Uncaged (34 page)

She was there. Amy had called Cheri and asked her to pick Nic up. She was in the bath. Everything was fine. So I relaxed. I asked Cheri, “Can I just lie down on your sofa for, like, fifteen minutes? I'm
really
tired. Then I'll take Nic home.” Cheri said that was fine. So I lay down and went to sleep. When I woke up, it was around midnight. The house was dark and Nic wasn't there. I asked Cheri what was going on. She said, “We took her home.” So I drove home, too. The house was dark and everything quiet, so I went to bed on the couch.

The next morning, I got up to start the day like always. Amy came downstairs, and she seemed really, really mad at me. I couldn't figure it out. Had something bad happened? She asked me if I remembered what had happened the day before. I said, “Yeah, I had that golf thing.” She asked, “Do you remember what happened with your daughter?” I said, “No, what happened?” Then it came crashing back. I suddenly remembered—the golf tournament, all the drinks, getting drunk, forgetting Nicolette, driving to the school, driving to Cheri's house, falling asleep ….

And I saw that Amy was right. I
was
an alcoholic. I had to be. I had to be an alcoholic or totally out of my mind. Because I would never, never, never leave my daughter unprotected like that unless I was very crazy or very sick. So I must be sick. I told Amy I was sorry. I told her I understood I was an alcoholic. I apologized over and over again. I said I would take care of it.

I had been around twelve-step programs almost my whole life. Being in group homes, I was taken to meetings. When I got into trouble with the law, sometimes going to meetings was part of the punishment or the probation. And being the smart, self-educated man that I am, I had read quite a few books about alcoholism and drug abuse. So I knew I wasn't the guy with the problem. I never drove my daughter around while I was drunk. I never killed anyone driving drunk, or lost my job, or anything like that. So in my mind, I wasn't an alcoholic.

But I knew something very serious was wrong with me to make me leave my daughter like that. So I knew what to do. I got into my car to leave. I'd been doing that every day for a while—just getting in the car to leave, so I could go drink or get high or whatever without my wife bugging me. That day I did the same thing, with the intention of going to some kind of twelve-step meeting. I drove somewhere and parked and thought about things. I started crying and kept crying for about thirty minutes—thinking about
what I'd done, what I'd done to my wife, what I'd done to my daughter.

Then I went rummaging in the glove compartment for a tissue or something. I found a joint. I decided to smoke that and go to my first twelve-step meeting.

I found a meeting about ten miles from my house. I walked in, totally baked and really nervous. I was really high, and really hung-over. I didn't think I would get very much out of the meeting. But I got something. I had been to so many meetings over the years, and I'd listened to all these people tell their stories. I might sympathize, but I didn't identify. I would think,
I'm not that guy.
Well, now I saw myself, and I realized, I
am
that guy.

I didn't go home after the meeting. I puttered around and avoided Amy. That night I went back to the house and told her I was sorry, again, and said I was going to get sober. I meant it.

I didn't have a drink that night. The next day, I got up and went to another meeting. I didn't drink. I went to another meeting. I went to seventy meetings, seventy days in a row. That became my day. I'd get up, get Nic ready, take her to school, go to a meeting, putter around, then pick Nic up again and bring her home. That was my sober life. I didn't drink, but for the first two weeks, it was really hard not to. And smoke. I missed the weed. Since I'd retired, I had been a daily weed smoker. I had been an every-other-day weed smoker for years—since I was a kid. I only quit when I was training for a fight, because I was always subject to drug testing. With big fights, they test a little closer. I
never
wanted to fail a drug test, which seemed like the stupidest reason in the world not to win a fight. So I was really careful about that. But otherwise I smoked. It made me feel calm. I missed it.

I started meeting men in the meetings. They'd give me their phone numbers and tell me I could call them if I felt like taking a drink. They were very friendly and supportive, but I never felt
comfortable in the meetings. I've always felt a little weird in groups. I've always felt apart from things. I'd listen to these guys talk, and I couldn't believe how bad off they were. Amy would ask, “How was the meeting?” and I'd say, “Great, but you can't believe what happened to this one guy.” I couldn't identify. It seemed like I was always the youngest guy in the room. And I was the guy who had suffered the least. These guys had lost
everything.
They had just been destroyed. Well, I drove to the meeting in a BMW. I had money in the bank. I wasn't in trouble with the law. My wife still let me come home. I couldn't believe I was a “real” alcoholic, if that's what it was to be a real alcoholic.

That's how I felt for the first ninety days. Then I went to a new meeting. It was a very young group. I met all these people who were just starting out. Some of them were being brought in from group homes, just like I had been when I was a kid. There were all these young guys wearing the institutional blue pants and white shirts. And I thought, “That was me.” I recognized myself in them. And that's when I got it. That's when I understood my alcoholism as a sickness, as a disease. I understood the progressive nature of it. I saw these guys at the beginning of their disease, and these other guys at the end of their disease, and I understood I was just another alcoholic somewhere in the middle. Not different, just at a different stage.

After that, things got easier. I felt much more like we were all on the same page. I felt more relaxed in the meetings. I felt more comfortable. After a while, it seemed more comfortable to be in a meeting than to be
not
in a meeting.

I had trouble getting people outside the meetings to understand that things had changed for me. I was at an event and everyone was drinking shots. They kept offering me shots, and I kept saying no, thank you. They got drunker and drunker. One guy finally asked me why I wasn't drinking. So I told him, “I'm an alcoholic. I can't drink.” He said, “No problem! Let me get you a beer!”

There have been times when I wanted a drink, or when I remembered how I used to drink. I get to feeling down emotionally, or feel like things are just too complicated, and I start finding my mind sort of … going there. When I see that happening, I say the Serenity Prayer and it passes.

I still get nervous about the future. It's so undetermined. I had all these plans and strategies in place, and then they were gone. But I've turned those things over to a higher power. I've surrendered. The other night I was at an event watching Nick Diaz kick B. J. Penn's ass. I was watching a guy I'd trained get beaten by a guy who'd beaten me. I was watching two generations of MMA fighters, both of whom I'd helped educate and form, doing their thing.

And all night long people came up to me, saying, “Mr. Shamrock, I've always wanted to meet you,” or “Mr. Shamrock, I want to thank you for all you've done for the sport.” In the past, I would only have thought, “Why is this guy bugging me?” or “Why is this guy interrupting my moment?” This night, though, all I could think was that these are real men coming up to me, speaking from their hearts and saying something really, really cool. I wouldn't have had the courage to say that kind of thing to a man I respected that much. I thought, this is pretty cool, to be the guy they're saying that about. I felt like I had earned their respect.

My introduction to martial arts was my introduction to life. It was my first exposure to the concept of a moral code. It was my first exposure to the ideas of honor, respect, and discipline, which to me are the three ideals of the martial way.

I didn't choose it. It happened to me. I became a martial artist because I had to survive in the fighting world. I was training with Ken in the Lion's Den and getting hurt, so I needed to grow and change. I was learning about fighting, but I needed something bigger than that. I found it in Japan, when I was first exposed to true martial artists.

I remember the very first moment of my consciousness about this. I had arrived in Japan along with another Lion's Den guy, Jason DeLucia. We were being introduced to people. One man called me “Shamrock-san” and bowed very deeply. So, being a smartass, I bowed back and made fun of him. Jason hit me and said, “Don't do that! Never do that! He was showing you respect! You can't make fun of him.”

This was a whole new idea for me. I had been trained in the
reverse
of that. I had been trained in juvenile hall, and in jail and
prison. I had been trained in gyms, with all the Lion's Den guys. There was no respect. There was no honor. There was no discipline. Guys came to the gym dirty and sweaty. They brought their girlfriends and wives. No one bowed. No one trained. They just showed up and started beating on each other. In Japan I saw a new way. Over time, this new way developed into an idea. I based the idea on the concept of Bushido—the warrior's way.

I learned that everyone has a warrior's way. Everyone has a warrior's mission. It's a life mission. Whatever you choose for yourself or whatever you think your life is about, you must go on that mission. You have to do battle and you have to fight along the way, whether it's a fight for your health, or your life, or the life of your business, or your marriage, or whatever. And you must fight fairly and honestly and stay true to the three ideals of honor, respect, and discipline.

This became the basis for my whole life. I learned it from the people I met in the martial arts community and developed it, over time, through my exposure to them. Every time I met with them, I saw that the martial arts people were different from the fight people. I'd go to this gym to train, or I'd go to that gym to teach, and I'd see fight people who wanted to challenge me to show off. No one showed any respect. No one seemed to have any discipline. Then I'd be asked to come teach at a tae kwon do school, or a karate school, and I'd have a completely different experience. They wore clean uniforms. They were quiet and respectful. They bowed. They were orderly and disciplined.

I observed and absorbed that. It became the basis for the martial way as it pertains to how I live my life. This is how I
learned
to live my life. I saw the application to everything I did, and I applied it to every action.

I learned that if I run my business life with honor, respect, and discipline, I enjoy success. I learned that from doing it the wrong
way and getting the wrong results. I learned that if I screwed a guy over in business, I would meet him again and he would try to screw me, or that my reputation would be damaged and
that
would screw me. Either way, some negativity would result from the negativity I had put out. And the opposite was true. Something positive always results from something positive I put out.

I learned the application in my personal life, too. I had not been parented well, or coached well. As a child, I was taught by being punished. As a fight student, I was taught by getting beat up. In both cases, I learned the lesson without getting any information. I knew I had done something wrong because I got punished for it. But I didn't know what I had done wrong, and I didn't know how not to do it because I had not been taught. I had not been exposed to honor, respect, or discipline.

So when I became a teacher and a parent, I tried to do it the other way. I saw that bad parenting gives you bad children—who in turn may grow up to be bad parents. Bad teaching gives you bad students—who may go on to be bad teachers. I tried to develop a method of teaching and parenting so that the information I had got transmitted in a way that could be retained and in a way that helped create a good child and a good student.

These are the tools I learned and developed to live my life. They work in my business life and in my marriage. I try to bring honor, respect, and discipline into every part of my life. I also developed a system for teaching and learning that seems to work in every part of my life. I developed it from years of writing and thinking about fighting and the martial way. I was a good student of fighting. Part of my training, starting from my first weeks at the Lion's Den, was trying to write down exactly what I was doing and exactly what results I got. I used to have whole notebooks full of information about this move, or this hold, or this diet, or this exercise regimen. Over the years, I developed a system for thinking about things, for
studying things, through the writing I was doing. That's how I came up with the idea of plus, minus, and equal. This is my formula for success.

What it means is that, in order to be successful in any part of my life, I need a plus, a minus, and an equal. I need someone who is my plus, who can teach me. I need someone who is my minus, who I can teach. I need someone who is my equal, so I can test myself.

In the gym, that means I need a trainer who can teach me things I don't know. He's my plus. I need a student, or a group of students, so I can pass along what I'm learning and learn it better in the process. They are my minus. And I need a sparring partner, a fighting buddy, so I can test and perfect what I'm learning. That's my equal.

I do this in my work life, too. When I started commentating fights for Showtime, I had a mentor—Al Bernstein. He's been commentating for thirty-five years. He knows everything. He's my plus. Then I had a partner—Mauro Ranallo. He's been a television guy for a long time, knows a lot about sports but not as much about MMA. He's my equal. Then there was the new guy—Pat Miletich. He's been around MMA for years as a fighter and a trainer, but he was new to commentating. So he's my minus. I was learning from Al, developing what I was learning with Mauro, and teaching what I was learning to Pat.