Uncaged (32 page)

What I brought to the game was the inside stuff, and maybe a fan base. I could see things in the cage that these guys couldn't, or I could see it faster or earlier than they could. And I think MMA fans felt my presence gave the commentary a little more legitimacy. It made it a little more real. When I said a guy was out of gas, or a punch rang someone's bell, they knew that I knew what I was talking about.

I thought the Showtime gig was a great opportunity for me to present my idea of where the sport could go. It was a way for me to put a positive face on MMA. For a long time I had been concerned about the sport. I had seen the increasing dominance of the UFC, and the increasing media presence of its figurehead, Dana White. They were making great headway. I didn't want to take anything away from them, but their way was not my way. Their way was sort of like boxing with no gloves. It felt like legitimized street fighting. The story they told continued to be “Two men go into the ring. Only one will survive.” It seemed kind of barbaric, and kind of ugly. It wasn't martial arts, and it wasn't the martial way, and I didn't think, in the long run, it was the story that was best for our sport.

That's why I had said no to Dana and the UFC back in the beginning, when they were just getting started. I didn't trust him, and I didn't believe he would make it. That's why I was trying to build the relationship with Strikeforce and Showtime. I wanted to be involved in telling
that
story—which was the story of the fighter, of the warrior, of the mixed martial artist who really
was
an artist, who had trained and was trying to live a life of Bushido, the moral code of the samurai that stressed frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery, and honor unto death (honor, respect, and discipline). All my efforts were driven by that dream.

I got an opportunity to carry the dream into the electronic game world. In 2010 I was contacted by the people at EA Sports, the electronic game giant. They had done really well with computer-simulated versions of everything from football to basketball to golf to soccer to hockey. Now they were getting into MMA, and they wanted me to come talk to them about being a character in their game. Of course I said yes. I loved the idea of being a character in a video game for Xbox or PlayStation. I loved being able to fight again with Bas Rutten in cyberspace. I think they even set it up so I could fight Ken Shamrock, in virtual reality, if not in actual reality.

After I announced my retirement, I started thinking about the future in different ways. If I wasn't going to be fighting, I wasn't going to be training. If I wasn't going to be training, I didn't necessarily have to be in San Jose. I started thinking about where I wanted to live, where I could make myself most useful. I decided to move to New York.

There were a lot of things behind the decision, but the main one was that I felt I could best serve the sport and my dream for the sport by moving to the information capital of the world. New York is the image center of America. It's where the message gets packaged and delivered. It's also the place where MMA is still not a sanctioned sport. I decided to plant my flag there and begin the campaign to make the case for MMA as a legal sport in the state.

Pretty soon I was driving around Manhattan with real estate agents. Amy and I looked at apartments and houses. We looked at schools and preschools. We put our house in San Jose on the market. I made an appearance at the New York state capitol, in front of a crowd of state senators and representatives. I told them why MMA needed to be a sanctioned sport in their state, the way it was in neighboring New Jersey.

I also made some speeches about bullying. I discovered I had a lot to say about that. As I was making the transition from MMA fighter to MMA spokesperson, a lot of people asked me questions about the future of the sport. A lot of them had questions for me about the UFC because it was the dominant brand in my sport. I've never been one to mince my words. I told the truth. I said I thought the UFC was not the best future for my sport. I said I thought Dana White and the kinds of fighters he represented, and the kind of fighting he stood for, were not the best image for the future of MMA. I didn't get too personal about it, but I said I thought the whole down-and-dirty MMA image was the wrong one. I didn't see how we could sell the world a sport if the image was of a foul-mouthed, trash-talking,
super-tattooed street fighter who dated porn stars and had run-ins with the law over drugs and alcohol. I wasn't talking about Dana White or any one specific fighter. I was just talking about the UFC image and what I thought was wrong with it.

Dana White went a little nuts on me. He called me “a liar and a two-faced chump.” He said I was “an irrelevant idiot.” He said I was “the biggest two-faced jerk-off” he'd ever met in his life.

I've been around guys like Dana White my whole life. I understand guys like him. They're mostly small, scared guys who huff and puff and try to make themselves look big by pushing around someone weaker. I was retired and no longer any kind of threat to him, so he felt he could say this kind of stuff without having any consequences.

And that's when it hit me. I realized I was being bullied. I understood bullying in a whole new way, like I'd never understood it before. I've always been a tough guy and a fighter. For a long time, I was kind of a big guy. So I didn't get pushed around that much. I didn't understand what that felt like—to be the little guy being pushed around, and not having any way to stand up or fight back. Now I felt that. I understood what it felt like to be dominated and defenseless.

I didn't like it. So I decided to do something about it. I went online and started reading about bullying. I found out there were various organizations, all around the country, working on parts of the bullying question. There were experts on the psychological aspect. There were experts on bullying in schools. But there was no national face to the issue. I decided to begin a national dialogue on the question of bullying. Within a week or so, I had met with several people, online or over the phone. We had agreed to create a national campaign for the anti-bullying idea.

I got busy really fast. I launched a charity golf tournament. I started an organization called StandTogether. I started fund-raising
and consciousness-raising. I went on the Jimmy Fallon show to talk about the problem and the solution to the problem. I went down to Los Angeles and spent a few days shooting a video series opposite the great fighter and future Strikeforce female champion Miesha “Takedown” Tate, showing women some basic rape-prevention tactics for protecting themselves from an attack.

I got really into it. I had no idea this problem was so serious. I discovered it was a national epidemic. I had spent my life fighting with people who were able to defend themselves, in an arena where the fight is stopped as soon as one guy
can't
defend himself. MMA was the fastest-growing sport in America. But bullying seemed to be the fastest-growing problem.

I saw a great opportunity. In MMA gyms all around the country we had an army of twelve-year-old kids looking to us, to their MMA teachers, to show them how to act and how to live and what to do with their lives. As their teachers, we have an obligation to educate them properly. We are the chosen warriors, the ones who get to spread the message. We believe in the way, the martial code, and we have chosen our path. That doesn't involve threatening people. I saw that we could use our leadership role to fix this thing. We could use it to help take away the shame of being bullied and to let people know that there is no excuse for abusing another human being— physically, mentally, sexually, or psychologically.

The psychological part was important. Until the Dana White incidents, I hadn't really experienced cyber-bullying. But now I saw the viciousness and unaccountability of bullying via texting, the Internet, or in social media. I talked with parents whose children had harmed themselves, or even killed themselves, because of bullying things that people had written about them and posted online.

I had spent years teaching kids how to fight and protect themselves. But this was different. I needed to find a way to teach kids how to fight on the Internet. I needed to find a way to teach them to
have confidence, and to know that words in cyberspace are forever, and they do hurt people, especially if you remain quiet or alone.

It was personal for me, too. I was the father of a little girl. I knew how to teach her to defend herself physically. I needed to learn how to teach her to defend herself against this new kind of bullying. Obviously my MMA experience was the way in. MMA had saved my life. I saw this opportunity to share that in a new way.

The funny thing, the really ironic thing, is that I myself had personally taught Dana White how to fight. I had taught him, or tried to teach him, the rudiments of MMA and the way of the martial artist. It was in the very early days of the UFC. I had known Dana for a few years, back when he was a nobody in our sport. He was running a kickboxing studio and teaching a kickboxing class. Then he became Tito Ortiz's new manager. I knew Tito, of course, so I started seeing him and Dana here and there. Out of the blue, Dana White got these guys named Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta into the business. They were Las Vegas guys who owned the Station Casino company. They had gotten interested in MMA and had formed a company called Zuffa to explore opportunities in the fighting world. They had hired Dana White to be president of their sports operations.

Suddenly Dana White was the head of an MMA company. But he didn't know anything about MMA, so he did two things. He tried to get me to sign as a UFC fighter. When I wouldn't do that, he tried to hire me to teach him how to fight. I had just become a free agent in September 1999, after the Tito fight. I had retired from fighting. I was living in Los Angeles and doing my thing. They desperately wanted me to fight for the UFC. But I wasn't feeling it—I saw what they were doing. I didn't think it was wrong, exactly, but I didn't see it for myself. But I did agree to work as a commentator. They signed me to a three-show contract. Then they hired me to move to Las Vegas for two weeks to train them in how to fight, MMA style. I was going to be the personal instructor for Dana White. So for
the next thirteen days, it was just Dana and me. I taught him all the basic moves.

After that, I guess he thought if he asked me again I'd come fight for the UFC. But every time he asked, I said no. I just didn't share their vision. They had a plan. They had a direction. I didn't think it was right for me, or for my sport. So, respectfully, I always said no.

Now it had come to this. A guy who I had trained in my sport was calling me out in public, on TV, on the Internet, calling me horrible names and telling ugly lies about me and my character. I gave a couple of interviews. I tried to clear up the question of whether I was a two-faced liar and a chump. I said his comments about me were ridiculous and insulting and that I was sad to see them associated with my sport. I pointed out that I had never attacked Dana White or the UFC, that I had never insulted them, or assaulted them, or been angry with them—but that in return for my being honest about going my own way, I had been attacked and ridiculed and bullied and had my character assaulted in public.

In reply, I said, “MMA breeds confidence, builds character, and creates strong, diverse communities whose foundation is honor, respect, and discipline. Dana White, I refuse to be bullied by you. Further, I respect a man who truthfully stands up and fights for his family with honor. So any time you want to become a real man, and not a bully, you let me know. I would be happy to oblige you with a personal introduction to Shamrock MMA.”

I pointed out that Dana White's behavior was a perfect example of why I thought he was a terrible representative of our sport. I said that it was a great example of what happened when corporate interests began to dictate martial arts. I didn't point out that in my opinion, Dana White had already been given the litmus test as a martial artist and he had failed terribly. (He really put it on a female grappler who came to help with his wrestling, overpowering her and grinding her into the mat. That's not something you do in my class.)

On March 12, 2011, I was completely blown over to learn that Zuffa, the parent company of the UFC, had made a deal to purchase Strikeforce. The MMA world was rocked by this news. It was a huge deal, a huge story, and it took me completely by surprise. I had gotten up early that day with my daughter. It was just a normal weekday morning—except my cell phone had been going crazy with texts. When I finally had time to check them, there were all these messages—text messages, Tweets, e-mails—from guys asking me if it was true about Zuffa. People thought I would know if something was going down. But I was completely blindsided. Scott Coker was my contact at Showtime. But he had gone underground about a week before. This wasn't unusual. We had talked once a week, at least once a week, for years. But it wasn't unusual for me not to hear from him when he was busy with something else.

Then I finally found a video of Dana White online, announcing the acquisition. It appeared that Silicon Valley Sports, which owned the controlling 51 percent interest in Strikeforce, had sold out. No one consulted me, or asked my opinion, or warned me. That's big business. It wasn't their job to warn me. It wasn't Scott Coker's job to warn me. It was their job to maximize profit.

I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised. I hadn't seen this coming, but I knew something had to change. The financial partners were strained. The company had spent a lot of money expanding the brand, competing with the UFC, trying to open the New York market, trying to grow the sport. Silicon Valley Sports is an old-fashioned, traditional sports company. They were tired of writing the checks and not seeing the returns.

I made some calls. I told my wife. She was pretty freaked out. Everybody was freaked out. I put in a call to Scott. I spoke to some of the Strikeforce team. It was a small group, and we were all very close. Everyone was shocked. No one was popping any champagne corks.