It was a hard thing to swallow, and Kenny was depressed for a while after the fight. But it led him to rethink his approach. He had to become a complete professional.
“You need to have a brutal honesty with yourself. Did I do everything possible to win that fight? What didn’t I do? And analyze honestly, without bias, from a technical standpoint. And then ask yourself, ‘Did I do everything in my training to prepare?’ It’s about moving forward. We plague ourselves with stupidity, with bad thoughts. We put our brains in that prison. You can carry that fear with you, inside you, and it can keep you from changing for the better.”
Kenny continued, “That loss drives me. Any loss I’ve had drives me. I don’t think there’s a day when I haven’t thought about the Sherk fight. I never want that to happen again. It drives me in training. I changed a lot of things since that fight. Training happens all the time, every day, even without a fight in the future. It was a huge hole in my game. I didn’t have a full-time strength and conditioning guy, and I needed to close that hole. Sherk was a real professional and I wasn’t.”
Since then, Kenny has worked with Kevin Kearns, his strength and conditioning coach, and made tremendous progress—he feels much stronger and more explosive. The injuries that plagued him have been rehabilitated. Against fighters that are supposed to be stronger than him, a deceptively stringy Kenny has shown plenty of pure strength. He’s won several fights in a row, finishing all of his opponents. But Kenny’s permanently dissatisfied, even in victory.
“I hate my wins, I just hate my losses more. I enjoyed the Sam Stout one—it was a coming-out party. He’d just beat Spencer Fischer, and I knew I could beat him easy and I did it. But I look back two weeks later and I think that sucked. That fight was a nice clean fight, no mistakes. But I don’t think about the past too much. When I look at tape and I think, That sucks, what am I doing, my hand is up here, I’m ducking all weird . . . it’s not pretty.”
Kenny went to Afghanistan in 2007 to train with some of the troops, as part of a program to boost morale that a company called ProSport MVP put together, originally with baseball players. The troops had requested UFC fighters, and Kenny answered the call. He thought it’d be interesting. Like any true student of the game, Kenny learned more from those he was teaching and interacting with than they from him.
What impressed Kenny the most was “the guys with beards,” the Special Forces soldiers who grew beards to better fit into Afghan society. The real, hard-core killers.
“They had the scars, the look in their eyes. They had seen the shit. But they were very professional about it.” Kenny tries to verbalize the impression he got. “This is the reality, and we accept it. We’ve been killing a lot of people and we’re satisfied with the job we’re doing . . . they were matter-of-fact and passionate.
“They told me about their weapon loop: how you go to your rifle, then the enemy’s rifle, then the sidearm, then your knife. In a fight, that’s game plan A, to B, to C, but in terms of life and death.”
“I looked around and thought, These guys must be on alert twenty-four-seven, they must be on alert all the time. They have to be. You see guys you know get killed and how does that affect your intensity? I walk into a cage and get it, but they’re out there every single day with it. I thought about it a lot, that kind of mental focus and clarity.”
Kenny remembers talking to Rob Kamen (a former muay Thai superstar fighter) about it. They were discussing the “selfprogramming.”
“I’m nastier than I used to be. And the closer to a fight, I get worse. I feel that I need to go out there and do a serious job. I want to take him out, I want to literally beat him—not just win. It changes me. And it must change them [the soldiers] a lot.”
Kenny mused aloud that it must be hard to come back to normal society after functioning on that level for so long. He can offer only his own example.
“I’m not the most fun person to be around, especially near a fight. You prepare your mind to suffer and inflict suffering. You delete a part of your compassion. There’s a certain amount of brutality—to offer violence. Or you’re vulnerable. I didn’t always feel that way. Before the Sherk fight it was always just part of my job, just compete. Now I want to kill that guy. Whatever I can do within the rules with the utmost brutality. I won’t hesitate. Every fight there’s more wood on the fire, more bad intentions the closer I get. I’ve been programmed.” Because without it you’re a sitting duck.
Kenny recounts the conversation with Rob Kamen. Rob had trouble deprogramming after he retired. He’d beat up the guys he was training with the pads, or he’d knock them out sparring. He couldn’t shut down the intensity. His students, who were paying him for training, couldn’t handle him—he kept fucking them up.
Rob told Kenny, “Certain people have it or they don’t, but you have to feed it. The fire may be there but it needs fuel. Some people don’t have that spark, and you need it or you’ll get hurt.”
Kenny remembers one guy in particular, a Special Forces soldier who approached him for an autograph with his arm in a sling. The guy’s eyes were so incredibly intense and his energy was so focused, and they just bullshitted, but the guy made an impression. His eyes, his aura stuck in Kenny’s mind. Afterward, Kenny found out the guy was a war hero.
I remember Dan Gable talking about the intensity “in the room”—you had to have examples of it. For fighters to know what is possible, you need to have examples. These soldiers had shown Kenny a different kind of focus, and he’d soaked it up.
“For them it’s life on the line, and I thought about that for my next fight—it’s either him or me. Being ready to die, going back to that samurai mentality. Today is a good day to die. You have to be ready for that, to leave everything out there. I think I had some understanding of the mentality, but going into that fight now, I know I need to kill him before he kills me. It’s life or death. I’m gonna destroy him.”
I see some of this intensity in sparring, when Kenny becomes another person entirely: savage, focused, and explosive. His will is palpable. He seems like the biggest guy in the room. But afterward, relaxed and laughing, Kenny makes something clear.
“I focus on destroying him, but emotions have no place. They can be good or bad, but emotions always run out. You can’t fight on emotion or adrenaline. At the end of the day, you have to have a love for it, something that lasts forever, because that will carry you. You can only be mad for so long. It can help you, but anytime you make decisions based on emotions you’ll make a decision without all the information, it’s inconsistent.”
He continues, “Whereas if I’m just focused on the techniques and strategy of the fight, on the fluidity of the fight, on what needs to be done tactically, then I’ll make the right decisions. Instead of just being mad, ‘Oh, he punched me, I’ll punch him.’ That changes things. You need to be able to stay calm. Okay, I got hit. That hurt, but I got to find the right way to hurt him back.”
Kenny confesses a secret to me toward the end of our last day. It goes back to our shared youth, the infatuation with action heroes and the perfect fight—where all your punches and kicks land cleanly and none of his do. Kenny confides that “being the champ would be great but, for me, I got into this and it’s grown into a monster. It’s about me doing the perfect technique. Doing something beautiful, like a painting. With accuracy, speed, power, timing—the best kick, the best punch, the purest and best technique. Like the old Bruce Lee stuff, but real. I’m so far away from that, and it’s bigger than the sport, bigger than a title or fans or anything. With that in mind, I’d much rather go for it with all my heart than run the clock out to grind out the win. I wouldn’t feel good about the win, it wouldn’t feel real.”
I asked Kenny what is the last thing he thinks right before the bell rings and he’s staring across the cage, and he smiles. He loves that moment. “I just get excited. Here we go, like I’m a painter with a blank canvas.”
Since we spoke, I watch Kenny fight with newfound
interest and respect, because he consistently improves so much. He is a fighter who changes dramatically from fight to fight. In his last fight, with Joe Stevenson (a fight I thought would be really tough for him), he dominated—and looked beautiful doing it, graceful. His footwork was smooth, his punches and kicks crisp and lightning quick, and his ground game simple, pure, and inexorable. And he knew it. The moment the fight was through he covered his face with his hands, one step closer to painting his masterpiece.
THE EGO IS GARBAGE
Frank Shamrock
What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man’s job?
If you don’t understand this, you will get lost,
However intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.
—Lao-tzu
There was a video making the rounds some years ago of former UFC champ Frank Shamrock working on a Pilates ball. He was doing things that nobody had seen before, flowing over the ball like water, flipping, turning, and spinning—balletic and pure. Was it related to MMA or grappling? It looked like something out of Cirque du Soleil. It was graceful, beautiful to watch, the weird private workout of a strange figure in the MMA world.
Frank Shamrock rides an unsteady place in MMA history—he was a dominant champion in the UFC before the sport fully evolved, and he retired from MMA early in his career when there weren’t many good fights left for him. At times he seemed super-naturally good, working in a different league than everyone else; at other times he’s been all-too human. He’s retained some of that aura of effortless invincibility, even when he loses. He seemed like an athlete from the future, and indeed when MMA began to surge in popularity Frank emerged from retirement. Older and wiser, however, he took control of his career.
He never returned to the UFC, which he calls “U-Fight-Cheap.” He’s had a love-hate relationship with longtime MMA fans, sometimes coming across as arrogant and sneering, other times as the epitome of the humble martial artist.
When I drove out to San Jose to meet Frank at his gym, he was remarkably reasonable, relaxed, and businesslike. But every now and again a flash of a fighter’s ego would shine through, the silly self-focus of celebrity would make its presence felt. His handsome battered face could split with a jackal grin, one tooth sharp and snaggled, and a slightly wild look in his eyes. I set out the tape recorder and sat down on the mats, and Frank stretched and started to talk. There is little mystery as to why Frank is the way he is—it’s where he’s from.
Frank was born Alisio Juarez III in 1972 in Santa Monica, California, and had a hard youth. “I was a pretty serious juvie delinquent,” he laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in his voice. “I left home at eleven and was a ward of the state until I was nineteen. The state was my mom and dad.” There is something about how he said it, a catch in his voice, a veil drawn by a self-made man over a wound that will never quite heal.
“It was a joke. As long as you don’t hurt anybody, you can do anything. We’d have huge parties, steal cars, wreak havoc . . . but as long as you didn’t hurt anyone they’d just send you along to the next place.” Frank wasn’t a street fighter, though—he disliked violence and can remember only a few scraps that he couldn’t avoid. He came to the idea of fighting late.
Though Frank hadn’t played many sports besides partying, he was a natural athlete. You can tell he was one of those odd kids who had all the gifts to make it—brawn, brains, looks, but without the family support and stability to guide him. So he drifted, alone. He dabbled in volleyball, soccer, and even pitched in Little League, but he never fought much, or even wrestled. “I went to wrestling camp and the first day a couple of guys went out partying, had a great time but got in some fights and caused trouble, and they assumed it was me who led them astray,” he laughs, this time with genuine merriment. “That was the end of my wrestling career. The coach kicked me out.”
Frank eventually found his way to Bob Shamrock, who ran the Shamrock Ranch, a foster home for boys in Susanville, California. Bob had a favorite adopted son, who’d taken his name: Ken Shamrock. Ken was a promising athlete and the alpha boy at the ranch, and he would become one of the founding fighters of modern MMA. He lost to Royce Gracie in a couple of early UFCs and had a good understanding of the ground game from training in Japan for Pancrase.
Pancrase was a promotion formed by Masakatsu Funaki, a bored pro wrestler, a submission wizard who wanted to fight as the “first ever pro-wrestling group with no preordained finishes” (to quote Paul Lazenby, a fighter and a commentator). This was in 1993, the year the UFC started in the United States. The idea, like so many ideas, was floating in the ether. Ken Shamrock was one of their early stars. Ken was very much the image of a fighter, with a superhero body of muscles, a square chin, and a GI Joe haircut. Ken eventually went to pro wrestling and was billed (in his prime with some veracity) as the “World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
The three Shamrocks have had a tempestuous relationship over the years. At one point, when Frank was sixteen, Bob and Ken went to North Carolina to pursue Ken’s pro wrestling career and kicked Frank back into the system. What that must have felt like to a sixteen-year-old boy is hard to fathom.
A few years later Bob and Ken returned to California, and Frank was formally adopted. Frank started training with his new brother and found he enjoyed the fight training. “I was very, very competitive. I go a hundred percent and I want to be good or terrible. I loved submission wrestling because it was singular, self-driven. In volleyball I’d go crazy and try to be everywhere at once, and guys were loafing.”
Frank took to it like a fish to water, and remembers, “It only took a few months to start beating those around me. Ken, my first teacher, taught me the basics, catch-as-catch-can wrestling. It was the simple stuff—movement, position, submission—but I loved it and I studied it like a science and progressed fast. I wrote down everything. I took a very scholastic approach. I saw the whole thing as a game, just a sport—not a fight. I wasn’t encumbered by the idea of winning or dominating.” Frank swears he had never been a street fighter, and he often talks about how distasteful he finds violence.
Ken was a superstar in the early MMA world, and Frank lurked in his shadow, going to the big fights at the UFC and in Japan as part of Ken’s posse. He began to fight, but “I had trouble, because I didn’t want to hurt people. I didn’t really understand the game.” He was in awe of his brother, who “smashed me at will.” The gym was called the Lion’s Den, and the brutality of training (and hazing new members) has become legendary. It was the epitome of the old school macho MMA gym, the original—come get your ass kicked if you want to play with the big boys.
Frank smiled at me with that hyena grin and said, “I had to accept that if I am swordsman, if I pick up the sword, I have to swing it. That’s the game. It is what it is. A punch is a punch, and there’s a game element and an art element, but it’s also a physical altercation and if I don’t go a hundred percent something bad could happen. Being a professional fighter and not trying to hurt your opponent is the stupidest, most oxymoronic thing. I think it was a fear of being good, of having the skill to hurt if necessary. At the time I wasn’t mature enough to realize that having the skill is wonderful, that it’s a blessing. You just need to know what to do with it. Some will fight in the street, some will languish in the middle, wondering if they should commit, and some will be the best fighters in the world. I realized and accepted it, that I loved it, and I accepted what comes with it. I may kill somebody or get famous but, if I’m true to it, then I accept that. From that point on, I smashed everybody.” Frank burst into laughter again, content.
I thought of Liborio, and Freddie Roach, and the importance of acceptance. Here I was hearing it again, in a slightly different context, perhaps, but it also played to Virgil’s comments about perspective. Maybe I was finally getting somewhere.
“There was a fight early on, John Lober, where I got him in a bunch of different holds and e
very time I got something I’d look over at him and think, ‘Hey, time to tap, I got you.’ But he was fighting. He came from a different place, and he’s thinking, ‘Just break my leg or I’ll get out.’ He forced me to confront the truth of fighting. It was a big growth moment for me.” Frank cackled. “Now I’ll stomp the head of my closest friend if he’s in the cage with me—that’s the game!”
Frank’s rise was meteoric. “I got really good and famous, really fast,” he said, and he’s right. He started fighting in Pancrase in Japan and suddenly he was matched, after only a few fights, against Funaki himself—the legend, the guy who had trained his brother, Ken. “I had to fight my teacher’s teacher. I couldn’t touch Ken. Ken could smash me at will. No matter how much I thought about it, or visualized, I didn’t see how I could beat this guy. So do I just go out there and die?” Frank laughed again.
Frank taught himself to meditate in hotel rooms in Japan. “The logic wasn’t there, of a way to beat this guy,” he says, “and I had so much fear and anxiety. I had to try something. I got inside myself, just trying to calm down. I was sitting in the hotel, thinking, ‘Oh my God what am I doing?’ when I realized I had to relax. So I worked on it. Deep breaths, eyes closed, just thinking about individual techniques. I relaxed and it worked. I started to do technical visualization. Then I went out there and Funaki kicked the shit out of me.” Frank dissolves into feral cackles, genuine deep amusement. “Yeah, he smashed me, but I came back and beat him later. And it never bothered me to lose like that. If I didn’t try hard enough, or screwed around, or was out of shape . . . those losses really bug me. If somebody kicks my ass—that was all you, dude. I have tremendous respect for them. Truthfully, that’s kind of what I’m looking for, someone who can do that and push me.” A sincerity came through those pat sporting words, a deep underlying need to be challenged.
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