Uncaged (11 page)

In the Pancrase organization, I was among real martial artists. It was an art and a sport. There were a lot of official rules, but also a lot of things you just didn't do. You could legally hit a guy when he was on the ground, but you didn't. It was not cool.

Maybe because the sport was so small, I knew everyone I was ever going to fight. If I fought a guy tonight, I was going to fight him again in six weeks. So we all followed these unspoken rules. We beat the shit out of each other, but we didn't want to
injure
each other. There was more honor and respect in it than that.

We fought all over Japan. The touring circuit took us everywhere from Kobe to Sapporo. We mostly fought in ten-thousand-seat arenas. Some venues were as small as two thousand seats. Some were as large as fifteen thousand. We played Korakuen Hall in Tokyo because that's where all the wrestling and boxing events in Tokyo
are held. We played NK Hall, near Tokyo Disneyland. After an earthquake in Kobe, the whole city had toppled over except for this brand-new shopping mall. So we came down the escalators and held our fights right in the mall.

We were treated like royalty, like rock stars. We were modern samurai. I was a big celebrity—over there. At home, I spent all my time training hard in a sport that no one knew and no one really wanted to see. But I'd go back to Japan, and we were big and everyone knew us. They respected us. Everyone knew that pro wrestling was fake. We were something new, this new kind of hybrid fighters, and we were famous.

I missed a lot because I didn't speak Japanese and I didn't really get all the cultural cues. Girls would come up to me, after fights or in the street, and give me their business cards. I thought that was a little weird. Then a friend of mind looked at the card and said, “This isn't a business card. It's a
personal
card. That means she wants to spent personal time with you.” After that, I was a young man on a mission to meet as many women as possible. I had always been the goofy, out-of-place kid who never knew anyone at the party. Now I was the star. I really enjoyed it. Being with American girls I had felt all these layers of weirdness and guilt and shame. That wasn't the case with the Japanese girls I met. They were eager to come over and take care of me and cook me noodles and sleep on the floor while I slept in the bed. They viewed their role in the relationship very differently than American girls. They'd buy me things. I had a whole bunch of Japanese women fans who bought me gifts— T-shirts and underwear and all kinds of weird stuff.

Back in Lodi, life wasn't that colorful. I was training hard and beginning to train other guys. I always read a lot. I became obsessed with
The Book of Five Rings,
which is an ancient Japanese book about martial arts. It is basically a textbook on how to live the simple samurai
life. The writer was a Japanese samurai warrior from the 1600s, and the book has lessons about how to live, how to train, how to fight, and how to win.

But I was also reading books about serial killers. I got kind of obsessed about those—the more vicious, the better. I'm not sure what that was about. On some level, maybe it made me feel better about what I was doing. I still hadn't dealt with the whole business of hurting people for a living. It was hurting me, to be hurting people. So the books made me feel like less of a monster. I mean, at least I wasn't cutting people into pieces, filleting their faces, or hanging them off a fence.

Meanwhile, I was learning how to live. That was my real education. I'd read these books and exhaust my body and learn from my own mistakes. I'd train all day, go out and drink all night, and then get my butt kicked bad the next day. Lesson: I better not drink all night if I don't want to get my butt kicked. That was my whole education: screw up, get hurt, learn a lesson, do something different the next time.

My second fight was a Pancrase event in Nagoya, Japan. It was only about a month after my first fight. I fought Katsuomi Inagaki and won with a submission hold after six minutes. Two months later, I fought again, in Yokohama, against Masakatsu Funaki. I lost. Funaki was the big cheese in our dojo. He was like the Ken Shamrock of Japan—an older guy, very tough, very respected. He was the guy who had trained Ken. He was a cofounder of Pancrase. He was the first man who gave me some idea of the spiritual aspect of martial arts. So it was to be expected that he beat me.

But a month after that I fought again, in Nagoya, against Minoru Suzuki. I beat him. He was another cofounder of Pancrase. He had been named second king of Pancrase, which was the equivalent of champion. (Ken was the first king, and Suzuki had beaten Ken and
taken the crown a year before this. A month after I beat Suzuki, he beat Ken again.) It was a huge victory.

I fought six more times that year—eleven fights in one calendar year! One of them was a rematch with Bas Rutten. A few things had changed since our first fight. I had gotten a little complacent about training. You see that happen with fighters. After they win a few fights, they want to train a bit less. In my case, I had met a really pretty girl. I started seeing her regularly whenever I was in Japan for a fight.

In the beginning, I was very serious about training. I wouldn't do anything before a fight. But after a while it got to where I'd even go over to Japan a little early—not for extra training, but so I could start partying with my girlfriend in Japan. I had always smoked pot but I started smoking hash a lot in those days, mainly because it was the only hard drug that you could buy in the Japanese subways. And I was drinking quite a bit. I remember thinking one night, “Hey, you gotta fight tomorrow!” I had another glass of wine and said, “Ah, you'll be fine.”

The second fight with Bas was in Tokyo, about six months after I beat him. I felt pretty comfortable going in. I was a superstar! But I realized after about five minutes that I was in trouble. My strategy was to get him down—Bas is from Holland, and those guys are all really good strikers—and finish him on the ground. But he was even stronger than I remembered him being, and he had much better conditioning. I was getting tired, and I could see he wasn't. I realized I didn't have the gas to finish the fight. I knew he was going to kick my ass unless I figured out a strategy to win.

The takedown strategy didn't work. He anticipated it, and I hadn't really developed my takedown skills yet. I attempted something, and he saw it coming, and we literally
flew
out of the ring, between the ropes and into the first row.

I whacked my head. I was dazed. There was no way I was going to be able to beat him. So I went to Plan B. I would get him mad and make him hit me in the face.

You get points against you in Pancrase for various things. I had one against me for getting knocked down early in the fight. I figured if I could get Bas mad at me and get him to lose his temper, he'd forget himself and make a fist and punch me with it. Then he'd lose a point for hitting me in the face. I knew I could survive that; there wasn't much time left. It was a fifteen-minute fight. I knew I could take whatever he could dish out for the last few minutes.

As soon as he got me into the next hold, I started making these clown faces at him. I stuck my tongue out at him. I called him names. And it worked. He went insane. He's a very emotional fighter to start with. He has a problem with his temper. At that time he always had a big
R
written on his hand before the fight. The
R
was for
relax,
because he'd get all tense and angry and use his energy the wrong way. That's why I knew I could make fun of him and get him to lose his temper. I had asked him about the
R,
so I knew.

He lost his temper, and he started bashing me in the face with his palm, totally legal. He hit me a bunch of times. It was a bad strategy, but it worked and he got pissed and closed his punch. I used my face as a battering ram against his fist and he got a warning and lost a point for the illegal strike. We got to the cards. It was a split decision. He got the point for the knockdown. I got the points for him hitting me in the face.

A smarter fighter would have said, “Dude, you can't use your face like that.” Other people got what I was doing, but they thought it just wasn't cool to make fun of someone. But I had to do something. I knew I couldn't beat him down. I wasn't going to just let him beat
me
down. So I found some psychology and made a little tweak.

I learned the same lesson about conditioning when I was fighting Allan Goes, a Brazilian fighter. We didn't know anything about
Brazilian fighters except they had some sort of grappling style. Because we were Pancrase and we were fighting and training in the Japanese tradition, we didn't worry much about anyone from outside the system. Any time you were scheduled to fight someone who wasn't Japanese, you figured it was going to be an easy month. You didn't train that hard.

It was Allan's first professional fight in a ring, but he had fought in a lot of street fights and challenge matches in Brazil—fights where you show up to another school and duke it out with the top guy. I was hanging out, I was goofing around. I was screwing up in every way possible. I thought I had nothing to worry about.

When the match started, Goes threw me on the ground and kicked the shit out of me. It was going to be a little harder than I had thought. I managed to get away from him and we grappled. When he was on my back he fishhooked my eyeball—which was really illegal, but the referee couldn't see it. He used that to put me in a rear naked choke. It was scary and not at all part of my plan for the fight. Somehow, before I went to sleep, I got to the rope and escaped. We started in again. I got him in a leg hold. I thought he'd quit, but he didn't. So I pressed it. I turned his ankle. I could feel all the tendons rip. The pain must have been unbearable. But he broke free somehow and got to the rope.

It turned out I had broken his leg. The fight went to the cards and ended in a draw.

My record was OK, but I wasn't learning the lessons I should have been learning. I fought Bas again a third time and lost about ten minutes into the fight. I got really tired. I had tried to get him on the ground, and failed. My only skill set in those days was on the ground, and he figured out ways to stop me from getting him down. I was getting desperate, so I tried a shoot to his knee. Somehow I got my forehead involved, and I hit his knee really hard with my eyebrow. It opened up a cut and the fight was ruled a TKO. It was a fluke, but honestly
I was pretty tired, and I wasn't going to make it. He beat on me pretty bad in that fight, and I would have had a hard time beating him.

I had an easier time with a few other fights. I had a second match against Funaki, the master of Pancrase. I got him into the same hold he had beaten me with, a toehold, about ten minutes into the fight. I got a win by submission. There was no way, though, that I beat him. I couldn't have comprehended that at the time. I was fighting my ass off. I was fighting for my life. But I didn't really know much about fighting. I did not understand that someone else's skill level could be so high that they could let me win without me knowing it. Later, when my skill level was as high as that, I knew something fishy had happened. I think Funaki let me get him into that hold and let me beat him.

Pancrase was still new. The founders knew they had to have more drama. They had to bring up the young fighters, and they had to have compelling matches. They knew it was important for young Frank to win a fight or two and be seen as a challenge to the old men. I think it's possible that Suzuki put me over, too. I beat him twice, once on strikes and once on a knee bar. I was named king of Pancrase after the second one. But maybe he let me win.

I had already declared that I would beat everybody. My first interview with a sports reporter was around that time, in 1995. I told him I was going to be king of Pancrase, just like Ken had been. He asked me about the no-holds-barred (NHB) fighting (the original name for MMA and UFC) that was just starting to take place. I said there was
no way
I was going to do any of that stuff. It was way too violent and way too crazy and way too dangerous for me.

I went on to fight other fights with Pancrase, all over Japan. I beat Takafumi Ito, Ryushi Yanagisawa, and Osami Shibuya—all guys I had trained with at the Yokohama dojo.

The Shibuya fight had one weird element to it. He was the latest big thing at the time in Japan. He was experimenting with steroids,
I think. He had muscles growing out of his ears. I knew he didn't really know how to fight, but he was incredibly strong. I had moved into this lazy, partying stage of my Japanese experience. I had fought six or eight fights. I was doing well. So I was screwing around. I wasn't training so hard. I wasn't preparing so well. I went into the fight with Shibuya really dehydrated. The fight went on longer than I expected and the dehydration caught up with me. I was dry. I couldn't swallow. I felt like I was dying of thirst. All I could think about was getting something to drink. I was getting tired, grappling with this big steroid-pumped guy. I couldn't finish him.

Then I suddenly saw that he was wet. He was all sweaty. We were down on the floor and I was hanging onto him for dear life. There were these big golden drops of sweat on his neck, these glorious big drops of water. So I just licked them off his skin. I sucked those drops down. It worked. I got the hydration I needed. Three minutes later I got him into a shoulder lock and won the fight. I don't think he ever knew what I did. I didn't tell him. It seemed like the kind of thing you should keep to yourself. But I figure, where there's a will, there's a way. That's how you can tell if a guy
really
wants to win a fight. Will he do anything? Lick the sweat off some guy's neck?

I fought some other guys, too. I beat an American fighter, Vernon White, who was recruited into Pancrase by Ken a couple of years before me and who went on to have a long career. He was the first person I fought who was also a training partner. Then I threw my forehead into Bas Rutten's kneecap and lost the king of Pancrase title.