Uncaged (13 page)

That was devastating to me. Ken and I were not close. We never really had a brotherly relationship. But he was my mentor. He had been my trainer. He was my employer. He and I were connected by Bob, our adopted father. We were supposed to be some sort of family. But now I realized that he either didn't believe in me or he was afraid of me. He didn't want me to be who I thought I could be. Plus he was really angry. When I tried to talk to him, he got even angrier. He grabbed a computer and threw it at me. Then he screamed at me for the next ten minutes.

It was time to go. I couldn't keep working for him.

I was still living in Lodi, in an apartment I was sharing with Jason DeLucia. I was doing OK financially. I had been making good money. My Pancrase salary was $5,000 a month. I had almost no overhead. I was driving a car I'd bought from Ken, a 1990 convertible Camaro that I'd painted purple. But the money was just disappearing. I was training all the time, and eating every meal in a restaurant. I never thought about the cost of anything. In Lodi, we lived in our little apartment and trained. In Japan, we lived like rock stars. We'd fight, and we'd go party, and everything cost a fortune. A beer was ten bucks! And we drank a lot of beer. So even though I was making a lot of money, I was always broke. By the twentieth of the month, I'd be down to seventy-eight dollars again. Every month.

I wasn't sure what kind of future I would have without Ken and the Lion's Den. I figured I'd better talk it over with my dad.

Bob Shamrock was living at a house in Lockford, about twenty miles from Lodi. His big group home in Susanville had been closed down. He had a smaller group home now, with only five or six boys in it. It was a little house on a suburban street, in the middle of grape country.

Ken had a ranch up the road, three or four miles away. It was a giant spread, five or six acres, with a swimming pool. He lived there with his wife and sons, and he had a second house on the property where his in-laws lived. He was doing very well financially. He had money coming in from the Japan contracts. He had his own money from the wrestling and fighting he was doing. He was making a little money from the gym. He was having some good paydays.

It was the afternoon training time. I knew Bob would be at home, and he'd probably be alone. So I drove out there. I told him what had happened with Ken, about him freaking out and throwing the computer at me. I told him this had happened in front of his students, while I was teaching his system and philosophy. I did not agree with demeaning and embarrassing people in front of others. How could I follow this person who treated me this way and speak on his behalf? How could I represent these ideals?

Bob didn't seem that worried about it. He said, “I'm sure it will be fine. Everything will work itself out.” I didn't think so. I told him I didn't think I could continue working with Ken. I told him I had a vision about the sport, that I was going to be the best in the world, and I thought that I had to go off on my own and pursue it.

Bob didn't see it. He told me he loved me, but he didn't share my vision. “I don't think you're a fighter—not a cage fighter,” he said. “You're an athlete and a sports guy. But you're not a fighter. You don't have the killer instinct. You will never do as well as Ken.”

He thought I should stay with the Lion's Den, patch things up with Ken, and just go on. I didn't want to hear it. In my heart, I knew he was partly right. I
didn't
have the killer instinct, not yet. But I thought he was wrong. I told him I was going to get my stuff and pack it up and go. “OK,” he said, “But I worry about you.” He gave me a big hug, and squeezed my arm, and said good-bye to me.

Maybe he didn't think I was really going. Maybe
I
didn't think I was really going. On some level, I couldn't see leaving Ken and the Lion's Den. It was all I knew, other than prisons and jails. It was my home, and my family, and my income. It was everything to me. But I thought maybe I could just train on my own and not have to listen to Ken and all his madness.

I found out right away that was not going to be possible. I wasn't going to the Lion's Den, but I tried to stay in touch with the guys. I didn't want to let anyone down. I knew they had fights, and I had been training them. So I called a couple of guys and asked them how they were doing and if they needed any help. They were kind of cryptic and strange with me. I got a weird vibe. I called another couple of guys and got the same vibe. I called another guy, and asked, “What's going on?” “I can't train with you anymore,” he said. I called another guy back and got the same thing. Ken had told them not to work with me anymore.

So I called Bob. I told him Ken was shutting me out. I asked him what was going on. “It's different now,” he said. “You chose to leave. You left the family. If you're not with the family, then technically you are not part of the family.” So it was over. My adopted father and my adopted brother were finished with me. I was on my own.

I loaded up my Camaro with my clothes and my blue boxing gloves and I went to Los Altos, a little town outside of San Jose, where my girlfriend, Angie, was living. She had a house there in the Los Altos hills. Her parents had moved out and were living in Santa Cruz, so we moved in.

The only guy associated with the Lion's Den who would take my calls was Maurice Smith. He had been a champion kickboxer when he came to the Lion's Den. He was going to train with Ken. They became friends. He was going to teach Ken striking, and Ken was going to teach him grappling. But when it came time for that, Ken was busy, so he had me train Maurice in grappling styles.

Over the next year or so, we became friends—good enough friends that when I left Bob and Ken, and no one was allowed to talk to me or train with me or work with me, Maurice defied them and said he would support me. He came on board as my coach.

I was pretty educated about bodybuilding, and I had learned a lot about certain kinds of wrestling and grappling and fighting— mostly by trial and error. I knew nothing, basically, about conditioning. But I knew that I got tired in fights. I knew that managing my energy and managing my fatigue was a huge part of what happened in fights. I'd find myself thinking, in the middle of a fight, that I could do a certain move or try a certain strategy, but that it was going to take a huge amount of energy, and if it didn't work I'd be screwed. I knew there was a point in almost every fight, at something like six minutes, when I would start thinking, “We gotta wrap this up
fast.
”

Maurice was light-years ahead of everyone else in this area. He was a great fighter himself, and would later be UFC and IFC heavyweight champion—belts that I would help train him to win. He knew what fighting was all about. He had been working with sports doctors. He had a lot of information about vascular training and building up his system. So he started me doing that. We started doing treadmills. We started doing interval training. This was all new in 1997. No one was doing this. All we knew about conditioning was “go run two miles.”

We experienced almost immediate results. Within a few weeks, I found that I could wrestle for two hours and not get tired—
never
get
tired. This was revolutionary. Almost everyone who was fighting in the sport that became MMA was basically fighting in a judo style, jujitsu style, or Greco-Roman wrestling style. It was an anaerobic kind of fighting—a series of short, violent movements with rests in between. Something like boxing or kickboxing is the opposite. It's very aerobic. You never stop moving. You maintain a consistent heart rate the whole time.

With Maurice, I began to develop that kind of fighting system. I was building my cardiovascular system and creating a new, dynamic kind of fighting style to go with it. I had already developed all the holds from what I'd learned working with Ken and my teachers in Japan. Now Maurice was teaching me all the strikes. And I was bringing in this new kind of athletics and creating moves on the fly.

The fight with Enson Inoue in 1997 was the first fight in which I got to apply it. The fight came together quickly—too quickly. I got a call, and suddenly I was negotiating to fight in Japan in eighteen days. So I showed up at the American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose and told Javier Mendez I was going to fight Enson Inoue in Tokyo. In eighteen days. He shook his head and said, “This is not good.” But he showed me some things. He taught me some stand-up techniques. I added those to what I'd been taught by Maurice, who by now had officially signed on. He became my trainer, my brother, and my main guy.

We rolled into Japan. It was the end of the year, and it was cold. We were fighting at NK Hall in Tokyo. The arena was set up like a rock show. They had these eight-foot-tall speakers. I came out on a platform that lifted me up like a rock star. I was wearing this little kimono that I'd bought in a tourist shop. And my sneakers. It was insane.

The fight was called VTJ-1997, for Vale Tudo Japan. Vale Tudo was a Brazilian style of fighting. The name means “anything goes,” so it's a kind of no-holds-barred fighting that includes very few rules.

I knew Enson Inoue pretty well. I had seen all his fights. He was a Japanese American, born in Japan, who had already had a lot of success in Shooto and Vale Tudo fights. He was a black belt in jujitsu, and he was big—like 220 pounds big. And he was a killer. And this was a closed-fist striking fight. I hadn't really done that, and I was afraid of the unknown. I was pretty sure he was going to beat me to death.

I hadn't really gotten over my sense of fear about fighting. I had conquered my fear of hurting the other guy, but I was still going into my fights afraid that I was going to get hurt, or even killed. And I was really afraid of this guy. He had more than thirty pounds on me, and he seemed really big and strong. He seemed like Ken, who could smash me.

To create more tension, I had been contacted by the UFC about a week before the fight. They said they wanted to do something in Japan. They had created a new middleweight division. Enson and I were among the top guys in that weight class. So they decided that the winner of our fight would go on to fight Kevin Jackson for the Middleweight Champion of the World UFC belt. That fight would be less than a month after my fight with Enson. So that added a little more pressure.

The fight started hard. Enson came out and hit me and knocked me across the ring. I bounced off the ropes and we were on the floor in about the first ten seconds. We stayed down for half of the first round. I hit him pretty hard a couple of times. He didn't hurt me. He spent half the round on his back, waiting for me to do something. But he was so strong.

The second round went differently. He hit me hard and we both went down. It was brutal. It was just a knock-down, drag-out fight. He was kicking the shit out of me, and I couldn't really do a lot about it except hold on.

Enson kept glancing at his corner. It seemed like he didn't know what to do with me. Then there was an amazing moment, about
four minutes into the second round, when suddenly, while sitting on my chest punching my face and the side of my head, he looked at me—right into my eyes like a best friend. We were trying to kill each other, but we both stopped at exactly the same moment to take a breath, and we looked at each other. Our corners were arguing. Maurice was making fun of Enson's corner. He was taunting them, like a child. Whatever they said, he repeated back at them. He was mocking them. They were shouting at him, “Don't say what we're saying,” and he was saying, “Don't say what we're saying!” So we both smiled, and Enson started laughing.

Then he went back to trying to kill me. He was mounted on top of me, throwing elbows into my head, and then he was throwing fists into the side of my face. There was one very bad moment where he sort of folded me over when I tried to knee him from the standing clinch. I had my arms around his waist, and my head pushed up under his chin so I could knee his thighs. I guess my hips got too close to him and he was able to step behind my knee and bend me backward and end up sitting on my chest. Whatever he did, it killed my lower spine. It gave me a huge jolt and took all the power out of my body.

My spine had been messed up from way back. I was at the group home in South Lake Tahoe, playing a lot of basketball in high school, when my leg started tripping up, and I thought it was kind of weird, but I kept playing. Then my leg started going numb. They sent me to a doctor. He checked me out and said, “You broke your spine when you were little. You have scoliosis. You'll be in pain for the rest of your life. There's nothing to do about it except fuse some of the vertebrae.” He told me I would lose a lot of flexibility, but I wouldn't be in much pain. He also said I had to avoid all contact sports. I freaked out about this news. I thought of myself as an athlete. No contact sports? I couldn't imagine being crippled for the rest of my life. I was just a kid!

So I went to see a chiropractor for a second opinion. He said, “You have a genetic problem, and you must have also fallen and hurt yourself. Now your back is curved in an
S
shape to absorb and distribute the impact of jumping. Your spine has a natural curve but not in that direction. But I can fix it for you.” When I was a kid, I had gotten hurt a couple of times pretty badly. One time I fell off a roof. Another time I fell out of a tree and landed flat on my back. Joe had told me not to climb on that stuff, so I didn't tell anybody what happened. I just sucked it up.

The chiropractor worked on me and gave me some herbs and twisted my back and said, “You have to stand up for the next twenty-four hours.” He said if I were to lie down and relax, my back would pull right back into that
S
position. The numbness went away immediately and the pain left over the next few days. I went back to see him once a week for months after. I never forgot the exercises that chiropractor showed me.

Now my back issues had come back to haunt me. There was a moment when I thought it was all over. Then the moment passed. I realized Enson wasn't going to kill me and that I could escape. I decided that actually
I
was going to kill
him.
Then I broke free and we were standing up, and it was rock-'em, sock-'em. It was just two guys murdering each other—especially him murdering me.