In the end, she realized her dream. She made it to Belize. She was happy.
For a while after the Diaz fight, I had some plans for setting up something else. I talked to some people. I had some ideas. But it was starting to look more and more like I was done. I was still very involved with MMA, on a lot of levels. I still had my schools. I was still selling training videos. And I had become an on-air commentator for Showtime. For several months, I had been appearing ringside, working with Mauro Ranallo, Gus Johnson, and Al Bernstein. I had gone to St. Louis with them to call a fight right after getting beaten by Nick Diaz. This was my new job. I was good at it and I really enjoyed it. I was able to bring some inside MMA expertise to the fans.
I saw a very bright future for my sport. I was working with Scott Coker to grow the Strikeforce brand. I was working with Showtime to grow our TV presence. I traveled to New York and went to the state capitol to speak to legislators there about making MMA a sanctioned sport in the state of New York. My wife and I started making plans to actually move to New York. We thought we could plant ourselves there and use the energy of that amazing city to build our brand, and build our sport, into the international event we knew it could be.
After a while, I saw that it meant I was going to have to retire. I couldn’t keep fighting and be a representative of the sport. It was too hard. My body was too damaged. The training was brutal, and I didn’t think I could continue to operate at the level that the fans had come to expect and that I had come to demand. If I couldn’t be the best—my best—then I didn’t want to continue.
I took advantage of my good Showtime relationship to turn my retirement into an event. On the night of June 26, 2010, I was in San Jose ready to work ringside calling the Fedor Emelianenko versus Fabricio Werdum fight. I had on my dark suit and a cool green tie. The lights went down, and the Showtime folks showed a video about my history with MMA, starting with my Pancrase titles in Japan.
When the lights came back up, I was standing inside the cage with a microphone in my hand. Surrounded by the fans and the people who loved me—even my son had come out to be there—I made my announcement.
“When I was twenty-two years old, my brother gave me two important things—he gave me an ass-whupping, and he gave me my love of mixed martial arts. Since that time, I’ve traveled the world, teaching mixed martial arts, preaching mixed martial arts, and dragging my poor family with me from country to country and city to city. I’m thirty-seven years old now, and my time has come. The stars like Gilbert Melendez and Cristiane Cyborg, they are the future, and I am the past. Tonight I announce my retirement. And I just want to say, it has been an honor to bleed for you, to break my bones for you, and to entertain you. And before I leave I would like to bow for you one more time. Thank you!”
I handed someone the microphone. I looked at Amy. I bowed four times, once to each corner of the arena.
I was done.
15
FIGHT NO MORE
I was now fully engaged in my new role as a regular commentator on Showtime. My partners were Mauro Ranallo and Gus Johnson. Mauro is a senior sports announcer with decades of experience in calling combative sports and everything else. He was the voice, alongside Bas Rutten, of the pay-per-view series Pride Fighting Championship, held in Japan. He hosted multiple television shows and has been in radio for over twenty-five years. He is also a huge wrestling and fighting fan and called my fights with Renzo, Baroni, Le, and Diaz. Gus started his career calling play-by-play in the NBA for the Minnesota Timberwolves. He went on to call Big East basketball and college hockey, and then boxing for Showtime and MMA for CBS.
What I brought to the game was the inside stuff, and maybe a fan base. I could see things in the cage that these guys couldn’t, or I could see it faster or earlier than they could. And I think MMA fans felt my presence gave the commentary a little more legitimacy. It made it a little more real. When I said a guy was out of gas, or a punch rang someone’s bell, they knew that I knew what I was talking about.
I thought the Showtime gig was a great opportunity for me to present my idea of where the sport could go. It was a way for me to put a positive face on MMA. For a long time I had been concerned about the sport. I had seen the increasing dominance of the UFC, and the increasing media presence of its figurehead, Dana White. They were making great headway. I didn’t want to take anything away from them, but their way was not my way. Their way was sort of like boxing with no gloves. It felt like legitimized street fighting. The story they told continued to be “Two men go into the ring. Only one will survive.” It seemed kind of barbaric, and kind of ugly. It wasn’t martial arts, and it wasn’t the martial way, and I didn’t think, in the long run, it was the story that was best for our sport.
That’s why I had said no to Dana and the UFC back in the beginning, when they were just getting started. I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t believe he would make it. That’s why I was trying to build the relationship with Strikeforce and Showtime. I wanted to be involved in telling that story—which was the story of the fighter, of the warrior, of the mixed martial artist who really was an artist, who had trained and was trying to live a life of Bushido, the moral code of the samurai that stressed frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery, and honor unto death (honor, respect, and discipline). All my efforts were driven by that dream.
I got an opportunity to carry the dream into the electronic game world. In 2010 I was contacted by the people at EA Sports, the electronic game giant. They had done really well with computer-simulated versions of everything from football to basketball to golf to soccer to hockey. Now they were getting into MMA, and they wanted me to come talk to them about being a character in their game. Of course I said yes. I loved the idea of being a character in a video game for Xbox or PlayStation. I loved being able to fight again with Bas Rutten in cyberspace. I think they even set it up so I could fight Ken Shamrock, in virtual reality, if not in actual reality.
After I announced my retirement, I started thinking about the future in different ways. If I wasn’t going to be fighting, I wasn’t going to be training. If I wasn’t going to be training, I didn’t necessarily have to be in San Jose. I started thinking about where I wanted to live, where I could make myself most useful. I decided to move to New York.
There were a lot of things behind the decision, but the main one was that I felt I could best serve the sport and my dream for the sport by moving to the information capital of the world. New York is the image center of America. It’s where the message gets packaged and delivered. It’s also the place where MMA is still not a sanctioned sport. I decided to plant my flag there and begin the campaign to make the case for MMA as a legal sport in the state.
Pretty soon I was driving around Manhattan with real estate agents. Amy and I looked at apartments and houses. We looked at schools and preschools. We put our house in San Jose on the market. I made an appearance at the New York state capitol, in front of a crowd of state senators and representatives. I told them why MMA needed to be a sanctioned sport in their state, the way it was in neighboring New Jersey.
I also made some speeches about bullying. I discovered I had a lot to say about that. As I was making the transition from MMA fighter to MMA spokesperson, a lot of people asked me questions about the future of the sport. A lot of them had questions for me about the UFC because it was the dominant brand in my sport. I’ve never been one to mince my words. I told the truth. I said I thought the UFC was not the best future for my sport. I said I thought Dana White and the kinds of fighters he represented, and the kind of fighting he stood for, were not the best image for the future of MMA. I didn’t get too personal about it, but I said I thought the whole down-and-dirty MMA image was the wrong one. I didn’t see how we could sell the world a sport if the image was of a foul-mouthed, trash-talking, super-tattooed street fighter who dated porn stars and had run-ins with the law over drugs and alcohol. I wasn’t talking about Dana White or any one specific fighter. I was just talking about
the UFC image and what I thought was wrong with it.
Dana White went a little nuts on me. He called me “a liar and a two-faced chump.” He said I was “an irrelevant idiot.” He said I was “the biggest two-faced jerk-off” he’d ever met in his life.
I’ve been around guys like Dana White my whole life. I understand guys like him. They’re mostly small, scared guys who huff and puff and try to make themselves look big by pushing around someone weaker. I was retired and no longer any kind of threat to him, so he felt he could say this kind of stuff without having any consequences.
And that’s when it hit me. I realized I was being bullied. I understood bullying in a whole new way, like I’d never understood it before. I’ve always been a tough guy and a fighter. For a long time, I was kind of a big guy. So I didn’t get pushed around that much. I didn’t understand what that felt like—to be the little guy being pushed around, and not having any way to stand up or fight back. Now I felt that. I understood what it felt like to be dominated and defenseless.
I didn’t like it. So I decided to do something about it. I went online and started reading about bullying. I found out there were various organizations, all around the country, working on parts of the bullying question. There were experts on the psychological aspect. There were experts on bullying in schools. But there was no national face to the issue. I decided to begin a national dialogue on the question of bullying. Within a week or so, I had met with several people, online or over the phone. We had agreed to create a national campaign for the anti-bullying idea.
I got busy really fast. I launched a charity golf tournament. I started an organization called StandTogether. I started fund-raising and consciousness-raising. I went on the Jimmy Fallon show to talk about the problem and the solution to the problem. I went down to Los Angeles and spent a few days shooting a video series opposite the great fighter and future Strikeforce female champion Miesha “Takedown” Tate, showing women some basic rape-prevention tactics for protecting themselves from an attack.
I got really into it. I had no idea this problem was so serious. I discovered it was a national epidemic. I had spent my life fighting with people who were able to defend themselves, in an arena where the fight is stopped as soon as one guy can’t defend himself. MMA was the fastest-growing sport in America. But bullying seemed to be the fastest-growing problem.
I saw a great opportunity. In MMA gyms all around the country we had an army of twelve-year-old kids looking to us, to their MMA teachers, to show them how to act and how to live and what to do with their lives. As their teachers, we have an obligation to educate them properly. We are the chosen warriors, the ones who get to spread the message. We believe in the way, the martial code, and we have chosen our path. That doesn’t involve threatening people. I saw that we could use our leadership role to fix this thing. We could use it to help take away the shame of being bullied and to let people know that there is no excuse for abusing another human being— physically, mentally, sexually, or psychologically.
The psychological part was important. Until the Dana White incidents, I hadn’t really experienced cyber-bullying. But now I saw the viciousness and unaccountability of bullying via texting, the Internet, or in social media. I talked with parents whose children had harmed themselves, or even killed themselves, because of bullying things that people had written about them and posted online.
I had spent years teaching kids how to fight and protect themselves. But this was different. I needed to find a way to teach kids how to fight on the Internet. I needed to find a way to teach them to have confidence, and to know that words in cyberspace are forever, and they do hurt people, especially if you remain quiet or alone.
It was personal for me, too. I was the father of a little girl. I knew how to teach her to defend herself physically. I needed to learn how to teach her to defend herself against this new kind of bullying. Obviously my MMA experience was the way in. MMA had saved my life. I saw this opportunity to share that in a new way.
The funny thing, the really ironic thing, is that I myself had personally taught Dana White how to fight. I had taught him, or tried to teach him, the rudiments of MMA and the way of the martial artist. It was in the very early days of the UFC. I had known Dana for a few years, back when he was a nobody in our sport. He was running a kickboxing studio and teaching a kickboxing class. Then he became Tito Ortiz’s new manager. I knew Tito, of course, so I started seeing him and Dana here and there. Out of the blue, Dana White got these guys named Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta into the business. They were Las Vegas guys who owned the Station Casino company. They had gotten interested in MMA and had formed a company called Zuffa to explore opportunities in the fighting world. They had hired Dana White to be president of their sports operations.
Suddenly Dana White was the head of an MMA company. But he didn’t know anything about MMA, so he did two things. He tried to get me to sign as a UFC fighter. When I wouldn’t do that, he tried to hire me to teach him how to fight. I had just become a free agent in September 1999, after the Tito fight. I had retired from fighting. I was living in Los Angeles and doing my thing. They desperately wanted me to fight for the UFC. But I wasn’t feeling it—I saw what they were doing. I didn’t think it was wrong, exactly, but I didn’t see it for myself. But I did agree to work as a commentator. They signed me to a three-show contract. Then they hired me to move to Las Vegas for two weeks to train them in how to fight, MMA style. I was going to be the personal instructor for Dana White. So for the next thirteen days, it was just Dana and me. I taught him all the basic moves.
After that, I guess he thought if he asked me again I’d come fight for the UFC. But every time he asked, I said no. I just didn’t share their vision. They had a plan. They had a direction. I didn’t think it was right for me, or for my sport. So, respectfully, I always said no.
Now it had come to this. A guy who I had trained in my sport was calling me out in public, on TV, on the Internet, calling me horrible names and telling ugly lies about me and my character. I gave a couple of interviews. I tried to clear up the question of whether I was a two-faced liar and a chump. I said his comments about me were ridiculous and insulting and that I was sad to see them associated with my sport. I pointed out that I had never attacked Dana White or the UFC, that I had never insulted them, or assaulted them, or been angry with them—but that in return for my being honest about going my own way, I had been attacked and ridiculed and bullied and had my character assaulted in public.
In reply, I said, “MMA breeds confidence, builds character, and creates strong, diverse communities whose foundation is honor, respect, and discipline. Dana White, I refuse to be bullied by you. Further, I respect a man who truthfully stands up and fights for his family with honor. So any time you want to become a real man, and not a bully, you let me know. I would be happy to oblige you with a personal introduction to Shamrock MMA.”
I pointed out that Dana White’s behavior was a perfect example of why I thought he was a terrible representative of our sport. I said that it was a great example of what happened when corporate interests began to dictate martial arts. I didn’t point out that in my opinion, Dana White had already been given the litmus test as a martial artist and he had failed terribly. (He really put it on a female grappler who came to help with his wrestling, overpowering her and grinding her into the mat. That’s not something you do in my class.)
On March 12, 2011, I was completely blown over to learn that Zuffa, the parent company of the UFC, had made a deal to purchase Strikeforce. The MMA world was rocked by this news. It was a huge deal, a huge story, and it took me completely by surprise. I had gotten up early that day with my daughter. It was just a normal weekday morning—except my cell phone had been going crazy with texts. When I finally had time to check them, there were all these messages—text messages, Tweets, e-mails—from guys asking me if it was true about Zuffa. People thought I would know if something was going down. But I was completely blindsided. Scott Coker was
my contact at Showtime. But he had gone underground about a week before. This wasn’t unusual. We had talked once a week, at least once a week, for years. But it wasn’t unusual for me not to hear from him when he was busy with something else.
Then I finally found a video of Dana White online, announcing the acquisition. It appeared that Silicon Valley Sports, which owned the controlling 51 percent interest in Strikeforce, had sold out. No one consulted me, or asked my opinion, or warned me. That’s big business. It wasn’t their job to warn me. It wasn’t Scott Coker’s job to warn me. It was their job to maximize profit.
I was shocked, but I wasn’t surprised. I hadn’t seen this coming, but I knew something had to change. The financial partners were strained. The company had spent a lot of money expanding the brand, competing with the UFC, trying to open the New York market, trying to grow the sport. Silicon Valley Sports is an old-fashioned, traditional sports company. They were tired of writing the checks and not seeing the returns.
I made some calls. I told my wife. She was pretty freaked out. Everybody was freaked out. I put in a call to Scott. I spoke to some of the Strikeforce team. It was a small group, and we were all very close. Everyone was shocked. No one was popping any champagne corks.
When I didn’t hear back from Scott, I sent an e-mail asking what was up. An hour later, I sent him another e-mail, thanking him for being my promoter and my friend. I felt horrible. There was no reason or explanation given. It came without warning. It felt like someone had died in a car accident, and you didn’t want to ask questions about what happened, or who was at fault. It was just … over.
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