Uncaged (15 page)

I tried three or four kicks. He moved in. I reached around his waist. He grabbed my head. I hoisted him up and dropped him hard. My plan went great, except that when I turned him upside down and stovepiped him, I broke his collarbone and exploded his shoulder and knocked him unconscious. I threw one more punch but it was unnecessary. I had broken some vertebrae in his neck. I heard the bones break. I will never forget the sound of it.

The fight lasted twenty-two seconds. Zinoviev was not getting up. The announcers were screaming. One of them said, “He's out cold! He's out cold! He dropped him on his head and he's out cold!” I ran around the cage a couple of times, but then I looked over and no one was moving. I got down close to Zinoviev to see how he was doing. He wasn't doing well. He was
out.
I thought,
It worked! I won! I am the greatest fighter in the world! And I have single-handedly destroyed the sport in a single night.

In those days there was no padding under the canvas. The floor was made up of a piece of plywood on top of concrete. It was really, really hard.

After the fight, I had the same sense of letdown as after the Jackson fight, for the same reason. Igor hadn't even punched me. He never landed a blow. It was just like my dream, to a T. He felt like he weighed five pounds. He hit the mat and it all crunched. And the fight was over and he was done.

They gave me the belt. I thought,
It was really that easy?
I had barely expended a breath of energy.

He never fought again. I always felt bad about that. He was a good guy, a real, honest, look-you-in-the-eye kind of guy. A soldier of the fist and spirit. And he never fought again. I knew the minute the fight was over that he was really mashed up. I felt horrible. I knew what I did to him would change his life but I was not ready for how that feeling would stick in my heart and mind. I can't watch
the fight even to this day. Yes, I was strutting around the cage flexing in celebration, but it was all an act—I felt sick inside. I had been determined to win the fight. Before, I had been afraid of hurting people. Now, I accepted that winning the fight meant hurting him and I understood that this was my job. I had to be willing to be hurt, and I had to be willing to hurt the other guy.

Years later, he was coaching some students in the International Fight League. I had a team in the IFL, too. I found myself sitting next to him at a team dinner. I said, “I just want to say that I'm really sorry I hurt you in that fight. I was just hoping to stun you. I didn't mean to hurt you so bad.” He started laughing. He laughed so loud! He said, “Frank! It's a fight! That's what happens in a fight!”

Maybe he had hurt a lot of people, too. His style was to go hard and punch hard. I was relieved that he had no hard feelings, because I know he never recovered right. I ended his career as a fighter.

For me it was a great victory. In some ways, it was the fight I feared the most, and it was by far the toughest fight of my life. I thought Enson was going to beat me down and choke me out. I thought Kevin Jackson was going to outwrestle me. But Igor was the first hybrid striker guy I'd faced. I knew I didn't have that much stand-up skill yet. I couldn't just smash people. So when I beat Igor, I knew it was a big moment. I knew there was no one on the planet who could beat me.

But I was still figuring it all out. My boxing skills were terrible. My kicking was still off balance. I was still evolving. I wanted to be the best. That meant I still had to figure out the mechanics and make them right.

I got paid $30,000 for the Zinoviev fight. That was good money, but it wasn't money you could retire on. Besides, I'd spent twenty days in a hotel on my own dime. So my expenses were high. But I knew, after this fight, that this was my only chance of ever doing anything big. I knew with fighting I could go anywhere in the world.

By this time my relationship with Bob Shamrock was completely zero. I had found that out on the Internet. I read an interview with Bob and Ken. They were saying all kinds of terrible things about me. The article said I had betrayed him, that I had screwed Ken over, and that I turned against the family.

I wasn't surprised that Ken was saying these things, but it hurt me to see Bob's name in there, so I called him. I told him I had read the article and that I was confused. He said he hadn't seen the article but that what I was saying didn't sound right. He said he was probably misquoted. He said he'd look at it, and I could call him back. When I did, a few days later, he said he'd seen the article and that everything in it was pretty much true. “It said everything I meant to say,” he told me. “You're not part of the family anymore. You chose to leave. And you know what that means. If you're not part of the family, you're out. You're not with us. You're against us.”

He made some more references to the family, and how the family is sacred, and how the family had secrets that could never be told. I didn't even know what he was talking about. What secrets? Were we some kind of Mafia organization? Maybe it was something to
do with him and Ken. They had a very strong bond, a very deep relationship. But I didn't even know what there was to betray. I had no secrets and nothing to hide.

It had been less than a year since I'd left the Lion's Den and started training on my own, but it was obvious that Bob was finished with me. So I was surprised when I saw him at the Zinoviev fight. He and Ken had come down to Louisiana to support one of the Lion's Den guys, Jerry Bohlander, who was fighting Kevin Jackson on the same UFC 16 card. I just ran into him. I had just beaten Zinoviev. I was the champ. I was there with all my guys, with Maurice and Angie. Bob was by himself. He gave me a hug. He seemed happy to see me. I took him aside, and said, “What happened? What changed?” “I don't know,” he said. “But you have to make it up with Ken.”

I told him I didn't know how to do that. I didn't have anything to apologize for. Ken had basically thrown me out. I told him I had been forced to go my own way. “No,” he said. “That isn't how it works. There's only one way, and it's our way. It's the family way. You chose to leave the family.” I didn't want it to end like that. I said I wanted to have a relationship with him. He told me I couldn't. He told me again that no one would help me or talk with me. I had chosen to be on my own, and now I had to be on my own. “But congratulations on the championship,” he said.

I was really hurt by this. And then I got mad. I felt more determined than ever to prove them wrong. It was obvious that the only future Ken and Bob could see for me was training Ken's guys in the Lion's Den. Maybe Ken had persuaded Bob to think that. Maybe he had made Bob choose. Ken's a very forceful guy, and he's a control freak. Everything is black or white, right or wrong. He has to have things his way. Bob is a little like that, too. But it killed me that they couldn't see it any differently. They
still
believed that I didn't have what it took, even after I'd beaten Enson, Kevin, and Igor. I was the
champion! I had the belt! But they still thought my job should be serving Ken and training his guys. The only thing to do was prove them wrong and prove myself right. I had to become the greatest fighter in the world.

My next fight was a title match with Jeremy Horn in Mobile, Alabama. It was kind of a mess, and there were a lot of miscommunications. Our sport was having a really hard time. We were getting shut down and pinched off everywhere. We'd been thrown off Time Warner cable and some other outlets. The sport was really popular and it was growing, but we were being seen by a smaller and smaller audience.

Bob Meyrowitz, the first owner of the UFC, wanted to change that. He had worked in the music industry and understood how to create a public image. They asked me to come to New York to talk about how we could grow the sport. They had the idea to make me an MMA sports personality and commentator. They said for the next show they couldn't afford an entire pay-per-view card but wanted to do a show titled Night of Champions along with a never-before-seen fight with Frank Shamrock. The plan was to fight the first fight of the night (for the live crowd only) and then change into a suit and commentate the rest of the fights as if nothing had happened. Then we could sell a pay-per-view show without the cost of producing one.

I said that was OK with me. I had three weeks to get ready. I thought I could figure out how to be a commentator in three weeks. But I told the organizers to make sure to pick me someone to fight that I actually
could
fight and then still be OK to go and commentate for the rest of the night.

They put together a good group of fighters. They had Dan Henderson, Chuck Liddell, Pete Williams, Allan Goes, Tank Abbott, and a whole bunch of other guys. For me, they picked Jeremy Horn. Jeremy was a very tough up-and-coming UFC guy. He'd had ten or
fifteen fights already, and he'd beaten almost everyone he'd gone up against. He had fought Dan Severn to a draw not long before—and Dan was a 250-pound fighter. This was not my idea of an easy fight. But they wanted a competitive match. That's what they got!

I hadn't been training very hard, and the moment I saw the picture of this tall, pasty, knock-kneed kid, I really let off the intensity. He looked like he couldn't fight his way out of a wet blanket. I thought I was getting ready to be a commentator. I didn't think I'd have to fight anybody serious. It was just supposed to be a warm-up bout. But he almost beat me. My whole style at that time was based on athletics and conditioning. It requires a huge amount of energy. If I'm out of condition, I lose energy fast. Well, this kid had my number. The fight was brutal. It was a sixteen-minute hug fest. Jeremy held me down and tried to control me, and I didn't have the energy to put him away. In the end, I got lucky. I just happened to knee bar him, and scraped away with a victory. I learned a good lesson. I couldn't mix my talents. I could be one thing or another thing. But being good at one thing required all of my focus. Luckily I was good on the microphone that night and the show was a huge success on pay-per-view.

My next fight—a revenge fight—was with John Lober. I hadn't forgotten the first one, in which I had taken an ass-whupping, and then taken that walk and had an epiphany about having a career. In that first fight, John had beaten me by controlling the striking and the stand-up position. I didn't want that to happen again. So I trained hard, mostly with Maurice. He got me tight on the striking. We did sessions three times a day. I ate and I took a nap in between— nothing else. We worked on striking and striking power because I really didn't have any. Maurice was working me up, making me strong. He had me running in water, swimming, running intervals. I was also doing resistance training for striking and kneeing and kicking. This would have been a tough training regimen for anyone.
For me, it was extra tough. I don't swim. I am terrible at it. I don't have a swimming body—I have a sinking body.

But it was really good training. I hadn't been taking care of my body because I didn't know how. I had no idea what effect the high-endurance sprinting was having on my spine, for example. I didn't know what the running was doing to my knees and hips. I was just beginning to understand the effects of all this damage to my body. When you're fighting, every blow does a little bit of damage. You kick a guy hard and bang him up a little, but the kick does some damage to you, too. When you're fighting, this is a big part of the fight. You're trying to do damage, but you're also trying to manage your body so you can stay in the fight. When you're training, too, you're trying to stay healthy so you can go to war.

Over the years, I had learned a lot about my own body. I had become a sort of gym doctor. Once, when I was in Japan, I got a cauliflower ear. Someone had grabbed my ears and banged them around. One of them got purple and swollen and felt like it was on fire. I couldn't touch that side of my head or sleep on it. So I went to see a doctor. All he did was stick a needle in my ear and drain off all the blood and pus. Then he iced it and sent me home.

Your ear is basically just some skin around some cartilage. When it gets abused, the skin gets irritated and separates from the cartilage. Your body responds by sending blood and gluey stuff up there to try and heal it. If you don't do anything, the ear will fill with gooey blood and turn purple. After Japan, I discovered I could do the work myself. When I was working at the Lion's Den and didn't have any money for doctors, I found out I could go visit the veterinarian and tell him I needed some needles to give injections to my dog, and he'd sell me 5 cc needles. When someone would get his ears all banged up, we'd take the needles and drain the blood and pus, then ice the ears, and send him on his way. I treated all the Lion's Den guys that way, and all the guys on all my IFC teams, too.
(The secret to avoiding this is to never let anyone grab your head. That's a golden rule in fighting. If your opponent tries, the defensive move is to rotate your shoulders very quickly and spin your head out of the hold. It's not that hard, because it's tough to hold onto a ball that's rotating. After my experience in Japan, I never let anyone grab my head again.)

I learned some other home medicine techniques. When I was still teaching at the Lion's Den, I worked with a guy named Haggar Chun Li. He was doing leg locks in training and he broke his leg— the little bone on the outside. You could hear it snap in the class. I had broken that same bone, so I knew what had happened. I took him to a chiropractor we knew and had him X-rayed. The chiropractor said, “Yep, it's broken. You've got to go to a doctor and get him in a cast.”

I was living in Ken's guesthouse at the time. I didn't have any money. Chun Li didn't have any money. But I was his teacher. I was his mentor. I had to help him. So I went to the library and took out a book on broken bones. I studied up. I saw that it was just some plaster of paris and some fabric. So I went to the store and got the stuff and came home and casted his leg. It healed great. He went on to fight a Hawaiian guy who broke both his eye sockets. He left fighting after that. He's an FBI agent now.