Uncaged (10 page)

The young boys were at the lowest level at the dojo. They were all poor farm boys from the provinces whose families had given them to the dojo to train. They lived there and worked there. It was their whole life. They hadn't had much schooling. They didn't have much future back home in their poor villages. This was their shot.

They had to do all the really hard work—the cooking and the cleaning. I was one level above them because I was a foreigner. They didn't really know where I fit in. They didn't know what to do with me. When I decided I couldn't eat chanko for breakfast (I just couldn't eat fish for breakfast, yuck), they let me start taking just the rice part and put milk and sugar and bananas in it. They wouldn't eat it, but they didn't stop me from eating it.

I slept in a room with a fighter named Ito.
Ito-san.
He was the most senior young boy in the dojo. He had been there long enough to have his own room. He came from a poor country family, and he'd been a wrestler in school. When Pancrase got started as a sport, he tried out and was invited to move to Tokyo. He had lived there three years already, doing nothing but serving. Now it was his fourth year, and he was going to turn pro, like me, and start having actual fights.

The Pancrase organization was only a few years old. It had been created by three Japanese catch wrestlers: Minoru Suzuki, Takako Fuke, and Masakatsu Funaki. They had all been professional fighters
in an organization called Fujiwara Gumi, then had broken away to do their own thing.

Pancrase is real fighting, not fake wrestling like the WWE in America. The rules were pretty simple. Fights were ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes for non-title bouts, thirty minutes for title bouts. Wins are by knockout, submission (with or without a tap out), or on points. Each fighter has five “escapes” at the beginning and can use one to grab the ropes if he's in a submission hold. After five escapes, he loses. Closed-fist strikes to the head were not allowed— but open-fist hits were—as were kicks, knees, or elbows to the head.

The organization idolized Karl Gotch, who was seen as the father of pro wrestling in Japan. He was a Belgian wrestler from a Hungarian family, and he had studied world wrestling styles, especially some East Indian disciplines and training techniques. He had wrestled on the Belgian team in the Olympics and then come to fight in the United States. He was also held for three years in a Nazi concentration camp, using the Indian conditioning training to keep himself alive and strong. Later he moved to Japan, where he was a huge star—they loved his spirit of survival. When he retired, he started training Japanese fighters, including Yoshiaki Fujiwara, who founded Fujiwara Gumi, which trained all the Pancrase fighters.

Gotch's and Fujiwara's pictures were on the wall at the entrance to the mats. Every morning we would have to line up and bow to them before beginning our workout. But the master of the dojo was Masaru Funaki. He was, to me, the ideal of the martial artist, a charismatic leader with a brotherly tone. When teaching, Ken had been like an animal. Funaki was gentler. Ken would show you an arm bar and almost break your arm doing it. Funaki would show a new move and say, “This uses less energy” or “This will scare your opponent” or “This will make you confident.” No one had talked to me like that. No one ever criticized me by saying, “That works, but this works better.”

A lot of our day was spent conditioning. That was the Gotch legacy. He was a freak about conditioning. His theory was that if you conditioned enough, no one could beat you. Maybe that's why the Japanese loved him so much. It was all about repetition and ritual. We were like an army. We'd do three hundred squats in a row, all counting out loud, all together. Then we'd do the exact same number of sit-ups, and the exact same number of push-ups, and so on.

We did that all day, six days a week. On Sunday, the young boys slept. They didn't go out, or hang out, or visit their families. They stayed in bed. I was left on my own.

There wasn't really anyone to hang out with other than the young boys. I couldn't talk to them anyway. English is the second language in much of Japan, but these were rural country boys who hadn't had much schooling. None of them spoke English at all. Funaki and Ito spoke just a little. It was really lonely for me. I tried to learn Japanese for the first few weeks, but it was too difficult. Japanese is one of the toughest languages out there to learn.

It was weird. I had been in prison only eight months earlier, but
this
made me feel more alone and isolated. In prison, at least there were people to talk to. Here, I felt like I was totally alone.

So I got into the habit of borrowing a bicycle on Sundays and pedaling down to the Shin-Yokohama train station. I'd park the bike and go hang out inside. If I saw anybody who looked like they spoke English, I'd say hello. I tried to make friends that way. If I saw a white person, I'd say, “Hey! How's it going?” I didn't make too many friends that way.

There was partying at the dojo, but I wasn't really part of that. I was still in that weird class status where no one really knew who I was, so everyone deferred to me as a higher class. I would have to speak up if I wanted something. The fighters would all drink heavily after a fight. The young boys weren't allowed to drink, and the rules in the dojo were very strict. No one broke the rules if
they wanted to stay. One kid told someone no one day during training. It was all very quiet and subtle, but two hours later his family arrived to pick him up, and no one ever saw him again. There was no sneaky drinking or drugging there, like there had been at the group homes where I'd lived.

But in the Japanese culture you are not allowed to
refuse
a drink. So after the fights it was a tradition for the fighters to get the young boys drunk. Then the young boys would screw around and act like idiots. One of them fell off a beam one night, broke his neck, and died. After that, they hung his picture in the hall, and we bowed to him, too, every day when we began our training.

The other difference between my life in Japan and my life in prison is that in prison you always know what's going to happen next. In Japan, I had no idea where anything was going. I was just training. I didn't know the plan. It was just one day to the next, training hard without any idea of what I was training for.

Then, after several months of training, I was told to prepare for my first fight. It was scheduled for December 18, 1994. I didn't know who I was going to fight, but I was told to get ready. We traveled to Tokyo. A little while before the fight they told me I was going to go up against a Dutch guy named Bas Rutten. This was insane. Bas Rutten was one of the top fighters in the world at that time. He was a veteran, six or seven years older than me. He was also a lot bigger than me—six foot one and about 205 pounds to my slimmed-down five foot ten and 185 pounds. I had basically no chance of beating him. Bas was favored to win the whole tournament. It was my first fight! I was just the appetizer portion. I was sure I was going to get killed.

It was supposed to be a ten-minute match. I was wearing black. He was wearing red. I had hair. He was bald. My brother Ken had come in from Lodi, to fight and to watch me fight. Funaki was there, along with all the other Pancrase guys. This was a tournament fight
to crown the first Pancrase champion and bring some credibility to the year-old league. I was making my big debut.

We came out to the ring. I was completely scared. I could feel the lights in the building like electricity running through me. Then the referee shouted, “Fight!” The bell rang. The crowd started screaming, mostly in Japanese, except for some American who kept yelling, “Punch his head!”

I felt his strength, right away—this superhuman, experienced strength. He was very muscular and wiry, and his muscles were incredibly dense. Mine aren't like that. When I get big, I get these full, perfect muscles, which are very good for fast reactions and fast recovery. They're very elastic, so I don't get many injuries. But they're not that strong. They don't have that density and that super strength. Bas's strength, compared to mine, was enormous. When I hit him I felt how strong his body was. So I knew he was going to hurt me. I knew he was going to win. I was afraid it was going to be serious—I was afraid I was actually going to
die.
He seemed really dangerous to me. Then he hit me really hard five or six times and I was sure of it.

Because of that, I fought like a crazy person. I had nothing to lose. I didn't pace myself. I threw everything I had, just to try to keep him from murdering me. But first he had to mess me up some. Right at the start of the fight, he got me with a front kick to the face and broke my nose. He got me right on the tip of it with his shoe and snapped the cartilage.

My plan had been to get him on the ground. I tried really hard to do that, but once I got him down, it didn't work right away. He threw a front choke on me and said, “Aha! I've got you!” But I could feel myself slipping out of the choke before he was finished saying it. I snapped free and we grappled. A minute or so later, I got him in a headlock. He started saying, over and over again, in his heavy Dutch accent, “That will not work. I am so strong.”

He wasn't actually talking to me; he was talking to himself. He was trying to pump himself up. I thought, “OK, this guy's crazy.” That made me fight harder—not better, but harder. I kept taking him down, and taking the better position. The next few minutes happened like
that.
They rang the bell again and suddenly it was over.

I went to my corner. Ken said, “OK. You did good.”
Good?
I was just happy he hadn't killed me. I said, “He broke my nose!”

Then the decision came down. I had won.

It was a huge upset. I wasn't supposed to win. I was just the bag boy. I was the guy who carried everyone's equipment, or the warm-up you beat on while you got ready for your
real
fight. People knew I was Ken's brother, but other than that I was relatively unknown. It was a huge victory.

In those days, everyone on the card was scheduled for several fights. My second one was with a guy named Manabu Yamada. It was supposed to be a twenty-minute match, but it was over in about eight. He got me with a leg lock and finished me. Then he went into the finals and fought against Ken and lost. Ken was named first champion of Pancrase.

It didn't matter to me that I didn't win my second match. I was on the map. I had fought my first fight, and I had won. I became an instant superstar in Japan.

We all went out that night to the Roppongi section of Tokyo— Bas and me and all the other fighters—and drank like fish. We went all night long. That was the tradition. In Japan, after a fight, you drink. The moment the training is over, you celebrate. I had been doing nothing but training for months and months—no drinking, no smoking, nothing but hard training. Now the event sponsor took us all out for an evening on the town. We sang karaoke and drank gallons of whiskey.

I became friends with Bas that night. I would make a lot of friends that way, bonding after a fight. That's a human tradition. Whenever
two people share a stressful event, it brings them together. It gives them something relevant to share.

I was just blown away. The whole experience was huge for me. Training in Japan, fighting in Japan, winning my first fight were all huge. Just
being
in Japan would have been the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. I was a small-town kid. I'd never been anywhere in my whole life. Travel, to me, meant getting into trouble and going to a new group home. Taking a trip meant being in handcuffs, riding on a bus, going from one jail to another. So this was gigantic.

I was on top of the world. I was blown away for weeks by the experience. I got my paycheck, and I went home with $1,800 in my pocket. To me, that was a fortune. I was rich! But when I got back to the United States in December, I learned the IRS had put a lien on my wages. I owed $4,000 in back child support, so I had to work out a payment plan for that debt. I didn't get all the money. But I was now a professional fighter.

After my first victory in Tokyo, I was placed on the Pancrase circuit. The fighters were all scheduled to fight every six to eight weeks. Fighting became my life. I'd stay in Lodi, living at Ken's house, training at the Lion's Den. Then I'd go back to the dojo in Tokyo, work out for two or three days to break the horrible jetlag, and prepare to fight. Afterward, I'd come back to Lodi. After a few months, I moved out of Ken's house and moved in with another fighter, Jason DeLucia.

It was a good time. I felt like I had arrived. I was part of something: working with Ken, training at the Lion's Den, beginning to train other fighters there, too.

Bob Shamrock was proud of me. He asked me if, like Ken, I wanted to become his adopted son. I was humbled and flattered by that and I said yes. We did the paperwork and I officially changed my name from Frank Juarez to Frank Shamrock. I got a new birth certificate that lists Robert Conrad Shamrock as my father. The line that reads
MOTHER
is blank.

The Pancrase people gave me a contract. Each month, they'd put $5,000 in my new bank account. I got a credit card. This was the first time I'd had anything like that. I bought a car. I started to realize this was how people actually lived. This was what people
do.
I had been mowing lawns and doing odd jobs and stealing things since I was nine years old. But this was the first time I actually had money in my pocket and money in the bank. I began to think this could be an actual job for me, a career.

But there were parts of the job I really didn't like. Weird as it is to say it, the thought of hurting other people as part of my job seemed bad to me. For the first ten fights or so, I mostly worried that I was going to get killed. But after that I mostly worried that I was going to kill someone else. I was really afraid I was going to hurt someone. I think it was because I had come from a home of physical abuse, and I viewed anything physical toward another person as violence. Maybe I was afraid of that kind of power. Anyway, in some fights, I could feel myself pulling back.