Uncaged (30 page)

It passed, but then it didn't seem to get better right away. I was told I would have to rest for a while. My ribs still felt messed up going in. I hadn't been able to train the way I like to train. I couldn't do any kind of grappling for about two weeks before the fight. But I still went in there 100 percent convinced I was going to beat him. Like a man whose faith is unshakeable, I once again picked up the metaphorical sword, and I believed the sword would strike him down.

The ref, as usual, was Big John McCarthy. He said, “Let's get it on!” and we did. I knew pretty early in the fight that I was in trouble. I saw that he got my range. He knew where to stand and how to hit me. I knew he was going to box me around until I got tired and then, bam! He kept his hands down a lot, asking me to hit him. He actually stuck his jaw out for me to smack it. But when I moved closer, bam! I was really surprised, also, at how
hard
he hit. His punches were very powerful.

I could tell really early in the first round that I wasn't fast enough. I wasn't strong, either, like I normally was. In the first couple of exchanges, when we connected, I didn't feel the energy and intention that I usually feel in the first part of the fight. Usually, no matter who I'm fighting, I'm not conscious of the other person's strength. That comes later, sometimes, but in the first part of the first round I never feel it.

This time I felt it. My stuff wasn't connecting; his stuff was. I started getting punched in the head a lot. It didn't hurt that much, but it started to back me up, mentally. He got me down and on my back, and he held me there a while. He hit me a couple of times.
Then I slipped out from under him and hit him a couple of times getting up. He threw a foot into my face.

Mostly he stuck his long right arm out and measured the range. He looked like a gorilla with those arms—waving them around, waving me in, and taunting me the whole time. I threw a couple of punches that landed and a couple that didn't. He didn't seem too worried about it. I didn't think I was hurting him any. Then he got me down and starting throwing punches, lefts and rights, that weren't hurting me any.

I didn't think I was going to lose. But I saw it was going to be harder to win than I thought. Midway through the first round I started running out of ideas. I tried one thing, and it didn't work. I tried something else, and that didn't work. That was a new feeling. It felt like I was climbing a hill that kept getting steeper. I didn't know if I was going to make it. Then I realized I wasn't making it. This was a brand-new feeling for me. I had never had anybody run over me in a fight. I get hit, and I back up, and I come at you again. But this was like I was getting run over.

Nick had started talking to me right away, right from the beginning. He taunted me, telling me to throw the right hand. He was angry, and he was emotional. He cursed me. He stuck his face out and told me to throw the right. I did, and hit him hard, and he responded, “Oh yeah!”

I've got a lot of power in my right hand. It's my go-to punch. But it takes a lot of energy. He knew that, and he was trying to get me to whittle myself down. Throwing the right tired me out. He'd stick his face out at me, and I'd throw the right. Then he'd punch me in the head a few times. With a few of them, I missed. That takes about three times as much energy. You throw the punch and then you have to bring it back. It's exhausting.

I could hear the fans. They sounded restless. Some of them were chanting, “Dee-az! Dee-az!” Then some others started chanting
back, “Shamrock! Shamrock!” I couldn't tell who was the favorite anymore. I could hear my corner yelling at me, too. But I wasn't really hearing them. I wasn't doing what they were telling me to do. I wasn't listening. I was just really tired. When we got to the end of the round, and I sat down, I wasn't really aware of what they were saying.

And when I went out for the second round, I wasn't listening. Whatever they were saying did not sink in. I just remember thinking that I was really tired, and that I had tried these nine different gear shifts, and that nothing was working. I needed to find another strategy. But I still thought I was going to win. I just thought it was going to take a lot longer than I wanted it to, and that it was going to take a lot more out of me.

Then with about three minutes left he punched me in the ribs. My body hadn't been working right. I was tired. I was getting hit. But I was still going. I was bleeding a lot. But I wasn't really hurting. I was just beat up and tired. But that punch in the ribs felt like someone stabbed me in the spine, like an electrical jolt to the spinal cord. It took all the juice out of me. It was like I had been Tasered. And I thought,
Oh my God, I'm going to
lose.

I had honestly thought the rib thing wouldn't have a big impact on the fight. I didn't think it was that big a deal. But I was really struggling. I could feel that I couldn't get any power into my shots. I had to keep the fight standing, and take the beating, because I didn't think I would have any power on the ground.

It was a weird, unpleasant experience. Usually I can take three rounds of
anything
and be fine. But it felt like my body started shutting down after the first round. Then came that shot in the ribs and I just went down. I couldn't defend myself. The ref let it go on a little, and then waved the fight stopped.

Diaz reached down and tried to pull me up. He had been talking shit the whole fight. Now he yelled at me. He said, “You're a legend!
Get up! Don't lay there!” He got me on my feet. He raised my hand over my head, and put his arm around my neck, and said, “The legend! The legend!”

Then we were in our corners. I was breathing hard and bleeding from everywhere—even the back of my head. I had hit it on something. When we stood up to shake hands, Nick bowed to me, like I was his
sensei.
He gave me some respect. He said, “I've been watching Frank Shamrock fight since the beginning…. It's hard to hate that guy. He's been doing what I want to do and saying what I want to say for a long time.” Then it was my turn. I said, “I give everything to Nick Diaz. I trained for him 100 percent. I didn't take him lightly…. I always step it up…. I always come to entertain. But Nick kicked my ass tonight, no two ways about it. He beat me.”

They replayed the moment when he hit me in the stomach. It was brutal. I said, “It doubled me over. And then he put a whuppin' on me.”

The announcer asked me about the future. I said, “I'm gonna keep coming back here. This is my hometown. This is my arena! I brought the sport here. I'm gonna keep representing…. I'll be back here—don't even worry about it…. Nick got the better of me tonight, but there's always tomorrow. That's the martial way.”

At the press conference after the fight, he said, “I just wanna say I had to get that one done for my boy.” He had wanted to beat me to avenge my knockout fight with Cesar Gracie three years earlier. Cesar had been in his corner. He won the fight for his coach.

After the fight, I went with some friends to an Italian restaurant around the corner from the arena. I tried to celebrate. When someone asked me what happened, I didn't pretend. I said, “I got hit! He was like a monkey, with that reach. He kicked my ass!”

I was happy not to be in the hospital. Usually I'm in the hospital after a fight, even when I win. One of my friends said, “It's a victory!” I said, “Yeah. I came in second!”

But actually I hate to lose. It
hurts
to lose. Especially in my hometown, it was hard to lose. For the fighter, it's
always
about winning. It's always about facing the challenge and meeting the challenge. This was the only time in my whole career that I flipped the switch and the lights didn't come on. I went out to perform, and the curtain came down before I got to do my bit. That had never, ever happened to me before.

Because of our contracts, Nick got $39,000 for beating me. I got $400,000 for being beat. The story of the fight was that the baton was passed. It was a big fight for Showtime. So the event was very successful all the way around, except for me getting my ass kicked. Everything else worked out exactly as it should have. Diaz has proven that he was worthy of the win. Since then he has demolished everyone else. His career went up to the next level after he fought me.

But I don't think he's a good representative of our sport. Lots of the new, younger guys aren't. The beauty of their experience is that they didn't have to fight for ten years to figure it all out. We did that for them. So they could start from what we had already learned and move forward from that. Guys like me started from zero. We had to invent the whole thing.

Besides being light-years ahead of us physically, though, they are bad representatives of the sport. They are professional martial artists, but what do they represent? If you're out gangbanging, smoking weed, and street fighting, you are not a good representative of our sport. You are
hurting
our sport. You're not acting like a leader. You are not taking a leadership role. Most of these younger fighters are clueless about that. They feel no sense of responsibility for their sport or their art. They are fighters, but they are not martial artists. They are not warriors.

Getting married to Amy had made me more serious about life in some way. I was committed. Having a second chance with another baby made it more real. Amy and I had been keeping house for a while, since we got married. When Nicolette was born, we felt more together than ever. We were a family.

Somehow being a new dad made me even more ambitious, more determined to do the things I had set out to do. With my son, I had always worked hard and made money and supported him. But he wasn't there every day, living with me, growing up with me. Nicolette was
here.
She wasn't going anywhere. She wasn't going to leave, and I wasn't going to leave. I had a new understanding about responsibility—that I had to protect her and take care of her and make a place for her in the world that was healthy and happy and safe.

I felt an overwhelming sense of love, too. Being a dad made me feel more settled. I felt needed, and necessary, in a completely new way.

I had not had any kind of relationship with Bob Shamrock since he had called and told me not to fight Tito Ortiz. He just wasn't in
the picture that much. It was uncomfortable for me. I didn't feel good about it. My trainer, Maurice Smith, told me, “Make up with your dad. Find a way to make up with him.” But I couldn't find the right way to do that. At first, I tried to do it through Ken, to patch it up that way. But that obviously didn't work. Ken was my mentor, but I realized that whatever his demons were, they weren't mine. I had to go my own way.

Then I heard that Bob had had a heart attack, so I went up to see him. He had actually had two or three heart attacks. He was in pretty bad shape. He was in the hospital, but he was hardly there. He was conked out.

I knew he hadn't been in good health. I wasn't surprised. He had stopped doing anything like caring for himself years before, when he was in his mid-forties. He went from working out and eating right and living clean to just sort of closing the door on his physical health and never opening it again. He had been a bodybuilder. He worked out obsessively. He was really buff. He wore custom-made shirts and lived like a celebrity. I heard him talk about those days, and saw the photographs from those days. But that had all ended around the time I first came to his boys' home. I always thought it had to do with losing his wife. That changed everything about him. Something left when she ran off. He gave up.

He had been living with Ken for several years. He'd been out of the group-home business for a while and wasn't working anywhere. Bob told me that he had lost his last group home
because
of Ken. Bob said Ken was always making trouble of some kind, and that one day Ken drove his car to Bob's house and laid a two-hundred-foot stretch of rubber down the road. The people in the neighborhood complained one more time and Bob lost his license to run the home.

After that, I heard he had bad money problems. He was always a big spender. He was not a saver. But he had Ken to take care of him. After he lost the last home, he was always with Ken. They moved to Reno.

I spent some time at Ken's house with him and all his crazy family. It was all very strange and sad. Bob lay there looking half-dead. Ken walked around looking really traumatized by the whole thing. I didn't stay long. I had to leave the next day. I thought it might be the last time I ever saw Bob. I thought he wouldn't make it. But he woke up the next day, or a few days later, feeling all right, and went home.

But he wasn't all right. He wasn't able to take care of himself, so he moved into an assisted-living facility. Not long after that, he had another heart attack, maybe his third or fourth. He was such a tough guy, so stubborn. He drove himself to the hospital instead of calling 911 or asking for help. He checked himself in, and then he checked himself out. Then he had another heart attack.

Ken's wife called me and said, “Bob's had another one. We think he's going to go.” And he went. We had been on alert. He had been in a nursing home. It didn't seem like he was going to make it. Ken and his wife, Tonya, brought Bob home so he could be surrounded by the people he loved. He died several days later on January 14, 2010. He was sixty-eight years old. I heard about it on the Internet. People started sending me condolences. I was really sad, but I had had to bury him many years before, unfortunately, because he had stopped being my dad. I was used to letting people go. I was used to moving on, emotionally. I had made my peace with him. It was still sad, though.

I struggled with the question of whether I should go to the funeral. It was my last chance to do something for him. I wanted to go. Bob was my family. He was the only father I ever knew, and the only one who ever really loved me.