Then we were in our corners. I was breathing hard and bleeding from everywhere—even the back of my head. I had hit it on something. When we stood up to shake hands, Nick bowed to me, like I was his sensei. He gave me some respect. He said, “I’ve been watching Frank Shamrock fight since the beginning…. It’s hard to hate that guy. He’s been doing what I want to do and saying what I want to say for a long time.” Then it was my turn. I said, “I give everything to Nick Diaz. I trained for him 100 percent. I didn’t take him lightly…. I always step it up…. I always come to entertain. But Nick kicked my ass tonight, no two ways about it. He beat me.”
They replayed the moment when he hit me in the stomach. It was brutal. I said, “It doubled me over. And then he put a whuppin’ on me.”
The announcer asked me about the future. I said, “I’m gonna keep coming back here. This is my hometown. This is my arena! I brought the sport here. I’m gonna keep representing…. I’ll be back here—don’t even worry about it…. Nick got the better of me tonight, but there’s always tomorrow. That’s the martial way.”
At the press conference after the fight, he said, “I just wanna say I had to get that one done for my boy.” He had wanted to beat me to avenge my knockout fight with Cesar Gracie three years earlier. Cesar had been in his corner. He won the fight for his coach.
After the fight, I went with some friends to an Italian restaurant around the corner from the arena. I tried to celebrate. When someone asked me what happened, I didn’t pretend. I said, “I got hit! He was like a monkey, with that reach. He kicked my ass!”
I was happy not to be in the hospital. Usually I’m in the hospital after a fight, even when I win. One of my friends said, “It’s a victory!” I said, “Yeah. I came in second!”
But actually I hate to lose. It hurts to lose. Especially in my hometown, it was hard to lose. For the fighter, it’s always about winning. It’s always about facing the challenge and meeting the challenge. This was the only time in my whole career that I flipped the switch and the lights didn’t come on. I went out to perform, and the curtain came down before I got to do my bit. That had never, ever happened to me before.
Because of our contracts, Nick got $39,000 for beating me. I got $400,000 for being beat. The story of the fight was that the baton was passed. It was a big fight for Showtime. So the event was very successful all the way around, except for me getting my ass kicked. Everything else worked out exactly as it should have. Diaz has proven that he was worthy of the win. Since then he has demolished everyone else. His career went up to the next level after he fought me.
But I don’t think he’s a good representative of our sport. Lots of the new, younger guys aren’t. The beauty of their experience is that they didn’t have to fight for ten years to figure it all out. We did that for them. So they could start from what we had already learned and move forward from that. Guys like me started from zero. We had to invent the whole thing.
Besides being light-years ahead of us physically, though, they are bad representatives of the sport. They are professional martial artists, but what do they represent? If you’re out gangbanging, smoking weed, and street fighting, you are not a good representative of our sport. You are hurting our sport. You’re not acting like a leader. You are not taking a leadership role. Most of these younger fighters are clueless about that. They feel no sense of responsibility for their sport or their art. They are fighters, but they are not martial artists. They are not warriors.
14
RETIREMENT
Getting married to Amy had made me more serious about life in some way. I was committed. Having a second chance with another baby made it more real. Amy and I had been keeping house for a while, since we got married. When Nicolette was born, we felt more together than ever. We were a family.
Somehow being a new dad made me even more ambitious, more determined to do the things I had set out to do. With my son, I had always worked hard and made money and supported him. But he wasn’t there every day, living with me, growing up with me. Nicolette was here. She wasn’t going anywhere. She wasn’t going to leave, and I wasn’t going to leave. I had a new understanding about responsibility—that I had to protect her and take care of her and make a place for her in the world that was healthy and happy and safe.
I felt an overwhelming sense of love, too. Being a dad made me feel more settled. I felt needed, and necessary, in a completely new way.
I had not had any kind of relationship with Bob Shamrock since he had called and told me not to fight Tito Ortiz. He just wasn’t in the picture that much. It was uncomfortable for me. I didn’t feel good about it. My trainer, Maurice Smith, told me, “Make up with your dad. Find a way to make up with him.” But I couldn’t find the right way to do that. At first, I tried to do it through Ken, to patch it up that way. But that obviously didn’t work. Ken was my mentor, but I realized that whatever his demons were, they weren’t mine. I had to go my own way.
Then I heard that Bob had had a heart attack, so I went up to see him. He had actually had two or three heart attacks. He was in pretty bad shape. He was in the hospital, but he was hardly there. He was conked out.
I knew he hadn’t been in good health. I wasn’t surprised. He had stopped doing anything like caring for himself years before, when he was in his mid-forties. He went from working out and eating right and living clean to just sort of closing the door on his physical health and never opening it again. He had been a bodybuilder. He worked out obsessively. He was really buff. He wore custom-made shirts and lived like a celebrity. I heard him talk about those days, and saw the photographs from those days. But that had all ended around the time I first came to his boys’ home. I always thought it had to do with losing his wife. That changed everything about him. Something left when she ran off. He gave up.
He had been living with Ken for several years. He’d been out of the group-home business for a while and wasn’t working anywhere. Bob told me that he had lost his last group home because of Ken. Bob said Ken was always making trouble of some kind, and that one day Ken drove his car to Bob’s house and laid a two-hundred-foot stretch of rubber down the road. The people in the neighborhood complained one more time and Bob lost his license to run the home.
After that, I heard he had bad money problems. He was always a big spender. He was not a saver. But he had Ken to take care of him. After he lost the last home, he was always with Ken. They moved to Reno.
I spent some time at Ken’s house with him and all his crazy family. It was all very strange and sad. Bob lay there looking half-dead. Ken walked around looking really traumatized by the whole thing. I didn’t stay long. I had to leave the next day. I thought it might be the last time I ever saw Bob. I thought he wouldn’t make it. But he woke up the next day, or a few days later, feeling all right, and went home.
But he wasn’t all right. He wasn’t able to take care of himself, so he moved into an assisted-living facility. Not long after that, he had another heart attack, maybe his third or fourth. He was such a tough guy, so stubborn. He drove himself to the hospital instead of calling 911 or asking for help. He checked himself in, and then he checked himself out. Then he had another heart attack.
Ken’s wife called me and said, “Bob’s had another one. We think he’s going to go.” And he went. We had been on alert. He had been in a nursing home. It didn’t seem like he was going to make it. Ken and his wife, Tonya, brought Bob home so he could be surrounded by the people he loved. He died several days later on January 14, 2010. He was sixty-eight years old. I heard about it on the Internet. People started sending me condolences. I was really sad, but I had had to bury him many years before, unfortunately, because he had stopped being my dad. I was used to letting people go. I was used to moving on, emotionally. I had made my peace with him. It was still sad, though.
I struggled with the question of whether I should go to the funeral. It was my last chance to do something for him. I wanted to go. Bob was my family. He was the only father I
ever knew, and the only one who ever really loved me.
But Ken was not my family. Besides training me and being a mentor to me, Ken was never a brother to me. Bob chose me to be his son. Ken didn’t choose me to be his brother.
I thought that going to the funeral would have been the right thing for me, but not the right thing for anyone else. It wouldn’t have been right for Ken and his family. So I chose to stay away. That felt like the best way for me to show respect to Bob, to Ken, to everyone.
It had been hard for me to make peace in my mind. All the things Ken and Bob said I couldn’t do, that I wasn’t going to do—I went and did them. And because they had said I couldn’t do those things, for a long time I didn’t give them any credit for helping me. I gave credit to the people who were standing with me when it happened. When people asked me how I’d done what I’d done, how I got where I was, I gave credit to other people—the ones who were helping me when I did it.
I think they took offense at that. They hated it. It didn’t sit well that I was accomplishing all the things that they said I couldn’t do, and all the things that Ken hadn’t been able to do. I got the championships and the world records. I beat a lot of the people who had beaten him. It must have been difficult, from their perspective.
But I had felt abandoned and betrayed by them. I couldn’t do it any other way. When I think of Bob now, I don’t think of betrayal. I admire Bob for how much he loved, for what he did, for what he believed in. This is what being a human being is all about. He was passionate. His whole life, he stepped up and said, “This is how we’re going to do this thing,” and then did it. I have a great admiration for that. I even admire him, in a weird way, for loving Ken so much that he carved me out of his life. He had to choose, and he chose what was the most important thing to him, and he didn’t waver.
My mother met Bob once or twice, very casually. She never understood the relationship. She thought he was just some strange guy who adopted me. Where she came from, it didn’t make sense. But I see him as my father. He is my father. He will always hold the top position of respect. I am proud and happy to be a Shamrock. I chose that, and I’m happy with that choice. My Juarez father experience wasn’t that good. In the end, I am a Shamrock.
Over the years I had become closer and closer to Henry Holmes. He started as my lawyer and adviser. After a while he had become a father figure. When I fought Tito Ortiz and won, I gave Henry my championship belt. It went into his trophy collection at his house, right next to the Mike Tyson gloves and the George Foreman gloves.
But the friendship part happened really slowly and very organically. We just sort of grew into each other. We’re both focused and neurotic and super-honest. But for a long time it was just a business friendship. What brought us closer was his having a son. Henry was on his fifth marriage, but he’d never had children. Now along came his son, Ben. Henry was winding down a crazy career. He had been this total shark in business. Now his world was becoming more and more about Ben.
For years I had been the one calling him and asking questions, trying to take advantage of his wisdom. It was mostly professional. But slowly I had started to talk to him about personal things, and he started talking back. Now we were talking and he was the one asking me questions.
I was teaching kids mixed martial arts. I understood children and had some experience with them. So he started coming to me for advice as a father. Because he had come to know me and love me and trust me, he listened to what I had to say.
I knew a lot about being a father, even though I had not always been around when little Frank was little. I had, between all my “dads,” maybe one good father. I understood what worked and what didn’t. You don’t scream at your child in anger. You don’t lock your child in the closet. You don’t do these things because they don’t work. I knew that because of what had been done to me as a child.
As my own son had grown older, I had been faced with some interesting challenges as a father. Little Frank had met a woman from Arkansas. He was planning to move there and marry her.
We had a lot going on. My wife’s father had fallen ill and died. That was a huge event. Bob Shamrock had died. That was a huge event. Now my son was moving away to Arkansas to marry an older woman and start some kind of life there.
I wanted to put a stop to it. Amy and I thought it was a mistake. But it was his mistake. In the end, we couldn’t do anything about it. And, in the end, it didn’t matter. He married her and moved to Arkansas. The relationship didn’t last. Within a year they were separated, and I started trying to unwind that for him. But at the same time he lucked into this job in Arkansas and began training as a flyman—a person who works in the wings of a theater, manipulating the wheels and pulleys that lower and raise the scenery and the curtains and all that. It’s a highly specialized occupation, and he got an apprenticeship in Arkansas. By the time his marriage was ending, he had learned how to do that and had gotten himself a job in Long Island, working as a flyman for a theater production company there.
My relationship with him became more normal. We got back on the calling-every-Sunday plan. He came home for my retirement and hung out. He came for Christmas and hung out. I got to have the new experience of being a father to an older son.
Henry was having the opposite experience, being an older father to a younger son. Because he’s an older guy, and because he’s been so successful in his business, he’s very set in his thinking. I could see he was doing everything for the right reasons, but he didn’t have a lot of experience. So he’d call me and say, “Am I completely wrong about this?” He had been so honest with me about my decisions over the years; now I was able to return the favor. I was able to bring him the dad stuff. Out of all that, we connected in a new way. He turned into my dad.
Not long after Bob died, I got a call from my mom. She lived in a weird commune situation in Texas. She had been there a year—she and her boyfriend, Barry, and my brother Perry, all living in this trailer park. They were still on their way to Belize to take possession of the piece of land my mother had bought on the Internet, in cash, from some stranger.
Things weren’t going too well. Barry had a lot of legal problems, including child support liens against him. He couldn’t get a passport. Perry had gotten out of control, too. He’d had some sort of breakdown. He was on disability, and he was supposed to be contributing some of the disability money to the mission to Belize, but he wasn’t. So he and my mom had a falling out over that. He moved into a different trailer and brought in this woman he’d met from Canada. But one day the police had to be called because he’d tied the Canadian woman to the bed or something. That was it. Perry was out.
The family was blown apart. No one was talking to anyone. Suzy was living in Colorado. She was married and had two kids. But I wasn’t talking to her. I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible to have a normal conversation with her. The talk could start anywhere, but then it would always turn to childhood trauma and about my career or money—all subjects that I did not want to share with anyone. For a long time Amy and I tried to avert, divert, change direction, whatever. After a while we just stopped answering the phone when we saw it was Suzy.
Robynn was still the most normal of us all. She had married a wonderful man named David, and she also had two kids. She had a job and a normal life and I liked talking to her.
But it didn’t look like my mom was depending on them to help out with the Belize issue. That was going to be me.
It turned out there was some problem with the house, too. The lady who owned the house, or the real estate agent who had sold her the house, had been murdered. The house was for sale. My mother had to go down there and sort it all out. So she called me and asked me for help. She said, “I need you to go to Belize and help me get my house.”
This was my mom, who never calls me and never, ever asks for help.
I was really busy. I didn’t have time to go to Belize. I asked Henry for his counsel. In his infinite wisdom, he said, “If there is
ever anything you can do for your mom, you should do it right away, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.” So I went to Belize. It took five days. It was a mess. My mom had very little information. She had never seen the house and didn’t even know where it was. We started driving around the town of San Ignacio, asking people what they knew about the house, the owner, the lady who had been murdered. It was insane. Word had gotten around that my mother was the one who’d been murdered. It was assumed the house was free and clear. Now someone was living in it, and someone else was trying to sell it.
I put the Frank Shamrock business mind to work on the problem. We got it all sorted out. We got a new deed. The house was all hers. But she still couldn’t fulfill her dream of moving to Belize because her boyfriend was stuck in Texas. I wasn’t going to spend the $50,000 to pay his back child support. I wasn’t going to break the law to solve his problem. I needed another solution. So I worked out an exit strategy for that, too.
I hired an escort to drive my mother down through Mexico, all the way to Belize in her motor home. And with my big brain I figured out a way to get the boyfriend out, too. There is a loophole in the passport laws. If you’re a US citizen and you’re leaving from a US port and returning to a US port, you can get on a cruise ship without a passport. No one expects you to take a cruise ship and just leave. But that’s what Barry did. He got on the cruise ship in Texas, and on the fourth or fifth day, he got off the cruise ship in Belize, walked away, and never came back. He can’t ever come back to the United States. But he wasn’t contributing anything up here anyway, and he doesn’t want to come back. He wants to be with my mom in Belize.
Hanging out with my mom on that trip was extremely strange. It was the longest time we’d spent alone together since I was a little boy. We were busy most of the time with all the house problems. But we had a little hang time, too, in our shared jungle hotel room. I finally asked her what had been going on when I was a little boy. I asked her why she had let me go, and why she hadn’t tried to get me back. She said, “I was just trying to survive.” She said, “I missed you. I wanted you back.” That’s all she said. It was a lot for her to say. I had to wait a long time to hear it. I held her hand and cried and told her I had missed her, too. It felt good.
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