Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  In those days I was already a big participant on the Internet. I was on the message boards all the time. I knew we had a million fans out there, actively consuming our product. At least 20 percent of them seem to be saying something negative about me. Martial arts, Shamrock style, was supposed to be about honor and respect. Now I was going all street fighter. So when I was asked to fight Phil Baroni, it was essential that I say yes. And it was essential that I fight hard and win. I had to bring honor back to my brand.

  12

  FIGHTING BARONI, ORTIZ, AND CUNG LE

  The Phil Baroni fight was set for June 2007, just five months after the Renzo Gracie fight. It was set for my hometown, San Jose. I had never fought Phil before, but I knew him and his situation pretty well. He was a former wrestler with a lot of stand-up boxing ability. We were about the same size at the time, although naturally I was ten pounds heavier. He was originally from New York, but we both lived in San Jose. He was a longtime UFC guy and had fought for PRIDE, which was the premier Japanese MMA organization for a long time.

  But UFC had just bought PRIDE a couple of months before, and they had cut Baroni from their roster. He had lost his last fight, on New Year’s Eve. He needed a big fight, and he needed a win.

  So did I. The fans had to see me fight a tough fight and win clean. They had to see me show up and defend my title. If I didn’t show up and fight well, I was finished. They would think I had cheated, that I was old, that it had all been smoke and mirrors the whole time. My brand would be toast.

  There was another reason I had to show up and win. Baroni had called me out—literally, called me out—in public. It turned into one of the ugliest feuds in MMA history. In fact, Phil Baroni didn’t start it. Josh Thomson did.

  Josh Thomson had been one of my young boys when I started training fighters for the Shamrock team at the American Kickboxing Academy. But he was a spoiled white kid who couldn’t take it. He was a quitter. He always quit when things got tough. He was a loudmouth and full of big talk, but he was a quitter when it came time to back it up in the gym. So I rode him pretty hard. I used to beat on him and try to make him stronger. But he was a punk, and I didn’t like him. Ultimately, I threw him off the team.

  But then I stopped training the team. They were still my guys, but I wasn’t personally around as much. I was in Los Angeles. I was going around the world, doing trainings and seminars. While I was away, Josh came back and started training with the team again. I still didn’t like him, and he was still a punk, but he was training with my guys.

  While we were trying hard to get the Gracie fight set up, the MMA scene was starting to take off on the Internet. There was a lot of new media. People were using YouTube and message boards in really aggressive ways. Josh saw an opportunity to go after me. He started commenting online, and saying nasty things about me, as a way to build his own brand. He was smart to do it. My brand was high, my name recognition was strong, and he was a nobody. So it was a clever way for him to get some attention.

  But then it started to get even more public. I was commentating at one of his fights, and he wore a T-shirt that said, FRANK GLAMROCK IS MY BITCH. Now, this was an old gimmick. Tito Ortiz had done it forever.

  Then it got a little more intense, because Josh Thomson’s roommate and training partner was Phil Baroni. Baroni’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, and he got all caught up in this feud, and he started posting things, too. He saw an opportunity to advance his name and maybe get a fight with me. And that created an opportunity for me. I knew I could never fight Josh. He was too little—a lightweight, about 155 pounds. But I could definitely fight Phil. So when he started posting things, I didn’t brush him off like I had Josh. I saw a chance to get something going. I started antagonizing him back.

  His early online comments were mean. I always spoke professionally as a martial artist in those days. I’d say things like “Here is the lesson” and “This is what I believe about fighting …” His comments were all along the lines of “He’s a total pussy” and “He’s a douchebag” and “I’m going to bounce his head off the cage.”

  These were draw-the-line statements. I took the bait. I started putting out my own little videos. They were great. I called him Phil Baloney, and Phil Steroni. I taunted him. I wanted him to get mad enough to fight me. It worked. We came to an agreement for a fight. I took it to Scott Coker as part of my Strikeforce arrangement with him. Everybody was in.

  We put together a December 2005 date for the Baroni fight. I started building it up on the Internet. I shot more videos. But then a problem came up: Baroni was trying to get to 185 pounds to fight me, and he took steroids to do it. He’s a natural 170, but suddenly he was huge. That was going to be a problem. This was a championship fight. The California fight commission told Baroni he’d have to pass a drug test. He’d failed one once before. They told him he’d have to take another test thirty or sixty days before the fight.

  He couldn’t do it. He advised Scott Coker that he wasn’t going to make it. Suddenly the fight was postponed. His drug test became a contractual roadblock. I took advantage of that. As soon as there were scheduling problems, I started making fun of him. I went public. I saw a way to capitalize. I made another movie. In it, I’m sitting in my backyard, wearing a T-shirt and a cap, smoking a fat cigar.

  ”I got breaking news,” I said. “I’m smoking a cigar, which means I’m not training 100 percent. Phil Baroni has backed out of a December eighth pay-per-view event. Apparently Phil Baroni had some ‘personal’ issues that will not allow me to knock him out for American pay-per-view. Don’t know why. Don’t know why the guy called me out. But if those issues are going to prevent him from being a man, then they must be very, very personal. My personal opinion is he’s a steroided miniature idiot who should have never challenged me. Look, here’s the deal: If you guys want to challenge me, you want to be a player, if your name is Gracie, give me a call. I can put the fight together. I’ll be more than happy to knock you out on pay-per-view. If you’re an idiot named Phil Steroni, don’t call me back. You’re wasting my time.”

  The barbs went back and forth. Baroni said, “Frank Shamrock is a punk. He’s going to stand with me and knock me out? I’m a fucking knockout artist. I’m gonna break this dude’s jaw. I’m gonna hit him and forget him. He can’t hurt me. He wants to go punch for punch? He can’t hurt me. I’m gonna hurt him.” I got on camera and said, with a sort of amused smile, “I don’t know if Phil is aware of how stupid he is. He’s a complete meathead. Phil? You’re a complete idiot.” He came back, very angry, with “You ready? You better be ready. ‘Cause I’m coming for you, bro. I’m coming to get you.”

  The feud was both good and bad for me. It was good because it built up expectation for the fight. But Showtime really wanted to move forward. When we couldn’t make the Baroni fight happen, suddenly the Renzo Gracie fight was on. The buildup for the Baroni fight brought a lot of extra heat to the Renzo fight. But I lost that, I looked like an asshole, and my brand took a huge hit. It became essential that I get the Baroni fight going and that I win.

  The fight was finally scheduled, and it looked like it was really going to happen. I may have been smoking that cigar in the video, but I took this one very seriously. I left home for a training camp, which I’d never really done before. I moved down to Temecula, California, to train with Dan Henderson at his place down there. I moved in with my friend Bryan Foster. He had a sort of farm out there, with sheep and horses and pigs. It was a good place to concentrate on training. They had a little empty room, and I put my air mattress and books in it. That was my training camp. It reminded me of prison.

  It was a good plan, but it didn’t work out. On the very first day of training, I was working out with a judo champion who was going to show me some stuff. We were boxing and sparring. I knew that I was going to have beat Phil Baroni standing up. There was no other way to do it, and it was what the fans were going to demand. I was going to have to knock him out or get killed trying. Ther
e were huge expectations going into that fight. Nothing else would be acceptable.

  So I was training with the judo guy. He threw a jab, then he just exploded with a huge judo leg chop, and my knee collapsed. My leg was planted and it just stayed there. The knee took the whole blow. Then the rest of me went down. It blew out my ACL completely.

  I was screaming with pain. I screamed like a little baby. It was the worst pain I’d ever experienced in my life, except maybe for the day I did the initiation with Ken at the Lion’s Den. It was horrible. Somehow I managed to get to Whole Foods. I bought a bag of vegetables to make soup and a bag of ice to put on my knee. I didn’t see a doctor right away, and I didn’t tell anybody what had happened. I was hoping it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.

  It was only three weeks until the fight. There was no way I could back out. I had to show up. If I told the truth about what happened and said I wanted to reschedule it, the fans wouldn’t believe it. Baroni would make me look like a fool. I had to find some way to show up.

  For a while, all I did was meditate and read. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t even walk. I tried to do some training that didn’t include anything on the ground. I got into a swimming pool with my legs tied together with a bungee cord, to see how that would work. It didn’t work that well.

  I finally went to see a doctor. He said, “You have literally got no ACL.” He told me the only treatment for it was surgery. I told him I had to fight a championship fight in two weeks. He told me there was no way I could be ready for that.

  It was not good. We had settled everything. ProElite was in. Strikeforce was in. We were making our deal with Showtime. And then we got word that CBS was coming to town. Everybody at CBS was going to be at the Shamrock-Baroni fight to see if it was time for CBS to take a chance on MMA. This fight was going to be the test case, the one that could qualify us.

  So there was no way I could back out. Instead, the fight was going to be a really heavy mental test. I was going to have to bypass this really huge physical liability. I was going to have to go in with a new attitude: if you get knocked out, and you get killed, so what? Who gives a shit? That outcome was going to have to be OK.

  I trained what I could train. By the time of the weigh-in, I could walk with two knee braces on and not look like I was in pain. No one outside my camp knew what had happened. Usually I’m very vocal about my injuries and my problems. Most fighters hide that stuff. Not me. I tell everyone who will listen what is wrong with me: the fighters, the media, everyone. I don’t know why I started doing it, no one else does. But once I started talking about my injuries I noticed that some fighters believed it and other didn’t, so I kept telling everyone to confuse them. It worked because the fighters thought I was trying to mislead them with false information about injuries, because no one talked about getting hurt. Normally, I just laid it out there. But this was different. I started putting out rumors about my other knee.

  My wife and my son, who flew out for most of my fights in the United States, and my trainers knew what was going on. I said, “This is really bad. You guys should know.” So they knew. It was clear that since I hadn’t been able to do my training, and since my leg was hurt, I wasn’t going to be able to do my basic thing, which was wrestling. I was going to have to stand up and strike. I had a lot of confidence in my striking, but I didn’t have much experience. I had no idea whether I could beat Baroni that way.

  I was scared. The Phil Baroni I was about to face was a scary guy. A lot of that was an act. I know that because, way back when, Phil came to me when I was teaching and approached me in a very humble, very normal way. He was outside his persona, and he said, “Would you teach me some of that stuff?” He was very personable.

  But this was a different guy. He was angry, and he was taking steroids. He wanted to kill me. He was a guy who hit really hard and who was able to take a serious beating himself. I had never really been knocked out cold, like when your brain really turns off. I had been knocked unconscious, when I had my bell rung and went away for a second. But I had never been knocked out to the point where someone had to wake me up. That is very, very bad for your brain, and I really didn’t want anyone to do that to me.

  Phil Baroni looked like the guy who could do that. And the guy who really wanted to do that.

  I spent two weeks sitting on that mattress in Temecula, meditating, pumping my soul up for the fight that was coming. I wasn’t worried about performing. I had always performed, no matter what kind of injury I went in with. But I worried about concealing the knee injury, and about not having to back out.

  The night of the fight came. We had fourteen thousand paid admissions. It was a huge fight. I was ready. I was still in very bad shape, but I had a plan. The fighters are supposed to be in their dressing rooms an hour before the match. I was planning on getting a big shot of lidocaine in my knee right before I went out. The shot lasts about an hour. I made them wait with the shot, and just sat there in pain, until the very last minute. When they came and knocked on my door, I said, “Doc, give me the shot.”

  I went out. I was scared. I had limited gas, and I knew it was limited. I knew I was at 65 percent or less. It wasn’t good.

  Phil Baroni was scared, too. He had to have been. He was stepping into a fight that was way bigger than anything he’d ever done, on a stage that was way bigger. He had come to California despite the drug test threat. He probably knew he wasn’t going to pass. If he won the fight and got the championship, they’d probably take it away from him. But I had challenged his manhood. I had called him out. He was physically ready to kill me.

  For him, it was a career maker. For me, it was going to be really good or really bad. When it was over, either my career was going to be finished or I was going to be a superstar. I couldn’t have said one way or the other which way it was going to go.

  We came out. I wore white shorts. He was in red. I had on two red knee braces, one on each leg. I looked OK if you didn’t know why I was wearing them. Some sort of prefight online poll showed that most of the fans thought Baroni was going to win. For a while, at the beginning of the fight, it looked like they were right.

  He got me pinned against the cage, just like he said he was going to, and he bounced my head off it a few times. He was hitting fast and hard. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He wasn’t doing any real damage, and he was using up a lot of energy. This is something that happens to guys on steroids. Enson Inoue fought me like that. He came out on steroids and was brutal for a few minutes, and then he ran out of gas. I thought maybe Baroni would do that.

  We went down. We got up. We danced around. His initial burst of energy didn’t come back. I got the center of the ring. I hit him really hard on the chin. Nothing happened, but it felt really good. I moved him around the ring a little. I started to think maybe this was going to be OK.

  So I taunted him a little. I took my fists away from my face and sort of waved him in—come on and get me! Then I took my hands and did a little “nighty-night” move, like I was going to sleep, and then pointed at him—like I was going to put him to sleep.

  Two seconds later I hit him with a left jab and huge right, and he went down. I was on top of him fast, and hit him a bunch more times. He turned his head and I hit him in the back of the neck without thinking, just like during the Renzo fight. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I am totally kicking his ass and for whatever reason I start fouling him. I got a warning and a point against me. Then I got him in a front choke. The announcers actually called it. One of them said, “He’s going for the choke!” and then, “It’s over!”

  But it wasn’t over. It was only two minutes into the first round. And I was fighting Phil Baroni. Some guys might have tapped. But Baroni didn’t tap. He broke free. We were on our feet again. Then we were on the ground again. He was on top. He was hanging on, but he was absorbing a lot of blows doing it. I hit him again and again in the head.

  We were up again. I pushed him around to the edge of the mat, and g
ot him hard with a knee to the face. He went over, and I got another choke hold on him. He slipped out of that, but he was on the ground and I hit him again and again to the head.

  He escaped. He was up. I hit him again, with a really hard right, and then followed up with a knee. He looked a little stunned, but he didn’t fall over. So I did that some more. I was having fun. I was smiling. I taunted him some more—come on! I got inside and hit him with another really hard right and knee combination.

  The round was nearly over. I hit him again several times. His face looked terrible. He was staggering around. I got him to the edge of the cage, then we were on the floor. He was holding me down. It was all he could do. I saw Tom Casino, the Showtime photographer, shooting cageside and instinctively flashed him a peace sign. Baroni was too hurt and didn’t have the energy to do anything else. He managed to hang on until the end of the round.

  In the next round, he came back strong. He was boxing again. He hit me a couple of times, pretty hard, and I was tired. I couldn’t see the punches coming. He was bouncing around like he was fresh and ready to go. But it didn’t last. I hit him hard a couple of times, and then he was just swinging. He threw his arm around trying to land something. A couple of them landed. But I hit him again and again. I hit him hard. I had almost never hit anyone as hard as I hit Phil Baroni, and I hit him again and again. He was taking the most amazing amount of punishment.

  At two minutes left in the second round, I caught him by the edge of the cage with a combination of rights and lefts. He took me down as he fell. He tried for an arm bar. I tried for a guillotine. We grappled around. I got a rear naked choke on him. But he wasn’t going to go quietly. He was struggling. He was trying to hit me. He was getting weaker. But he wasn’t tapping. For the longest time, he wasn’t tapping.