Uncaged (31 page)

But Ken was not my family. Besides training me and being a mentor to me, Ken was never a brother to me. Bob chose me to be his son. Ken didn't choose me to be his brother.

I thought that going to the funeral would have been the right thing for me, but not the right thing for anyone else. It wouldn't
have been right for Ken and his family. So I chose to stay away. That felt like the best way for me to show respect to Bob, to Ken, to everyone.

It had been hard for me to make peace in my mind. All the things Ken and Bob said I couldn't do, that I wasn't going to do—I went and did them. And because they had said I couldn't do those things, for a long time I didn't give them any credit for helping me. I gave credit to the people who were standing with me when it happened. When people asked me how I'd done what I'd done, how I got where I was, I gave credit to other people—the ones who were helping me when I did it.

I think they took offense at that. They hated it. It didn't sit well that I was accomplishing all the things that they said I couldn't do,
and
all the things that Ken hadn't been able to do. I got the championships and the world records. I beat a lot of the people who had beaten him. It must have been difficult, from their perspective.

But I had felt abandoned and betrayed by them. I couldn't do it any other way. When I think of Bob now, I don't think of betrayal. I admire Bob for how much he loved, for what he did, for what he believed in. This is what being a human being is all about. He was passionate. His whole life, he stepped up and said, “This is how we're going to do this thing,” and then did it. I have a great admiration for that. I even admire him, in a weird way, for loving Ken so much that he carved me out of his life. He had to choose, and he chose what was the most important thing to him, and he didn't waver.

My mother met Bob once or twice, very casually. She never understood the relationship. She thought he was just some strange guy who adopted me. Where she came from, it didn't make sense. But I see him as my father. He
is
my father. He will always hold the top position of respect. I am proud and happy to be a Shamrock. I chose that, and I'm happy with that choice. My Juarez father experience wasn't that good. In the end, I
am
a Shamrock.

Over the years I had become closer and closer to Henry Holmes. He started as my lawyer and adviser. After a while he had become a father figure. When I fought Tito Ortiz and won, I gave Henry my championship belt. It went into his trophy collection at his house, right next to the Mike Tyson gloves and the George Foreman gloves.

But the friendship part happened really slowly and very organically. We just sort of grew into each other. We're both focused and neurotic and super-honest. But for a long time it was just a business friendship. What brought us closer was his having a son. Henry was on his fifth marriage, but he'd never had children. Now along came his son, Ben. Henry was winding down a crazy career. He had been this total shark in business. Now his world was becoming more and more about Ben.

For years I had been the one calling him and asking questions, trying to take advantage of his wisdom. It was mostly professional. But slowly I had started to talk to him about personal things, and he started talking back. Now we were talking and he was the one asking
me
questions.

I was teaching kids mixed martial arts. I understood children and had some experience with them. So he started coming to me for advice as a father. Because he had come to know me and love me and trust me, he listened to what I had to say.

I knew a lot about being a father, even though I had not always been around when little Frank was little. I had, between all my “dads,” maybe one good father. I understood what worked and what didn't. You don't scream at your child in anger. You don't lock your child in the closet. You don't do these things because they don't work. I knew that because of what had been done to me as a child.

As my own son had grown older, I had been faced with some interesting challenges as a father. Little Frank had met a woman from Arkansas. He was planning to move there and marry her.

We had a lot going on. My wife's father had fallen ill and died. That was a huge event. Bob Shamrock had died. That was a huge event. Now my son was moving away to Arkansas to marry an older woman and start some kind of life there.

I wanted to put a stop to it. Amy and I thought it was a mistake. But it was his mistake. In the end, we couldn't do anything about it. And, in the end, it didn't matter. He married her and moved to Arkansas. The relationship didn't last. Within a year they were separated, and I started trying to unwind that for him. But at the same time he lucked into this job in Arkansas and began training as a flyman—a person who works in the wings of a theater, manipulating the wheels and pulleys that lower and raise the scenery and the curtains and all that. It's a highly specialized occupation, and he got an apprenticeship in Arkansas. By the time his marriage was ending, he had learned how to do that and had gotten himself a job in Long Island, working as a flyman for a theater production company there.

My relationship with him became more normal. We got back on the calling-every-Sunday plan. He came home for my retirement and hung out. He came for Christmas and hung out. I got to have the new experience of being a father to an older son.

Henry was having the opposite experience, being an older father to a younger son. Because he's an older guy, and because he's been so successful in his business, he's very set in his thinking. I could see he was doing everything for the right reasons, but he didn't have a lot of experience. So he'd call me and say, “Am I completely wrong about this?” He had been so honest with me about my decisions over the years; now I was able to return the favor. I was able to bring him the dad stuff. Out of all that, we connected in a new way. He turned into my dad.

Not long after Bob died, I got a call from my mom. She lived in a weird commune situation in Texas. She had been there a year—she and her boyfriend, Barry, and my brother Perry, all living in this
trailer park. They were still on their way to Belize to take possession of the piece of land my mother had bought on the Internet, in cash, from some stranger.

Things weren't going too well. Barry had a lot of legal problems, including child support liens against him. He couldn't get a passport. Perry had gotten out of control, too. He'd had some sort of breakdown. He was on disability, and he was supposed to be contributing some of the disability money to the mission to Belize, but he wasn't. So he and my mom had a falling out over that. He moved into a different trailer and brought in this woman he'd met from Canada. But one day the police had to be called because he'd tied the Canadian woman to the bed or something. That was it. Perry was out.

The family was blown apart. No one was talking to anyone. Suzy was living in Colorado. She was married and had two kids. But I wasn't talking to her. I couldn't. It wasn't possible to have a normal conversation with her. The talk could start anywhere, but then it would always turn to childhood trauma and about my career or money—all subjects that I did not want to share with anyone. For a long time Amy and I tried to avert, divert, change direction, whatever. After a while we just stopped answering the phone when we saw it was Suzy.

Robynn was still the most normal of us all. She had married a wonderful man named David, and she also had two kids. She had a job and a normal life and I liked talking to her.

But it didn't look like my mom was depending on them to help out with the Belize issue. That was going to be me.

It turned out there was some problem with the house, too. The lady who owned the house, or the real estate agent who had sold her the house, had been murdered. The house was for sale. My mother had to go down there and sort it all out. So she called me and asked me for help. She said, “I need you to go to Belize and help me get my house.”

This was my mom, who never calls me and never, ever asks for help.

I was really busy. I didn't have time to go to Belize. I asked Henry for his counsel. In his infinite wisdom, he said, “If there is ever anything you can do for your mom, you should do it right away, or you'll regret it for the rest of your life.” So I went to Belize. It took five days. It was a mess. My mom had very little information. She had never seen the house and didn't even know where it was. We started driving around the town of San Ignacio, asking people what they knew about the house, the owner, the lady who had been murdered. It was insane. Word had gotten around that my
mother
was the one who'd been murdered. It was assumed the house was free and clear. Now someone was living in it, and someone else was trying to sell it.

I put the Frank Shamrock business mind to work on the problem. We got it all sorted out. We got a new deed. The house was all hers. But she still couldn't fulfill her dream of moving to Belize because her boyfriend was stuck in Texas. I wasn't going to spend the $50,000 to pay his back child support. I wasn't going to break the law to solve his problem. I needed another solution. So I worked out an exit strategy for that, too.

I hired an escort to drive my mother down through Mexico, all the way to Belize in her motor home. And with my big brain I figured out a way to get the boyfriend out, too. There is a loophole in the passport laws. If you're a US citizen and you're leaving from a US port and returning to a US port, you can get on a cruise ship without a passport. No one expects you to take a cruise ship and just leave. But that's what Barry did. He got on the cruise ship in Texas, and on the fourth or fifth day, he got off the cruise ship in Belize, walked away, and never came back. He can't ever come back to the United States. But he wasn't contributing anything up here anyway, and he doesn't want to come back. He wants to be with my mom in Belize.

Hanging out with my mom on that trip was extremely strange. It was the longest time we'd spent alone together since I was a little boy. We were busy most of the time with all the house problems. But we had a little hang time, too, in our shared jungle hotel room. I finally asked her what had been going on when I was a little boy. I asked her why she had let me go, and why she hadn't tried to get me back. She said, “I was just trying to survive.” She said, “I missed you. I wanted you back.” That's all she said. It was a lot for her to say. I had to wait a long time to hear it. I held her hand and cried and told her I had missed her, too. It felt good.

In the end, she realized her dream. She made it to Belize. She was happy.

For a while after the Diaz fight, I had some plans for setting up something else. I talked to some people. I had some ideas. But it was starting to look more and more like I was done. I was still very involved with MMA, on a lot of levels. I still had my schools. I was still selling training videos. And I had become an on-air commentator for Showtime. For several months, I had been appearing ringside, working with Mauro Ranallo, Gus Johnson, and Al Bernstein. I had gone to St. Louis with them to call a fight right after getting beaten by Nick Diaz. This was my new job. I was good at it and I really enjoyed it. I was able to bring some inside MMA expertise to the fans.

I saw a very bright future for my sport. I was working with Scott Coker to grow the Strikeforce brand. I was working with Showtime to grow our TV presence. I traveled to New York and went to the state capitol to speak to legislators there about making MMA a sanctioned sport in the state of New York. My wife and I started making plans to actually move to New York. We thought we could plant ourselves there and use the energy of that amazing city to
build our brand, and build our sport, into the international event we knew it could be.

After a while, I saw that it meant I was going to have to retire. I couldn't keep fighting and be a representative of the sport. It was too hard. My body was too damaged. The training was brutal, and I didn't think I could continue to operate at the level that the fans had come to expect and that I had come to demand. If I couldn't be the best
—my
best—then I didn't want to continue.

I took advantage of my good Showtime relationship to turn my retirement into an event. On the night of June 26, 2010, I was in San Jose ready to work ringside calling the Fedor Emelianenko versus Fabricio Werdum fight. I had on my dark suit and a cool green tie. The lights went down, and the Showtime folks showed a video about my history with MMA, starting with my Pancrase titles in Japan.

When the lights came back up, I was standing inside the cage with a microphone in my hand. Surrounded by the fans and the people who loved me—even my son had come out to be there—I made my announcement.

“When I was twenty-two years old, my brother gave me two important things—he gave me an ass-whupping, and he gave me my love of mixed martial arts. Since that time, I've traveled the world, teaching mixed martial arts, preaching mixed martial arts, and dragging my poor family with me from country to country and city to city. I'm thirty-seven years old now, and my time has come. The stars like Gilbert Melendez and Cristiane Cyborg, they are the future, and I am the past. Tonight I announce my retirement. And I just want to say, it has been an honor to bleed for you, to break my bones for you, and to entertain you. And before I leave I would like to bow for you one more time. Thank you!”

I handed someone the microphone. I looked at Amy. I bowed four times, once to each corner of the arena.

I was done.

I was now fully engaged in my new role as a regular commentator on Showtime. My partners were Mauro Ranallo and Gus Johnson. Mauro is a senior sports announcer with decades of experience in calling combative sports and everything else. He was the voice, alongside Bas Rutten, of the pay-per-view series
Pride Fighting Championship,
held in Japan. He hosted multiple television shows and has been in radio for over twenty-five years. He is also a huge wrestling and fighting fan and called my fights with Renzo, Baroni, Le, and Diaz. Gus started his career calling play-by-play in the NBA for the Minnesota Timberwolves. He went on to call Big East basketball and college hockey, and then boxing for Showtime and MMA for CBS.