Uncaged (33 page)

When I didn't hear back from Scott, I sent an e-mail asking what was up. An hour later, I sent him another e-mail, thanking him for being my promoter and my friend. I felt horrible. There was no reason or explanation given. It came without warning. It felt like someone had died in a car accident, and you didn't want to ask questions about what happened, or who was at fault. It was just … over.

When I finally talked to Scott, I asked him, “What do we tell the press?” I had been the public face and the brand spokesman for Strikeforce. I had a long and friendly relationship with many of the MMA journalists, and I was getting pounded by their texts and e-mails. I had to tell them something. Scott sent me an e-mail explanation about how the Silicon Valley Sports guys had wanted out of the MMA business, and that they had no place else to go except Zuffa. They needed Strikeforce. Strikeforce needed Zuffa. We're all going to be one happy family now as the sport moves on to its next great level.

I couldn't sell that. These reporters were friends of mine. They're smart. They knew what was going on. Their articles already said, “Good-bye, Strikeforce. Good-bye, Frank.” It was the end of two brands.

I did my job. I tried to put a nice face on it. But I had a lot of weird feelings about it. Scott and I were very close friends. I was the spokesman for our brand. It was a real kick in the nuts
not
to know we were being sold. It would've been nice if he had shared it with me.

It would have made it easier for me to think about my future, for one thing. The news about the sale threw that wide open. I was getting ready to move to New York. My house was on the market. My wife and I had been looking at houses in Manhattan. We had visited schools for our daughter. We were committed. Now it looked like all of that was going to change, too. I had a contract with Strikeforce. Strikeforce had its arrangements with Showtime.
But Strikeforce was going to be owned by the UFC, and the UFC was run by Dana White. And it was clear to everyone what Dana White thought of Frank Shamrock.

In the first interviews, Dana White insisted that everyone's contracts would be honored, and that the new ownership of Strikeforce wouldn't change anything. Strikeforce fighters would continue to fight for Strikeforce. Strikeforce officers would continue to work for Strikeforce. In the short term, that made sense. Long term, it didn't. I wasn't sure whether my role had changed, or how it had changed. A good business mind told me to prepare a good exit strategy. But I felt unsure, and being unsure is a bad business strategy.

There didn't seem to be a future for me with the UFC, and I wasn't sure I wanted one. For a long time, they continued to look like the same old thing. They were gathering steam. They kept getting bigger. They had great fighters. They had become the dominant force in the industry. They had achieved their goal in buying Strikeforce. They had created a sport, but it was now going to be known as UFC. One of the first rule changes to Strikeforce was to add elbows and make the rules the same in both leagues. I was originally the person who convinced Coker to remove the elbows from the Strikeforce to cut down on the blood and cuts. But the UFC was now MMA. I didn't think the way they'd done it was appropriate and fair. They used their power to stop other people's growth and to stop the sport itself from growing. They took the sport of MMA and made it into
their
sport.

They did that in ways that weren't cool. My own experience shows this. They were angry at me for not agreeing to fight for them when I was a free agent. They retaliated by taking away my history. My championships and my records disappeared. I'm not in the UFC Hall of Fame. If you study the history of MMA as told by the UFC, I don't exist. That's how they repaid me for not sharing their vision.

But I didn't share it then and I don't share it now. By the time the UFC came along, I had already seen a couple of versions of MMA. There was the Japanese execution of martial arts, in the version that was Pancrase. There was the first UFC, run by Bob Meyrowitz. He founded the UFC and sold it to Zuffa in 2001. Now I had seen a decade of UFC under Zuffa and Dana White.

I did the math. With Zuffa's UFC, you've got Dana White, a boxing fan with no martial arts experience, backed by financial people from the casino business, who are very schooled in the management of sports and boxing. If you combine those two things, you don't get MMA. You get white-collar boxing. That didn't make sense to me. It was going to be a business about making money off fighters. It was not going to be about talent and the artists. It was just going to be another way of making money.

They were 100 percent sure their vision was the right one. I was 100 percent sure their vision wasn't the right one. I saw a sport steeped in martial arts history and culture, and athletes who respected the fighting art and their bodies. They wanted to own the sport. I'm fine with that. But I'm not fine with them erasing my history from their sport. If they do that, it's not a sport anymore. It's just a business. I understand that, too—but I don't want any part of it.

Was I wrong? Yes—kind of. I misjudged them. I didn't share their vision, and I thought they would crash and burn. I had seen other big companies come and go. Look at the Extreme Fighting Championship. It was a big, rich, well-organized company. Look at the Full Contact Fighting Federation. Some big money guys had come and gone.

Dana had seen inside the world of MMA when it was sexy and interesting but immature. He had the right guys, with lots of money. Lorenzo knew the fight commission. They had the right connections, and the right qualifications and the right network. They were
casino operators, which is a service business with huge overhead and huge payroll. I knew they could run a big business.

And they did. I may not like how they got from point
A
to point B, but they got there. They have moved the sport forward. They have made it a global sport. Their MMA model is now the only model. They control the marketplace.

But did I make a mistake? No. Not for me. I have no regrets about leaving the UFC or resisting the offers to rejoin the UFC. All I have to do to know that is look at my brother. He went with them and fought for them, until they cut him. They brought him back for a trilogy of fights with Tito Ortiz that revived the UFC on pay-per-view, which many said saved the company from early bankruptcy. They made millions off him. He fought some more, and then they cut him again. So he sued them in court and lost and had to pay them back, $172,000 in attorney bills. Now he's done, and he has had no control over anything that happened during most of his career. He has no promotional rights. He can't use the photographs or the video footage of any of that and say, “Here, this is who I am, and what I did.” Dana White controls that, not Ken Shamrock. It's his life, but someone else owns it.

Back in 1999, I was just beginning to understand my brand, my personal brand, and what it could be worth. I saw an opportunity to create something with lifelong value. I saw the future. I knew I was going to be a world champion fighter. I wanted that to be my job, and my career, and my brand. And I wanted to be able to make money off that, and control the images associated with my name, after I stopped fighting. There was no way I could have done that as part of Dana White's UFC.

This is my
life.
This is my job. This is my journey. I love MMA. It's my church. It's not just where I go on Sunday. It's where I have gone every day of my adult life. I have lived and breathed mixed martial arts, and the martial artist way, right down to my marrow.
But suddenly, as the spring of 2011 turned to summer, I began to think that my future as a martial artist might not include MMA. For the first time in almost twenty years, I was not sure what was coming. I was not sure what I was going to do. I had been a guy with a one-year plan, a five-year plan, and a ten-year plan. Now I was a guy with no plan at all.

I tend to be a little obsessive, and I'm very highly focused. Strikeforce had been my life. For the past five years, it was almost all I had done. I put all my energies into developing the brand. I shut down or stepped away from my other businesses. I believed in the Strikeforce dream. When it died, I was left feeling high and dry. I felt completely screwed. So I started drinking. I thought, “Well, the last fifteen years of my life is just … gone. I might was well whoop it up.”

The brakes came off. Where I used to have a drink in the evening to chill out, or smoke a little weed at night to relax, now I started almost first thing in the morning. I had nothing better to do. There was no training. There was no media work. There was just nothing.

So I started drinking, every day, and earlier in the day. I'd get Nicolette up for school. I'd get her fed and dressed. And then I was done with my day. I had no other responsibilities except sit and worry about my future. I had nothing else going on. There was no reason not to smoke a joint and have a cocktail.

I had really gotten into drinking rum. It's the nectar of the gods. It gave me such a warm and cozy feeling. Rum and Coke became
my brunch. I'd have a drink or two, maybe do a little shopping, maybe smoke a little pot, and then come home and have a nap. And then get up and have some more rum.

The drinking got serious for me really quickly. I had always been purpose-based. I had always struggled so hard to survive, to get ahead, to excel. Drinking and drugging didn't go with that. When I was training for a fight, I'd quit everything for three months before the fight. Even when I wasn't training, I stayed focused, didn't go too crazy. And even after I retired, my drinking was minimal. Over the last couple of years, I'd have a drink every night—but just a little one. I'd have a beer, or a little wine. Maybe a glass of rum. But rarely to excess.

Now, with Strikeforce gone, the struggle was over. There was nothing to fight for or against. I really quickly hit a very low place. There was no reason
not
to drink. There was nothing to be sober for.

Pretty soon I was drinking every day, and drinking hard every night. I started seeing fewer people and doing fewer things. I became antisocial. I'd have my morning drinks and lunchtime drinks. I'd run an errand. I'd smoke a joint. I'd sober up by late afternoon, when I'd go pick my daughter up from school. When she was home safe I'd start it up again. Looking back, my behavior was not surprising. I had been using and abusing drugs and alcohol since I was a boy. I had gone through periods when it really dominated my life. So I guess it wasn't all that weird that I fell so hard.

Amy was
not
happy about it. She saw what was happening, and she was pretty vocal about it. She worried. She kept telling me I was in a terrible mood. She wanted to talk about it. She wanted me to do something about it. She kept telling me I was an alcoholic and that I needed help.

I didn't hide the drinking from her. I didn't see any reason to. I didn't think I was an alcoholic. I still had my job as a commentator. I didn't drink on the job. I still had money in the bank. I wasn't
doing anything bad. I was just upset. I felt like my baby had died. I was grieving. I felt like my only problem, in fact, was
her
—and her telling me all the time that I was an alcoholic. I told her she was crazy, that she should quit bugging me about my drinking. When she asked me what was bothering me, I said, “You. The thing that bugs me most in my life, right now, is you bothering me about the drinking.”

When she wouldn't shut up about it, I said, “You know what the problem is? You're crazy. You need to see a psychiatrist. You should make an appointment and go see someone, because you're nuts and you're making
me
nuts.” I was seriously not worried about the drinking. I felt angry inside. I felt sort of cut off from everything. The drinking seemed to help. But Amy did what I told her to do. She saw the psychiatrist. She came home and told me about it. The doctor had said to her, “Your husband is an alcoholic. He has to stop drinking. If he can't, you should take your daughter and get out.” So she came home and told me that. She said, “He told me that if you keep drinking, I have to take Nicolette and leave you.”

Nothing was going to cut me off from my daughter. Nothing can get between me and my daughter. I would die before I would let that happen. So I said I would quit, and I meant it. But then I got up the next day, and all I wanted to do, all I wanted to do more than anything in the world, was have a drink. So I took Nicolette to school and came home and had a drink.

For a month, Amy and I fought. I stayed drunk and she stayed mad. She kept saying, “I'm serious. You're an alcoholic and I'm going to leave.” I thought she was being ridiculous, and I told her that. I told her she was crazy. But then something happened that made me think she might be right. We had a plan to look at houses in Los Angeles. I wanted to be near the ocean, near my friend Henry, near the TV and movie businesses. Amy and I were going to L.A. to check out some real estate.

Then we found out Amy was pregnant. Then she had a miscarriage while we were in L.A. We flew back to San Jose right away. She saw a doctor and got taken care of, but she was pretty beat up. The doctor put her on bed rest, so she asked me if I would please pick up Nic after school and bring her home.

I had agreed to do a charity golf tournament the next day. I got Nic up and took her to school, and then I was going off to play golf. I started drinking around eleven in the morning. The tournament went all right. I drank all day. I had a good time, Tweeting and texting like crazy. Then I looked at the clock, and it was 5:30. I was really drunk. Wasted. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing, but I couldn't really remember what it was. And my phone had died, so there wasn't anyone to call and ask, “Hey, am I supposed to be somewhere?”

Then I remembered I was supposed to pick up my daughter. At the school. At 4:30. I drove over there. It was 6:00 when I arrived. The place was dark. The doors were locked. I started pounding on things and yelling. There was nobody around. I figured the only person who could have picked Nic up, other than Amy or me, was our friend Cheri. So I got back in the car and drove to her house, all drunk and out of my mind with fear, and anger, and shame. I had never driven drunk or high with my little girl before and now I couldn't even remember where she was. I was freaking out.