley finance guys. They were really excited about MMA and a “blood brothers” concept. We were going to tell the story of MMA, using the stories of Ken and me, and then finish with us fighting each other.
But Ken kept signing all these other contracts that got in the way. He was fighting this person and that person. Then he had a weird encounter with Kimbo Slice. Ken had signed to fight Kimbo at an October 2008 EliteXC event. It was a big fight and was going to be broadcast on CBS. But the day of the fight, while Ken was training with a sparring partner, he took a head butt and got cut above his eye. It took six stitches to close it. The examining doctor said Ken couldn’t fight.
I don’t know what really happened. What I believe is that he found out right before the fight that Kimbo was being paid a whole lot more money than he was making and that he went a little nuts. He demanded more money. He made some threats. I think he lost control of himself and got injured—not on purpose, exactly, but the way a guy who has lost control is bound to.
Ken became a bit of a black sheep after that. No one wanted to invest in a fight that involved him, or him and me. The Silicon Valley deal went away. But a weird rumor got started. Someone started saying that I had offered to fight Kimbo myself—and offered to take a fall.
What is true about that is that I was part of the group that had organized Ken’s fight with Kimbo. I was involved with ProElite and EliteXC. So I was one of about twenty-five guys in the room trying to figure out what the hell to do when Ken couldn’t fight, and trying to come up with some way to save a multimillion-dollar production that was a very big deal in our sport.
So I did volunteer to fight Kimbo myself. We made the offer to Kimbo’s people, and I was actually waiting to get cleared by the commission to take the fight. Up until the evening of the fight itself, up until about an hour before the live TV event started, I thought I was going to do it. But then the word came from Kimbo’s camp— “absolutely not.” It was a question of skill level. I had about ten times Kimbo’s experience and ability. But he was a bigger guy. If I went out there and smashed him, it wouldn’t look very good on his record.
I was disappointed. I thought it would make a great sports story—Frank comes off the bench for his brother, defends the family honor, and beats the big guy. But I was also a little relieved. My back was in bad shape. It was hurting me a lot. I hadn’t been training for a fight. It would have been a tough fight for me. But I would have done it, for the story.
In the end, Kimbo went up against a fighter named Seth Petruzelli—who beat him by TKO fourteen seconds into the first round. Petruzelli said after the fight that the EliteXC promoters had offered him more money to stand up and punch it out with Kimbo rather than take him to the ground. He later retracted that, but the Florida sports commission convened an investigation anyway. They didn’t come up with anything.
Years later, a former Elite guy named Jared Shaw started telling people that I had secretly offered to do the fight and throw it in Kimbo’s favor. He said he was shocked and disgusted, but that he thought I was serious—because he thought I had worked the fight against Cung, too. Why else would I have stood up for that fight and not gone to the ground unless the promoters had paid me to do it? It was a ridiculous charge, and I don’t think anyone took it seriously. Why would I do such a thing? My career was doing fine. I had no reason to throw a fight. They couldn’t have possibly had enough money to induce me to do that, even if I’d been willing.
As for the guy making the charge, I think he was just a little confused. I actually think Jared Shaw is just a guy who smokes too much weed and was upset not to be more involved in MMA than he was. This was his attempt to use the popularity of my brand to create a little heat for himself. He hinted that he was writing some sort of tell-all book about the MMA world. Maybe he was trying to get people excited about that, but it didn’t work. It made him look like an idiot.
But one of the beautiful things about MMA is that it’s still so small that any idiot with the gumption can get up and make a fuss about something. I don’t know what the guy’s problem was. My lawyers said I could sue him, but he didn’t seem worth bothering about. I told his people to tell him to shut up, and he did, and it was over.
Back in 2006, I had another family feud on my hands. I had started having conversations with Scott Coker about something new he was putting together called Strikeforce MMA. Scott was a local guy, a kickboxer and kickboxing promoter. We had known each other since way back in the K-1 days, and I had a lot of respect for him. He had organized a new fight company and he asked me to be in its premier fight—against Cesar Gracie.
The Gracie family was perceived to be the number one enemy of the Shamrock family. The feud went way back to the early Lion’s Den days. The Gracies are a huge family and they had already had a giant influence on the world of martial arts. Cesar’s great-uncles Carlos and Helio invented Brazilian jujitsu. Between the two of them and Cesar’s uncle Carlos Robson Gracie, they became a dominant force in California MMA. A bunch of them opened gyms that were in direct competition with Ken’s Lion’s Den.
Ken had lost his first matchup against another Gracie, Royce, back in 1993. They’d had their rematch in 1995 and fought to a draw. (If you see the pictures from that fight, you’d think Ken had won. He’s smiling, and Royce looks like he’s been hit by a bus. But it was still a draw because we had no judges back then; if you didn’t lose in thirty minutes, it was a draw.)
Even though Ken and I were hardly even speaking by then, the fight between Cesar and me was hyped as a superfight between bitter rivals. The fight was set for March 10, 2006, and scheduled for the new HP Pavilion in San Jose. It was going to be the first sanctioned MMA fight in the state of California. And it was a huge success for Strikeforce. The fight was a sellout, and it set a new record for paid attendance at just over eighteen thousand.
It had taken almost two years to put together. The Gracies started it; Cesar cropped up on the Internet, talking crap and making outlandish statements. He said he could beat me easily, once I was retired. Someone brought that to my attention, and I said, “Hey, this is money!” I was on the beach in Hawaii, vacationing with Amy, when I first heard about it. When I got back, I started talking to Scott Coker about setting it up. I wrote a note to Cesar, accepting his challenge and posting it online. But the sport wasn’t legal in California. Scott had no TV deal. There was no money for a fight like this outside the local San Jose community. But we rallied the state. We kept the heat alive. A commission was appointed. Scott went to them and said he was the most experienced fight promoter in the state. The commission did their thing, and we got our shot.
Cesar had kept up his line of talk. He was going to kill me. He was 10 and 0 in his fights in Brazil. But there were no videos of any of them. Going in, we couldn’t find any actual records either. We did not think he was 10 and 0. They do these challen
ge matches in Brazil, where someone just shows up at a gym and challenges you. Maybe he had ten of those. But there was no evidence that he had actually fought anyone. We thought maybe he was making up stuff about his experience. But I still trained really hard. I trained my ass off. I got into fantastic shape. I had Maurice working with me, and all my guys. I knew he was a jujitsu guy and a grappler. I didn’t think he was a striker. I believed I could beat him in striking. But he was an unknown in a lot of ways. I knew the fight was going to be one of those pivotal moments, where I suddenly saw my opening and got my shot, or one of those “oh shit” moments where I suddenly realize I’m in trouble. But I didn’t think he could beat me.
The undercard was impressive. A relatively new guy named Gilbert Melendez was fighting Harris Sarmiento. A new guy named Nick Diaz was fighting Tony Juares. Gilbert and Nick were both Gracie camp fighters. It was also the MMA debut of a new fighter named Cung Le, another local San Jose guy who’d already been a kickboxing champion. I wasn’t paying too much attention to all that. I was the headliner. I was busy thinking about my fight. I came out in red shorts, ready to go.
I had fought in front of a larger crowd before. But that was in Japan, where everyone is polite and quiet. This was nearly eighteen thousand fans and they were insane. I’m not sure what they were expecting. At the time, I wasn’t sure whether they knew it was Cesar and me, or thought it was Ken and Royce, or what. They wanted to see a Shamrock and a Gracie kick each other’s asses. They were super-excited, and loud. I had never felt anything like the energy in that arena. I got really fired up.
I was bouncing around on the balls of my feet—very energized. I was watching Cesar. He actually looked a little out of shape. We were about the same weight. I was a little taller. Then he took off his shirt and I saw he had a little roll. He had a little cheese around the middle. I knew he hadn’t trained very hard. We had met at the photo shoot. He had a very, very strong grip, which made me a little nervous. My question was about his stamina. I always expect the worst. I expect long, hard fights. I train for long, hard fights. For this one, I didn’t think he was going to strike a lot, and I didn’t think he was going to have the stamina to fight fast and hard for very long. So that’s what I was planning on. When he took his shirt off, I got a little more confident.
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