Uncaged (19 page)

This was probably one of the largest martial arts events in history. There were eighty thousand fans in the arena waiting for MMA action. But it turned out they weren't ready for it. They'd never seen anything like American-style MMA. I came into the ring and the fight started, and I foot-kicked this guy in the face and I could hear that they didn't like it. I could actually
hear
it. All eighty thousand of them seemed to get really quiet, like … this was
bad.

The fight went my way right from the start, except that my shoulder hurt. I thought Elvis was going to give up. But I didn't know he wasn't going to give up until the end. I found out later that he went to his corner after the first round and told them he was done. He told me so, himself. But his corner guys screamed at him and called him names and made him mad. So he came back out. We had to go the full five rounds. I won by decision. I thought it was a good fight, even though I could hardly lift my arm and was not very effective on one side. But it was still a real battle. I came out and stomped his head and kicked his face and won the fight. But it was
the last one I ever fought in Japan. People weren't ready for it. The sport was still too new.

When it was over, I went back to California and saw the surgeons again. They opened my shoulder up, cleaned it and sewed it and reattached it. I don't know if I made things worse fighting Elvis with an injured shoulder or not.

One of the main reasons I fought Elvis was that I'd made a deal with the K-1 guys. They were going to use that fight to launch a huge MMA league—
our
MMA league. They were going to give me a bunch of money for that. They were going to use my name and image to brand it, and we were going to build an MMA empire in Japan and come back to the US to compete against the UFC.

But I hung around for a year after the Elvis fight while they tried to get things going. I went to endless meetings at which there was a lot of talk and never any decisions. I learned about the Japanese way of doing business. Finally it became clear that they didn't know what they were doing in MMA, and they didn't have any money. Before that, I'd always gotten paid in cash. After a fight, the promoter would invite you to his suite where he would sit at a table with two leather-clad guards behind him and enormous stacks of money in front of him. He was always smoking a cigarette, and he always handed you a tiny paper bag filled with cash. It was always clean, fresh, sequential one hundred dollar bills. He'd always present me with the bag and ask me if I wanted to count it.

It didn't matter how much I was getting paid. I always got paid the same way. Sometimes it was $10,000. One time it was $80,000. In
cash.
That was a big bag. But now there were money problems. No more gobs of cash. I told them it was time for a change—they were using my name and they weren't paying me! Luckily, when I first began studying Japanese business methods I learned about a common business practice to help guide a business decision or dispute. It's called the Naniwambashi strategy. It's the melodramatic
story of how you have sacrificed so much for the company and without this decision in your favor, you and possibly your whole family will be on the streets. The more drama the better!

Now it was time to tell my story to Master Ishi and the heads of K-1. Then the checks started coming, and it was good money, but after another year or so it was obvious they weren't going to be able to make it happen. I was very serious about branding, and about moving my brand forward. I had giant hopes for my sport. I knew it was going to be huge. But I couldn't be tied up with people who weren't able to make it happen. So in 2002 I told them I was out, and they let me go do my own thing.

I realized that I would have to get the money myself. I would need to study financing, and understand distribution. I had been relying on them to do that. I would have to rely on myself. So I started studying business.

Some time before that I had started talking to gyms. Partly on Angie's advice, because she was so into fitness, we looked at expanding the MMA idea into gyms. We started pitching Gold's Gym, which had been the original sponsor for the UFC. The Gold's Gym people told us to come on down to Venice Beach. Angie and I met them and started training with them. They were wonderful to work with. They sponsored me for a few years with clothes and equipment, and I'd get to pose for pictures next to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Nothing came of the Gold's conversations but some great friendships, and they eventually sold out to another company. But I started thinking about teaching and ended up doing a huge amount of it. This wasn't new for me. I had taught a lot of Ken's guys in the original Lion's Den in Lodi. I had opened Ken's gym, Lion's Den Submission Academy, in 1997. In San Jose, I started teaching at the American Kickboxing Academy. Any time I wasn't fighting, I was teaching. I taught the judo students at San Jose State. I taught
the tae kwon do guys. In 1998 I started going overseas, teaching in Japan, teaching in Denmark. I was expanding my brand and increasing my teaching ability. I started doing seminars in Europe.

I did one pro wrestling match in Japan, too. It was what I call “stiff” pro wrestling. In Japan, the line between fighting and wrestling is very thin. It's a kind of soft fighting. There are kicks, and you can use your knees, and you can use all the submission moves. It's just like a real fight. You do all the moves. You just don't finish them. And you know who the winner is before you start. It's not exactly staged fighting. It's like
real
staged fighting. They took real fighting, which is dangerous and unpredictable, and gave it an ending. The winner is determined ahead of time. But everything else, 90 percent of the fighting, is real fighting. You decide ahead of time who's going to win and how. For example, I'm going to finish with a leg lock. For the next ten minutes, you beat the hell out of each other. Then you do your leg lock and it's over.

I fought a guy named Daisuke Nakamura. It was my last pro wrestling match. I didn't fight again for another couple of years, but I was busy. I always had a fighting team that I managed and traveled with. (That was how it always was with me. When I left Ken and the Lion's Den, I had started a team of guys almost at once. We trained together every day, ate together every day. That was how I always worked with fighters. We became family.) We fought all over. One time we got a contract to do a fight in Wenatchee, Washington. That's an apple-growing area, out in the middle of nowhere. We arrived to find everything all messed up. Everyone at the hotel had been drinking. My guys and I tried to go to bed, but we all kept getting woken up. There were fighters running in the hall, knocking on doors, acting like idiots. Someone set up a bucket over my door so that when I opened it I'd get soaked.

I chased two guys down to their room. When they ran inside and locked the door, I said, “If you don't open up, I'm gonna kick
this door in.” They were laughing their asses off. So I kicked the door in, just in time to see them jump out the window. I threw all their training gear into a bedsheet and used that to soak up all the water in my room.

The next morning I got a call. “Can we get our clothes?” They were the people we were supposed to fight. They didn't have anything to train or fight in.

Then we found out the venue had changed, less than forty-eight hours before the event, and no one seemed to be in charge. I hunted down the promoter and made him give me the cash box. I told him, “I'm going to fix this show, but you have to sit down and shut up.” We resurrected the show, renegotiated the pay, and had the fight. Everything seemed to be fixed up. But then the next day when we arrived at the airport to fly home we found out the organizers had only gotten us one-way tickets. I was so mad that I went and found the promoter and threatened him. I took away his wallet. I took all his money, and we flew home.

I'm not saying
this
was the face of MMA, but the MMA business was not a professional one. This was the kind of thing that happened in our industry. This was what I was determined to change. So I dabbled in the business of MMA. I believed that the basic problem with our sport was presentation. At the time, the whole concept of the cage was too much. We needed something softer and more mainstream. I had a vision of an arena, something less scary and threatening.

But it wasn't a shared vision. I used to go out on these money-raising excursions, and people would laugh at me. The idea of a mainstream MMA was so far-fetched. No one got it. It was
cage
fighting. The view of the sport was 100 percent negative. Society just was not ready for it at all. People would say, “Look at them. They're animals. There are no rules. You can't kick a man when he's
down.
It's not cool.” That's what I was facing. So I got busy
trying to come up with something new. I became a promoter for a while.

I got a call one day from a woman in Arizona. She was an American Indian, and she had some sort of nonprofit organization behind her, and she was interested in MMA. I had been working with the idea of promoting and about the concept of Bushido, which is a Japanese expression, from the samurai days, that means “way of the warrior.” She introduced me to a graphic designer who created a really cool Bushido logo.

So I put the two ideas together, and we went into business in early 2001. For the first time, here was an MMA event that said, “Frank Shamrock Presents …” on it. I pulled together some really good fighters, and we staged our first fight. We had Yves Edwards, Pete Spratt, Trevor Prangley, Shannon Ritch, Josh Thomson, and Bobby Southworth. It was a great show, with everyone representing his respective martial art. I thought I knew everything, and I thought it was going to be huge.

It wasn't huge. We lost our asses. I made peanuts. It was a disaster. I was a fighter and didn't know about being a promoter and neither did my partner. I had never had to attend to the finer details, like administrative tasks. So I decided to get out of the promotion business. But then three months later, in 2001, we did Bushido II. It was another disaster.

I kept thinking about how to do something different in my industry, about different ways to get MMA across, different types of presentations. I was very aware of the limitations and the barriers. MMA was too bloody. There weren't enough regulations. It was too scary. The ropes and the cage made everything too cold and unpleasant.

I came up with an idea for something called Shootbox. I spent months polling people, studying arenas, and designing a combination of new ideas and old ideas. I designed a presentation that
included a sunken, four-sided box. Around it were elevated seats, and above it was an elevated, four-sided TV screen, like they have at hockey matches. There would be nothing between the fan and the fight. Everything would be open and visible. The storyline wouldn't be the fight to the death. It would be about the art of fighting and it would be seen like never before. Our tagline was “NO Ring, NO Ropes, NO Cage—No Limits.”

Soon we had our first investor, from Arizona. He had seen advertising for the Bushido shows. He and his father were working with a public company and they wanted to get into MMA. They asked me to create a concept for network TV, so I showed them the Shootbox concept. They loved it, and we worked out a deal. I sold them the rights to Shootbox. They got 100 percent of the company and my services. I got ten million shares in their company and a big salary.

I was back in the promotion business. I thought I was really taking off. I started driving a BMW! I was a promoter and a presenter. I was the president of sports and marketing for a major multimedia company! We organized our first show for August 2003, in Orlando, Florida.

In order to get approved by the Florida boxing commission, we had to build an actual Shootbox. So my friend Crazy Bob and the boys built one. On his front lawn. It was a huge wooden box, thirty-six feet square. When it was done, we shipped it to Florida.

We debuted on a Saturday night. The event was sold out. The fighters were Dave Velasquez, Alex Kababian, Erik Wray, Jason DeLucia, Mike Swick, Butch Bacon, Matt Rogers, Jeff Ford, Jerome Smith, Chad Washburn, Daniel Wade, and more. The fights were being filmed so we could show the footage to the networks. We had some press there, and a lot of MMA people in the audience. Bas Rutten and Dan Severn were there watching and Don Frye and Jeff Blatnick commentated the action.

It was a great event. The fighting was good. Mike Swick knocked out Butch Bacon with a punch that required the paramedics, so that created a lot of scary drama.

The idea was to film the event and present it to the networks and to investors. But the two backers ran out of money before they even got that far. The night before the fights happened, one of the principals knocked on my door and said, “Do you know what's going on?” Our company had been sold to another company. The money was funky. Something weird was going on. My partners didn't know where the next round of financing was coming from, or if it was coming at all. It turned out it wasn't.

My plan had been to hold ShootBox 2 in Las Vegas, and to fight Cesar Gracie myself. There was never a ShootBox 2. I never even got a VHS tape of the first show. I had shares in a worthless company. I got rid of the BMW. But my belief that I could take MMA more mainstream didn't change.