Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  I got knocked over about halfway through the round. I sat on my butt and said, “Come on!” I was only kidding. I knew he wouldn’t come down to the ground after me. He’d get killed if he did that, and he knew it. So I popped back up. We were going to fight his fight. No problem.

  I was still walking him down the canvas. He was still using the right side kick effectively—in the leg, in the side, in the body—but it wasn’t hurting me much anymore. It was more distracting than anything else. He did land a right jab that caught me by surprise. I nodded my head a few times, as if to say, “Yeah, that was a good one.”

  I got a good one into him, too. I hit him really hard a few times, once in the throat. I felt my fist go in and squish, and I thought, “Wow, that’s going to hurt.” I had blocked a few more kicks with my right arm, which still felt weird. When I hit with it, I could feel it vibrating. But it didn’t seem all that important. It just hurt.

  The third round started. Cung came with a couple of high kicks that got me on the side of the head. I started to wonder if he was going for a decision, just trying to outlast me and score some points and win that way. I was starting to get tired. I could see he was starting to get tired, too. I could hear him gasp, a few times, on our exchanges. I was glad about that. Maybe my cardio was better than his. Our rhythms were similar. We were moving at about the same speed.

  But I also noticed he was starting to look really relaxed. He was finding a range. He was getting comfortable with the kicks. I didn’t like that. I needed to overcome that. He could see his range, and I needed to correct that. I remember feeling a sort of urgency about it—like I had to stop that now.

  It’s a little like dancing. One guy is usually leading. If the other guy controls the distance and controls the space between the two of you, then he gets the confidence and the timing for where and when the strikes are. If you control the area, you dictate. Most fighters dictate with the strike—with the jab or the punch. Cung was dictating with the side kick, or the fast round kick. He understood that was happening before I did. He had the range, and I couldn’t take it away from him. He got more confident, and his kicks increased in power and combination. He kicked me in the body a few times and it really hurt. He got a heel into my face, and that hurt pretty good, too. Then I hit him really hard, super-hard, with a left hook. It didn’t seem to do anything at all.

  He swept me with a leg kick and knocked me on my butt. I got up, nodding my head—that was a good one. But I got back into it. At about a minute left in the third round, I landed a very sharp right, and followed it with several really successful strikes. It looked like the fight was going to turn. The crowd went insane. I pushed Cung around pretty hard, and got him up against the side of the cage. We clinched, and then pushed off.

  I felt really good. I was sort of bobbing and bouncing as I walked him across the cage, with my hands down. I thought I might be able to finish him. Then he got me with another kick, a left kick to the right side of my head. That hurt. When he threw the next one, I blocked it. The pain was horrible. I felt the bone separate, and then I thought I was going to actually crap myself getting to my corner. The pain was unbelievable. I had never felt anything like it. The horn went and the round was over.

  The crowd went insane. They were on their feet. But I didn’t even make it to my corner. I fell down halfway there, and they had to pick me up and carry me to the stool. I felt like I was going to die. The pain was worse than anything I could ever remember feeling. When the bell rang, I couldn’t answer it. I was lying on my back, moaning. They called the fight for Cung. It was over.

  Cung strutted around the ring. He yelled that he loved his girlfriend. He crossed himself. He hugged people. He mugged for the cameras. I was lying on my back, crying and whimpering. I was begging for pain medication. I was begging for morphine. I don’t think I’d ever done that before.

  They brought out the belt. They ruled the fight a technical knockout. They crowned the new middleweight champion.

  I knew Cung couldn’t go past fifteen minutes. I knew I could outlast him. I knew he was afraid to get hit, and he didn’t have the conditioning. But I had made a mistake, a technical mistake. I didn’t anticipate his kicks would come that fast or have that much power. Fast kicks aren’t usually very powerful kicks, and I didn’t see that a fast kick could hurt that much. So when I blocked the kicks, I blocked with one arm. I had trained that way. I had practiced that. But I should have been using two for those big kicks. That’s what Maurice had said, but I was too arrogant to think that Cung could break my arm. If I’d done that, I would have KO-ed him in the third or fourth round.

  That’s the reason I stood up with him. I knew he would be toast by the end of the third round, and I could do what I wanted. But I was losing the fight. I had stood up and fought the way I wanted, but he was winning in points. I was doing some damage. I could see his eyes cross a couple of times. He was almost knocked out a couple of times. I was banging him up bad, in the third round, even while he was scoring more points.

  But his kicks were awesome. He really rang my bell hard with that last set of kicks to the side of the head. I never thought he was going to knock me out. He never hit me and made me see stars— although I think I did see two Cung Les, side by side, for a second, after one of those kicks that I didn’t see coming, probably the one that opened a cut that required eight staples to close.

  I hadn’t been aware how badly my arm was hurt. The rush is so high when you’re fighting. There is very little fear. You don’t feel much. You’re just flooring it. If you feel like you’re winning, there is this enormous rush of energy. If your opponent is whacking on you, and you feel like you’re losing, the opposite is true. Every time you try something and it doesn’t work, you can feel yourself wilt a little.

  But otherwise you find yourself in this weird zone. You feel bolts of energy flying off you, and into you. You don’t really hear the crowd. You don’t really hear your corner. There’s almost no time for that. If you stop to listen or think, it becomes too late to act or react fast enough. You’re in a very heightened state of awareness, in a very narrow tunnel. When you break away from that energy, you lose momentum. You can’t do that. You have to keep going.

  I felt like I was still going. I felt very conscious of what was going on. I saw Cung breathing hard. I saw he was getting tired. I thought, perfect. We’re right on time. Until that last kick, if you had stopped the fight and asked me how I was doing, I would have told you I was going to knock him out and finish the fight and retain my title.

  But at the end of the third round, I knew I was done. I told Maurice, “I think my arm is broken,” and then the pain was just too much. I am Mr. Pain Tolerance. I can take a lot of abuse. But this was amazing. I was screaming for morphine.

  They took me to the hospital. I underwent surgery the next morning. I got a big metal plate and a bunch of metal screws in my arm. I was afraid I might not be able to fight again. I was afraid I was finished.

  13

  FATHERHOOD

  Something wonderful happened to me right after the Cung fight. My wife, Amy, gave birth to our daughter, Nicolette, on April 24, 2008.

  It hadn’t been easy. We had been trying for a while. Maybe we were trying too hard. I noticed an ad in Baby Magazine for a watch called the Ov-Watch. It was a brand-new, patent-pending, FDA-cleared ovulation tracking system that only required her to wear a silly watch; my kind of program. All the pee sticks and schedule sex were wearing us out. It cost a hundred bucks, but we were getting anxious, so we got the watch and went to Kauai for vacation. That’s where Amy got pregnant.

  I had not been around when my son was born. I was locked up. I had not been much of a father to him, either, when he was young. I was determined to be a different kind of dad this time around. It was a difficult birth. I spent five days and nights at the hospital with Amy. I read every book I could find about babies and about being a father. I must have read fifty books. I didn’t want to miss a single thi
ng. I didn’t miss a single thing. I was 100 percent there for the arrival of my daughter.

  That cost me a movie role. About three or four months before Nicolette was born, I had told Amy that I was not going to let anything interfere with my job as a father. I was going to cancel everything and be there when the baby was born, no matter what. Then a package arrived from 20th Century Fox. It looked very official, and marked CONFIDENTIAL, and it was a script for a movie version of the video game Max Payne. Mark Wahlberg was going to star, and the director wanted me to play the part of the evil bad guy. It was all set up. All I had to do was sign. But I also would have to go to Toronto for the shoot and be gone for a week or two.

  I read the script. I took a day. Amy looked at me as if to say, “Yeah, you’re going to do it.” She tried to pretend she was excited for me. But I knew it wasn’t right. I had said I was going to be there. I had to be there. So I called the production office. I said I was really flattered, and thought the project was awesome, and that I’d love to do it if they could postpone things for a few months.

  The woman at the production office was very, very polite. She said, “I’ll run that by the director and see what he says.” As if that would ever happen! Someone else got the part. I never saw the movie. I think I made the right decision. But the timing could have been better.

  Over the years I had maintained as close a relationship as I could with my son. We had been through some crazy stuff. One time, he decided he really wanted to become a sword swallower. Being an overcompensating father, I said, “OK, I’ll help you.” I told him to start training for it and after three months I bought the best sword-swallowing sword that money can buy.

  He’s always been a little eccentric, and a little adventurous, like me. He was really a daredevil. He would always say, “Is it going to kill me?” If it wasn’t, he’d go and try it. I thought I was being a thoughtful and supportive father. But he got into trouble. One night I got a call. My son was performing in a show in a church, doing his sword-swallowing act, when he nicked something in his stomach and started bleeding. He bled for thirteen hours. He was in the emergency room and he was dying.

  Just before that I had been forced to take him out of his home. His mother’s drug use had gotten really bad. He was having trouble, too. He had a breakdown of some kind at school. So I sent him to Utah to live with his grandparents, Christy’s mom and dad. They helped raise him, and even though they had kept her drug issues a secret from me, they were the best parents for him. I really wanted him to live with Amy and me, but we were always on the road and I was perpetually in a fight camp. So he was kind of on his own, even though he was only sixteen years old.

  It was a Memorial Day weekend when he injured himself. I got up to Salt Lake City as fast as I could and rented a car and drove to the hospital. He was in surgery. They had to slice him open to do it, but they stopped the bleeding in his stomach and saved his life. He was going to be OK. For some reason they gave me the sword. I ended up stopping in a gas station and giving the sword to the attendant. It was a $200 sword, but I just gave it to the guy. He must have thought I was nuts.

  It was a life-changing event for me. I thought I was invincible. I thought my son was invincible, too. But he had almost died. It freaked me out.

  I had not kept in very close touch with anyone from my family for a long time. My brother, Perry, had taken off when he was still a teenager. He had joined the navy at age eighteen and run off to see the world. He got a girl pregnant on the East Coast, where he was stationed. Then he came home on a visit and got another girl pregnant on the West Coast. My mother told me he was bipolar. She had always said he was “special.” She said she did a lot of drugs when she was pregnant with him. I think she blamed herself for his condition.

  Suzy lived in Colorado, Robynn somewhere in California. We weren’t close as adults. Suzy had been so traumatized by much of her childhood that she was always cutting herself off, always closing off contact because she got angry about something or upset with someone.

  I didn’t stay close to my mom. She had stayed with Joe despite everything. They were together for more than twenty-five years, until Joe died.

  Joe smoked Camel nonfilters. He smoked so much, I used to imagine him smoking in the shower. My mom smoked with him. But they both quit when Joe got lung cancer. The doctors diagnosed him with mesothelioma, a kind of lung cancer that people usually get from asbestos. Joe had worked for the military on ships, scraping asbestos off things, breathing that stuff into his lungs. Then he was a smoker all his life. So it wasn’t really surprising. The doctors said he had stage four cancer and gave him six months to live. He died about two years later.

  Perry came home from wherever he was living to be with my mom. He was supposed to move in with her and take care of her, help her handle her affairs after Joe died. Instead, I think he moved in with her and spent all her money getting high and hanging out.

  Somewhere in there, someone hatched a scheme. My mother had bought a jungle house in Belize. She and her new boyfriend, Barry, along with Perry and his son, Matthew, were all moving there. They bought a motor home, and the plan was to drive that motor home across the United States and Mexico to Belize.

  I don’t know whose plan it was. They got slowed down in Texas and were stuck for a while, all four of them, in two motor homes, in Galveston. I didn’t think they’d ever get out of there. I certainly didn’t think they’d ever get to Belize.

  My sister Robynn visited me in San Jose in the spring of 2011. She had come up to San Francisco to attend some seminars relating to her business. We hung out together, just the two of us. It was the first time we had done that since we were little kids, since before I got sent away to juvenile hall the first time—the first time in almost thirty years.

  We talked a while. When we were alone, I asked her if she remembered how the family moved from Lancaster to Redding. She remembered. She remembered a lot. She told me that our mother left Lancaster because she was leaving my father. “She got fed up with him,” Robynn said. “She couldn’t take it anymore.” So she left Frank and ran off with another man. First my mother left the whole gang of us kids with an aunt of ours, who we called Aunt Dolly. Later, she and the guy came back for the family. Somehow they found their way to Redding.

  I only remember him from pictures. He was a white dude, with long hair and a beard. He was a few inches taller than my mom and looked like a typical hippie guy from the 1970s. The pictures included some from a wedding album. I know my mom and this White Hippie Guy got married somewhere in the woods—a hippie wedding—and then went on a camping honeymoon. I don’t think it lasted long, maybe a year or so, before White Hippie Guy was out and Joe arrived on the scene.

  I always imagined that life before Joe was more normal. That’s not what Robynn said. She told me that my mother left my father and ran off with White Hippie Guy because she had found out that he and my father were lovers, that they were both pedophiles, and that they were doing things together. They were best friends and deviant sexual partners. My mom found out something, or got freaked out by something, and decided to take off. In her mind she was getting back at Frank, somehow, by stealing his best friend and running off with him.

  Then she left him, Robynn told me, when he started molesting Robynn and Suzy. I was shocked but not entirely surprised. I knew that my father, Frank Juarez, had been incarcerated for many years for some sort of sex crimes. In about 2008 I had been contacted by a representative of the California prison system, asking me if I’d be willing to sponsor my father out of jail.

  I got the letter out of the blue. I hadn’t heard anything from my dad and I hadn’t seen him, physically, since the few months that I lived with him in Lancaster when I was a little boy. I knew he had been with other families. I heard he had disappeared. What I learned later was that he had gone to prison for ten years for child molestation. He was a violent offender. When you are a violent sex offender, you don’t just do your time and get released. You do y
our time, and then you go for some kind of psychological evaluation, and then you have to find someone to sponsor you back into society. That’s why they were contacting me. He had become eligible for some kind of parole or release. He put me on a list. I was on there with my grandfather. My dad’s attorney or his public defender initiated it. The letter didn’t say outright what the deal was. It said the state of California believed I had specific or important information about this individual. Please contact the district attorney’s office.

  I saw the name on top. I saw that it was Frank Juarez. At first I thought Oh no, someone has stolen my identity! In the last ten years, I have had a bunch of attempts at accessing my identity under my old name, Frank Alicio Juarez. I always assumed it might have been my dad, trying to use my credit or get some of my money. So I thought this was another one of those attempts. So I followed up and contacted the district attorney’s office. I discovered that they wanted to find someone to vouch for him so he could get out of prison.

  I was shocked. I was a little scared. But I didn’t feel responsible. I wasn’t tempted to do what the state was asking me to do. That was very clear to me. So I said, “I don’t want anything to do with the guy.” I had a young daughter at home. I didn’t want a violent sex offender living with me. I didn’t even want him to know where my house was. I was sorry about him being locked up, and sorry that he had no one to vouch for him, but I did not feel responsible for him. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him in over twenty years. He had never been a father to me. I didn’t even remember him from my childhood. I didn’t want to have him in my life—at least, not this way.

  The guy from the prison board told me that I could say no, and that probably what would happen is that my father would remain in custody. Then, every two years or so, I’d be contacted again when he came up for reevaluation. I’d get the call. I’d be asked again if I wanted to vouch for him.