Uncaged (9 page)

Ken was older than me by about eight years, and we could have passed for brothers. We both have a kind of Mexican Indian look. We have really similar bodies. And we were both really damaged children who never had anybody show us much love or respect or kindness. So we really responded to Bob and the attention he gave us. Especially Ken. What he and Bob had was very special. It was real love, an all-or-nothing love, like a man has with his son. It was deep.

Bob was into the Adonis. He understood and appreciated the male body. He understood clothes, decorating, and fine cars and was really into bodybuilding. He wanted his boys to be athletic and to look athletic in a very specific way. Ken and I had that look.

By the time I showed up in Lodi, Ken was leaving professional wrestling and getting involved in this thing called Pancrase. It was from Japan, and it involved certain kinds of wrestling mixed with certain kinds of submission holds. The name comes from the Greek
Pankration.
It was one of the original Olympic sports and might be the world's oldest known form of organized fighting. Ken had already had some success with the Pancrase organization and was building a team of American Pancrase fighters to take to Japan.

I arrived at the Lion's Den gym on April 7, 1994, two days after I got out of Folsom. I don't think Ken was very happy to see me. He wouldn't have had any reason to be. We weren't friends. We didn't even know each other. He was just doing what Bob said to do—just like I was.

We didn't have anything in common. I wasn't into sports, and Ken was a superjock. I was a long-haired stoner. He was a clean-cut family man, married and the father of several boys. I was a criminal coming out of prison. He was a hardworking citizen. We were complete opposites, except physically. But maybe Ken saw me as competition. He shouldn't have; Ken was Bob's number-one boy. Of all the kids Bob had brought into his group homes—and there were literally
thousands
of boys—Ken had been the only one he ever adopted. I was one of Bob's favorite kids, but Ken was the
one.

The Lion's Den was in a crummy, run-down building behind a car stereo shop that didn't look like much. Ken was doing OK as a fighter, but he wasn't famous yet. But he was making a living out of it. He was training a group of guys for Pancrase—Vernon White, Scott Bessac, Jason DeLucia, and some others. They were all hanging around the Lion's Den when I showed up for my tryout.

Every gym has tryouts. It's not unusual for a new guy to show up and want to get involved. The people running the gym will give him a shot. That's how all fighters begin. I was the only guy who showed up that day looking for a tryout. Bob had told Ken to expect me, so he knew I was coming. He obviously wasn't happy about it. But he agreed to let me test.

The first part was physical conditioning. While Ken and some of the other guys watched and counted, I did 500 sit-ups. Then I did 500 squats. Then 500 leg lifts. Then 250 push-ups. They kept a bucket nearby. This was the “puke bucket.” I learned later this is part of the tryout process. It's not unusual for guys to throw up during the physical conditioning part of the test once the body goes into shock from the exertion. It's not bad to throw up. It's good. You push yourself too hard, you get sick, and you throw up—and then you keep going. That's part of the tryout. If you're not trying hard enough to puke, and if you don't keep going after you puke, you're out.

That's the purpose of the entire exercise. It's designed to weed out the guys who don't have what it takes or who don't want it bad enough. The tryout process is very structured, and it's brutal. It's not designed to teach you, or encourage you, or welcome you into the family. It's designed to break you and make you quit. I got the feeling real quick that Ken was going to try extra hard to make me quit.

I passed the physical conditioning. Then it was time for the sparring.

Ken's guys put me in the ring for the first time in my life. No one told me what to do or how to do it. They just put me in the ring and told me to get ready. Then Ken got in the ring with me. I saw right away that he was not going to take it easy on me. It was already clear he didn't think I was going to make it. Now it became clear that he didn't
want
me to make it. He wanted me to fall apart. So he got me in the ring and told me we were going to spar for twenty minutes straight.

I got creamed. For twenty minutes, I stood there swinging my hands around while Ken beat the crap out of me. First, he hit me so hard with a palm strike that he broke my nose. I started bleeding all over the place. I thought maybe we'd stop, get me cleaned up a little, or let me rest a little. No. We kept going.

A little later, he knocked me down. I was on all fours, trying to catch my breath. He punched me so hard in the side that he broke two of my ribs. When I got up, he hit me some more on my broken nose and my broken ribs. When I fell down, he got me in a wrestling hold, and then hit me some more where he'd broken my ribs. It was the most painful thing I'd ever felt in my life. But he got bored with hurting me that way, so he got me in a choke hold and threw me around the ring like a rag doll for a little while.

It went on forever! Twenty minutes is a long time in the ring for anyone. For a beginner, it was an eternity. I kept thinking it was
over, and then it was never over. It just went on and on and on, and I kept getting hit harder and harder. Ken looked sort of bored and disgusted by the whole thing. He'd stop hitting me for a minute, and then he'd start squeezing me and choking the life out of me again. I had no way to defend myself. I had no idea of where to be or how to move. I didn't even understand the concept of range. Until I got kicked in the face—then I understood.

I'm sure Ken expected me to quit without making him do anything but box me around. But I didn't quit. So he knocked me down, wrestled me to the ground, and held me there. He got me in a leg lock and started twisting up my legs. I had no idea how to get out of a hold like that and no idea how to protect myself. So I didn't. Ken kept twisting. The pain was incredible. After a minute I felt all the tendons in my left knee pop and rip. It was
horrible.
I felt like I was dying. I thought I was going to pass out. Then there was this vivid moment. I heard one of Ken's guys say, “Didn't anyone tell this guy he could tap out?” I was screaming with pain, but I heard that, and I said, “What?”

“You can stop anytime if you just say ‘tap.'”

So I yelled, “Tap! Tap!” and the fight ended.

We had gone the whole twenty minutes. I had passed the tryout. Ken walked out of the ring looking disgusted. I crawled out after him. Someone drove me to Ken's house and took me upstairs and put me in a bedroom. I passed out and slept for the next two days. When I finally came downstairs, I actually had to slide down the stairs on my ass because my legs wouldn't work. It would take two weeks of icing and heat on my knee to walk without a limp and another two weeks before I could take a full breath without the rib pain sending me to the other knee. That's the shape I was in when I started my training at the Lion's Den.

Ken had trained as a fighter in the old-fashioned Japanese tradition, in which you begin training not as a fighter but as an apprentice—almost
a slave. So that's the training I got, too. For the next few weeks, all I did was clean the mats and carry the other fighters' bags. I learned to serve. After a while, because of my size I became the warm-up guy. I'd get in the ring and guys would warm up—by beating on me. I'd spar with them and they'd kick my ass until they got bored. Then I'd have to go clean the mats and carry their bags.

That went on for several months. No one was training me or teaching me anything. I'd get the snot beat out of me, and then I'd clean up the gym and pack up everyone's gear and go home. I didn't grasp anything for a long time. I didn't know anything about sports because I'd never been on a team, with a coach, long enough to learn anything. I didn't understand wrestling and fighting as a sport or a discipline. I only understood street fighting—twenty-second fights in which you hit a guy and he hits you and someone falls down and everyone runs. But I didn't know how to fight a real fight.

But I was picking up stuff. I learned the ten positions of Pancrase. They were all on the ground. The system was all grappling. It was old-school submission wrestling. The positions all had Japanese names. Ken had simplified them by giving them numbers, and we learned those.

But Ken was not a teacher, he was a fighter. He fought all the time, and he was successful. But he had no patience or skill for teaching. He was a bully. He had trouble articulating stuff. He could show you things, but he couldn't explain them. So he taught in the old way, like he'd learned in Japan. “I want to show you this technique. Give me your leg.” And you'd scream “Aaaaaggghh!” while he twisted your leg. Then he'd make you hold
his
leg, and he'd say, “This is how you get out of it.” And you'd scream “Aaaaaagggh!” while he kicked your face.

It was more like a gym than a martial arts dojo. There was no training in the modern sense; it was just guys working out and fighting. No one was in very good condition by today's standards.
We had no concept of cardio. We wrestled and drilled for an hour, then ran two miles. We did some weight training and some sparring, but that was it.

Most of the guys didn't live like athletes or martial artists, either, especially Ken. He had this rock ‘n' roll lifestyle. He was a married man and a good father, but he was living it up and doing his own thing, which involved a lot of partying. He was working on his career and training himself.

I didn't like Ken's party scene. It was pretty hard-core, with a lot of sex and drugs, and it all seemed very fake. I didn't see any real future mixing hard partying with training but I didn't have anyplace else to go. I didn't have any skills to make a living with. I didn't know how to do anything. Ken obviously didn't want me there. But Bob Shamrock was the only man who seemed to care anything about what happened to me, and he said it was a good idea. I understood this was an opportunity, and I was a guy with no opportunities. So I stayed with it.

All the while, I was watching and learning. I had learned how to be a student in prison. I had learned how to pay attention and take notes. Watching the other fighters, getting my ass kicked, I began to see things. When I figured something out, I wrote it down. I drew pictures of the moves and the holds. I took the same energy and mind-set that I had used in prison and added it to the martial studies.

I'm not sure how I got it, but I already had a martial arts mentality. I was driven to protect myself, seek excellence, and help others in a shared purpose. And I began to realize that this fighting thing could be a sport, with real skills and real techniques that I could learn. Ken beat me up so easily at the tryout that I was humiliated, but I was also intrigued. I was challenged. It seemed like if I did the physical part, and paid attention, and studied, I should be able to figure it out.

I had an advantage because I didn't have anything to unlearn. I was a blank slate, with no preconceived notions of how to wrestle or how to box. If someone told me how to do something, or if I figured something out, I just did it. It was challenging, and I respond to challenges, but it was kind of terrible, too.

Other guys would come to the gym and ask to try out. Ken would put them through the same thing he put me through. It was so ridiculously hard that almost no one made it past the conditioning part, with the five hundred sit-ups and five hundred leg lifts. If they made it to the sparring part, they'd crack at the beginning of that. Ken insisted on it. We'd be put in the ring with the tryouts, and if we didn't kick their asses, Ken would kick
our
asses.

After a few months, I started thinking maybe I could do this thing. I discovered I was a gifted athlete. Plus I was smart. Most of the guys in Ken's organization weren't either of those things. They were really tough, but that's all they were—just tough, angry guys who knew how to take a lot of punishment and who liked dishing it out. I realized after about six months that I might actually have a shot. Then one day I got Scott Bessac in a choke hold and made him tap out. That was huge. I had finally beaten somebody.

In the fall of 1994, Ken and the Pancrase guys in Japan decided it was time for me to fight. They wanted me to leave Lodi and the Lion's Den and finish my training over there. So I flew to Tokyo and joined the Pancrase organization.

I moved to Japan in late 1994. It was the middle of winter in Tokyo, cold and damp. I was taken to a big tin building in a suburban neighborhood in Yokohama, in Kanagawa Prefecture, about an hour by train from downtown Tokyo. The houses were all packed tightly together, and the air smelled like raw sewage.

The tin building was my new dojo. There were mats here and there on the floor, and there was a fighting ring in the middle. Around the sides of the building were very Spartan dormitory rooms with nothing in them but a mat on the floor and some blankets. There was a partitioned area with a rice cooker, a refrigerator, and a huge cooking pot. That was the kitchen. The toilet was outside the building and was a traditional Japanese squat toilet, which is just like an outhouse over a trough.

This was my home and my gym. This is where I worked and trained, along with the other Pancrase fighters.

Every day was the same. I got up at eight. We'd get breakfast, which was a kind of rice stew called
chankonabe,
or just
chanko,
a sort of goopy rice soup in a huge pot with vegetables and bits of fish in it that would stew all day. The fighters would start coming in
around nine. The young boys who lived at the dojo would do their training while the fighters did their warming up. Then the wrestling part of the training would start around eleven. We'd have a break for lunch a couple of hours later, and we'd all eat some more chanko. Then we'd have an afternoon session. We'd break for dinner and eat chanko again. Then there was an evening session. At night, you'd have to clean the gym. Then you'd roll up in your blankets and try to get warm and get some sleep.