When I finally talked to Scott, I asked him, “What do we tell the press?” I had been the public face and the brand spokesman for Strikeforce. I had a long and friendly relationship with many of the MMA journalists, and I was getting pounded by their texts and e-mails. I had to tell them something. Scott sent me an e-mail explanation about how the Silicon Valley Sports guys had wanted out of the MMA business, and that they had no place else to go except Zuffa. They needed Strikeforce. Strikeforce needed Zuffa. We’re all going to be one happy family now as the sport moves on to its next great level.
I couldn’t sell that. These reporters were friends of mine. They’re smart. They knew what was going on. Their articles already said, “Good-bye, Strikeforce. Good-bye, Frank.” It was the end of two brands.
I did my job. I tried to put a nice face on it. But I had a lot of weird feelings about it. Scott and I were very close friends. I was the spokesman for our brand. It was a real kick in the nuts not to know we were being sold. It would’ve been nice if he had shared it with me.
It would have made it easier for me to think about my future, for one thing. The news about the sale threw that wide open. I was getting ready to move to New York. My house was on the market. My wife and I had been looking at houses in Manhattan. We had visited schools for our daughter. We were committed. Now it looked like all of that was going to change, too. I had a contract with Strikeforce. Strikeforce had its arrangements with Showtime. But Strikeforce was going to be owned by the UFC, and the UFC was run by Dana White. And it was clear to everyone what Dana White thought of Frank Shamrock.
In the first interviews, Dana White insisted that everyone’s contracts would be honored, and that the new ownership of Strikeforce wouldn’t change anything. Strikeforce fighters would continue to fight for Strikeforce. Strikeforce officers would continue to work for Strikeforce. In the short term, that made sense. Long term, it didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether my role had changed, or how it had changed. A good business mind told me to prepare a good exit strategy. But I felt unsure, and being unsure is a bad business strategy.
There didn’t seem to be a future for me with the UFC, and I wasn’t sure I wanted one. For a long time, they continued to look like the same old thing. They were gathering steam. They kept getting bigger. They had great fighters. They had become the dominant force in the industry. They had achieved their goal in buying Strikeforce. They had created a sport, but it was now going to be known as UFC. One of the first rule changes to Strikeforce was to add elbows and make the rules the same in both leagues. I was originally the person who convinced Coker to remove the elbows from the Strikeforce to cut down on the blood and cuts. But the UFC was now MMA. I didn’t think the way they’d done it was appropriate and fair. They used their power to stop other people’s growth and to stop the sport itself from growing. They took the sport of MMA and made it into their sport.
They did that in ways that weren’t cool. My own experience shows this. They were angry at me for not agreeing to fight for them when I was a free agent. They retaliated by taking away my history. My championships and my records disappeared. I’m not in the UFC Hall of Fame. If you study the history of MMA as told by the UFC, I don’t exist. That’s how they repaid me for not sharing their vision.
But I didn’t share it then and I don’t share it now. By the time the UFC came along, I had already seen a couple of versions of MMA. There was the Japanese execution of martial arts, in the version that was Pancrase. There was the first UFC, run by Bob Meyrowitz. He founded the UFC and sold it to Zuffa in 2001. Now I had seen a decade of UFC under Zuffa and Dana White.
I did the math. With Zuffa’s UFC, you’ve got Dana White, a boxing fan with no martial arts experience, backed by financial people from the casino business, who are very schooled in the management of sports and boxing. If you combine those two things, you don’t get MMA. You get white-collar boxing. That didn’t make sense to me. It was going to be a business about making money off fighters. It was not going to be about talent and the artists. It was just going to be another way of making money.
They were 100 percent sure their vision was the right one. I was 100 percent sure their vision wasn’t the right one. I saw a sport steeped in martial arts history and culture, and athletes who respected the fighting art and their bodies. They wanted to own the sport. I’m fine with that. But I’m not fine with them erasing my history from their sport. If they do that, it’s not a sport anymore. It’s just a business. I understand that, too—but I don’t want any part of it.
Was I wrong? Yes—kind of. I misjudged them. I didn’t share their vision, and I thought they would crash and burn. I had seen other big companies come and go. Look at the Extreme Fighting Championship. It was a big, rich, well-organized company. Look at the Full Contact Fighting Federation. Some big money guys had come and gone.
Dana had seen inside the world of MMA when it was sexy and interesting but immature. He had the right guys, with lots of money. Lorenzo knew the fight commission. They had the right connections, and the right qualifications and the right network. They were casino operators, which is a service business with huge overhead and huge payroll. I knew they could run a big business.
And they did. I may not like how they got from point A to point B, but they got there. They have moved the sport forward. They have made it a global sport. Their MMA model is now the only model. They control the marketplace.
But did I make a mistake? No. Not for me. I have no regrets about leaving the UFC or resisting the offers to rejoin the UFC. All I have to do to know that is look at my brother. He went with them and fought for them, until they cut him. They brought him back for a trilogy of fights with Tito Ortiz that revived the UFC on pay-per-view, which many said saved the company from early bankruptcy. They made millions off him. He fought some more, and then they cut him again. So he sued them in court and lost and had to pay them back, $172,000 in attorney bills. Now he’s done, and he has had no control over anything that happened during most of his career. He has no promotional rights. He can’t use the photographs or the video footage of any of that and say, “Here, this is who I am, and what I did.” Dana White controls that, not Ken Shamrock. It’s his life, but someone else owns it.
Back in 1999, I was just beginning to understand my brand, my personal brand, and what it could be worth. I saw an opportunity to create something with lifelong value. I saw the future. I knew I was going to be a world champion fighter. I wanted that to be my job, and my career, and my brand. And I wanted to be able to make money off that, and control the images associated with my name, after I stopped fighting. There was no way I could have done that as part of Dana White’s UFC.
This is my life. This is my job. This is my journey. I love MMA. It’s my church. It’s not just where I go on Sunday. It’s where I have gone every day of my adult life. I have lived and breathed mixed martial arts, and the martial artist way, right down to my marrow. But suddenly, as the spring of 2011 turned to summer, I began to think that my future as a martial artist might not include MMA. For the first time in almost twenty years, I was not sure what was coming. I was not sure what I was going to do. I had been a guy with a one-year plan, a five-year plan, and a ten-year plan. Now I was a guy with no plan at all.
16
COMING TO TERMS
I tend to be a little obsessive, and I’m very highly focused. Strikeforce had been my life. For the past five years, it was almost all I had done. I put all my energies into developing the brand. I shut down or stepped away from my other businesses. I believed in the Strikeforce dream. When it died, I was left feeling high and dry. I felt completely screwed. So I started drinking. I thought, “Well, the last fifteen years of my life is just … gone. I might was well whoop it up.”
The brakes came off. Where I used to have a drink in the evening to chill out, or smoke a little weed at night to relax, now I started almost first thing in the morning. I had nothing better to do. There was no training. There was no media work. There w
as just nothing.
So I started drinking, every day, and earlier in the day. I’d get Nicolette up for school. I’d get her fed and dressed. And then I was done with my day. I had no other responsibilities except sit and worry about my future. I had nothing else going on. There was no reason not to smoke a joint and have a cocktail.
I had really gotten into drinking rum. It’s the nectar of the gods. It gave me such a warm and cozy feeling. Rum and Coke became my brunch. I’d have a drink or two, maybe do a little shopping, maybe smoke a little pot, and then come home and have a nap. And then get up and have some more rum.
The drinking got serious for me really quickly. I had always been purpose-based. I had always struggled so hard to survive, to get ahead, to excel. Drinking and drugging didn’t go with that. When I was training for a fight, I’d quit everything for three months before the fight. Even when I wasn’t training, I stayed focused, didn’t go too crazy. And even after I retired, my drinking was minimal. Over the last couple of years, I’d have a drink every night—but just a little one. I’d have a beer, or a little wine. Maybe a glass of rum. But rarely to excess.
Now, with Strikeforce gone, the struggle was over. There was nothing to fight for or against. I really quickly hit a very low place. There was no reason not to drink. There was nothing to be sober for.
Pretty soon I was drinking every day, and drinking hard every night. I started seeing fewer people and doing fewer things. I became antisocial. I’d have my morning drinks and lunchtime drinks. I’d run an errand. I’d smoke a joint. I’d sober up by late afternoon, when I’d go pick my daughter up from school. When she was home safe I’d start it up again. Looking back, my behavior was not surprising. I had been using and abusing drugs and alcohol since I was a boy. I had gone through periods when it really dominated my life. So I guess it wasn’t all that weird that I fell so hard.
Amy was not happy about it. She saw what was happening, and she was pretty vocal about it. She worried. She kept telling me I was in a terrible mood. She wanted to talk about it. She wanted me to do something about it. She kept telling me I was an alcoholic and that I needed help.
I didn’t hide the drinking from her. I didn’t see any reason to. I didn’t think I was an alcoholic. I still had my job as a commentator. I didn’t drink on the job. I still had money in the bank. I wasn’t doing anything bad. I was just upset. I felt like my baby had died. I was grieving. I felt like my only problem, in fact, was her—and her telling me all the time that I was an alcoholic. I told her she was crazy, that she should quit bugging me about my drinking. When she asked me what was bothering me, I said, “You. The thing that bugs me most in my life, right now, is you bothering me about the drinking.”
When she wouldn’t shut up about it, I said, “You know what the problem is? You’re crazy. You need to see a psychiatrist. You should make an appointment and go see someone, because you’re nuts and you’re making me nuts.” I was seriously not worried about the drinking. I felt angry inside. I felt sort of cut off from everything. The drinking seemed to help. But Amy did what I told her to do. She saw the psychiatrist. She came home and told me about it. The doctor had said to her, “Your husband is an alcoholic. He has to stop drinking. If he can’t, you should take your daughter and get out.” So she came home and told me that. She said, “He told me that if you keep drinking, I have to take Nicolette and leave you.”
Nothing was going to cut me off from my daughter. Nothing can get between me and my daughter. I would die before I would let that happen. So I said I would quit, and I meant it. But then I got up the next day, and all I wanted to do, all I wanted to do more than anything in the world, was have a drink. So I took Nicolette to school and came home and had a drink.
For a month, Amy and I fought. I stayed drunk and she stayed mad. She kept saying, “I’m serious. You’re an alcoholic and I’m going to leave.” I thought she was being ridiculous, and I told her that. I told her she was crazy. But then something happened that made me think she might be right. We had a plan to look at houses in Los Angeles. I wanted to be near the ocean, near my friend Henry, near the TV and movie businesses. Amy and I were going to L.A. to check out some real estate.
Then we found out Amy was pregnant. Then she had a miscarriage while we were in L.A. We flew back to San Jose right away. She saw a doctor and got taken care of, but she was pretty beat up. The doctor put her on bed rest, so she asked me if I would please pick up Nic after school and bring her home.
I had agreed to do a charity golf tournament the next day. I got Nic up and took her to school, and then I was going off to play golf. I started drinking around eleven in the morning. The tournament went all right. I drank all day. I had a good time, Tweeting and texting like crazy. Then I looked at the clock, and it was 5:30. I was really drunk. Wasted. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing, but I couldn’t really remember what it was. And my phone had died, so there wasn’t anyone to call and ask, “Hey, am I supposed to be somewhere?”
Then I remembered I was supposed to pick up my daughter. At the school. At 4:30. I drove over there. It was 6:00 when I arrived. The place was dark. The doors were locked. I started pounding on things and yelling. There was nobody around. I figured the only person who could have picked Nic up, other than Amy or me, was our friend Cheri. So I got back in the car and drove to her house, all drunk and out of my mind with fear, and anger, and shame. I had never driven drunk or high with my little girl before and now I couldn’t even remember where she was. I was freaking out.
She was there. Amy had called Cheri and asked her to pick Nic up. She was in the bath. Everything was fine. So I relaxed. I asked Cheri, “Can I just lie down on your sofa for, like, fifteen minutes? I’m really tired. Then I’ll take Nic home.” Cheri said that was fine. So I lay down and went to sleep. When I woke up, it was around midnight. The house was dark and Nic wasn’t there. I asked Cheri what was going on. She said, “We took her home.” So I drove home, too. The house was dark and everything quiet, so I went to bed on the couch.
The next morning, I got up to start the day like always. Amy came downstairs, and she seemed really, really mad at me. I couldn’t figure it out. Had something bad happened? She asked me if I remembered what had happened the day before. I said, “Yeah, I had that golf thing.” She asked, “Do you remember what happened with your daughter?” I said, “No, what happened?” Then it came crashing back. I suddenly remembered—the golf tournament, all the drinks, getting drunk, forgetting Nicolette, driving to the school, driving to Cheri’s house, falling asleep ….
And I saw that Amy was right. I was an alcoholic. I had to be. I had to be an alcoholic or totally out of my mind. Because I would never, never, never leave my daughter unprotected like that unless I was very crazy or very sick. So I must be sick. I told Amy I was sorry. I told her I understood I was an alcoholic. I apologized over and over again. I said I would take care of it.
I had been around twelve-step programs almost my whole life. Being in group homes, I was taken to meetings. When I got into trouble with the law, sometimes going to meetings was part of the punishment or the probation. And being the smart, self-educated man that I am, I had read quite a few books about alcoholism and drug abuse. So I knew I wasn’t the guy with the problem. I never drove my daughter around while I was drunk. I never killed anyone driving drunk, or lost my job, or anything like that. So in my mind, I wasn’t an alcoholic.
But I knew something very serious was wrong with me to make me leave my daughter like that. So I knew what to do. I got into my car to leave. I’d been doing that every day for a while—just getting in the car to leave, so I could go drink or get high or whatever without my wife bugging me. That day I did the same thing, with the intention of going to some kind of twelve-step meeting. I drove somewhere and parked and thought about things. I started crying and kept crying for about thirty minutes—thinking about what I’d done, what I’d done to my wife, what I’d done to my daughter.
Then I went
rummaging in the glove compartment for a tissue or something. I found a joint. I decided to smoke that and go to my first twelve-step meeting.
I found a meeting about ten miles from my house. I walked in, totally baked and really nervous. I was really high, and really hung-over. I didn’t think I would get very much out of the meeting. But I got something. I had been to so many meetings over the years, and I’d listened to all these people tell their stories. I might sympathize, but I didn’t identify. I would think, I’m not that guy. Well, now I saw myself, and I realized, I am that guy.
I didn’t go home after the meeting. I puttered around and avoided Amy. That night I went back to the house and told her I was sorry, again, and said I was going to get sober. I meant it.
I didn’t have a drink that night. The next day, I got up and went to another meeting. I didn’t drink. I went to another meeting. I went to seventy meetings, seventy days in a row. That became my day. I’d get up, get Nic ready, take her to school, go to a meeting, putter around, then pick Nic up again and bring her home. That was my sober life. I didn’t drink, but for the first two weeks, it was really hard not to. And smoke. I missed the weed. Since I’d retired, I had been a daily weed smoker. I had been an every-other-day weed smoker for years—since I was a kid. I only quit when I was training for a fight, because I was always subject to drug testing. With big fights, they test a little closer. I never wanted to fail a drug test, which seemed like the stupidest reason in the world not to win a fight. So I was really careful about that. But otherwise I smoked. It made me feel calm. I missed it.
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