Uncaged (12 page)

Things back home were weird. Ken had lost his king of Pancrase title to Suzuki a couple of years earlier. He was becoming disenchanted with the Pancrase organization. They wanted him to “lose” his title to another fighter so that if he lost in the UFC it wouldn't make Pancrase look like the weaker league. He had fought in a few
Ultimate Fighting Championships, going back to 1993 and the first-ever UFC events. The Brazilian Royce Gracie beat him by submission in less than a minute in their first fight, setting up a Gracie-Shamrock rivalry that continues to this day. By 1996, he had stopped fighting for Pancrase altogether. A little while later he signed a contact with World Wrestling Entertainment.

But a lot of his Lion's Den fighters were still Pancrase guys, and someone had to train them. This increasingly became my responsibility. The master plan seemed to be that Ken would go do his thing and I would stay home and take care of the business. I was a good teacher, but I didn't really know what I was doing yet. The sport was evolving. We had all these guys who had been good at one discipline—who were good boxers or good wrestlers—and were now trying to become mixed martial artists. No one had taught me how to do that or how to teach that. I only knew what ten fights and a lot of mistakes had taught me. But I was personable, and I could sign people up for classes, and I took the job seriously. The Lion's Den was successful. We had a strong fighting camp, with some amazing guys fighting with us—Jerry Bohlander, Guy Mezger, Tre Telligman, Jason DeLucia, Mickey Burnett. Those were some very tough young guys.

I wasn't teaching them the way Ken had. I didn't have my thumb on them. His system was: if you were breaking the rules, or not respecting the system, he'd bring you in, tell you what you had done wrong, and then make you get in the ring with him. Then he'd beat the shit out of you. You trained hard out of fear, out of the knowledge that he would beat the shit out of you if you missed a training session or showed up late.

I was a little subtler. If a guy was screwing up, I'd get him in the ring and wrestle with him and tire him out and make him keep going until he puked, and then make him go some more. If a guy showed up late, I'd say, “Hey, you're ten minutes late.” Then I'd let
him warm up and get him into the ring. Thirty minutes later, when he's vomiting and bleeding and about to pass out, I'd say, “Take a break. And by the way, we are
never
late to class.”

After a while, I stopped doing even that with most of the guys. They were professional fighters. This was what they were doing for a living. They were adults. My attitude was, you're a pro. I'll help you, and good luck to you, but I'm not going to keep my foot on your neck.

I was a little distracted. I had met a woman, and we had gotten pretty serious. Her name was Angelina Brown. We met in Hawaii, when I was there working as the trainer for some of Ken's Lion's Den team. We were in Waikiki because some of the guys were fighting in a Super Brawl match. I went to work out in a Gold's Gym while the fighters were cutting weight, and that's where we met.

She was super athletic and really good-looking. She had just graduated from UCLA with a degree in marketing and had gone to Hawaii to work with T. Jay Thompson, the promoter of the Super Brawl fights.

I was already seeing someone else, a former Miss Teenage Hawaii named Angel. She had been my sort of unofficial Hawaiian girlfriend; I saw her whenever I was over there. But I met Angelina and that changed. Angel was out. Angelina was in.

In January 1997 I was scheduled to fight John Lober. I had trained a bunch of guys for Super Brawl fights, but now I was getting my shot. Ken or Bob, with their Super Brawl relationships, had arranged the fight. I didn't have a lot of time to think about it or prepare for it. It just sort of came up. I had seen Lober fight a few times. He was known as John “the Machine” Lober because he had a reputation for being able to take a tremendous beating and just keep plowing forward like some kind of robot. He could just keep going. But he didn't scare me. I figured that with my submission holds I could annihilate him. I'd get him down, get him in a hold,
and he wouldn't get up. I saw the whole thing play out in my mind. I trained medium hard. I wasn't worried. I was on the beer and oatmeal diet, which meant I was drinking more and eating more than usual. I got really big and puffy looking, but it made me sort of slow and sloppy. I weighed two hundred pounds, but physically I wasn't ready. Mentally, I was OK but not great. I had lost my last two Pancrase fights, to Yuki Kondo and Kiuma Koniuka. That part of my life seemed to be ending. I didn't see any future in Pancrase anymore—the company treated me differently after Ken left for the UFC. But my relationship with Angelina was going strong. She liked the fighter's life, or at least she liked being the fighter's girlfriend. She seemed really into it. She liked being in the limelight, or at least near it.

The Lober fight was held in Honolulu. It was a straight-time fight, one round, thirty minutes, no holds barred—very different from what I'd been doing. For one thing, there was more striking and boxing. There was no rule about closed-fist hitting to the face. I hadn't had too much experience with that kind of fighting. I didn't think it would be any big deal, though. I'd been hit in the face before. I'd been kicked in the face. I'd had my nose broken a couple of times.

John was a stocky white guy with a shaved head and a goatee, with “Machine” tattooed on his stomach. He had just come off a draw against Igor Zinoviev, who was very tough. I should have been more scared than I was. But I had confidence. I came out strong. For the first three minutes, I kicked his ass. I had him on the ground in the first ten seconds, and I held him there a long time. I had him pinned, and he was struggling, and I was head-butting him hard. I landed a heel to his face that must have hurt.

Then I got tired. My plan wasn't working. It was taking too long to work. I had him in a submission hold, and he was supposed to give up, but he didn't give up. I realized he was not a sportsman.
This wasn't Pancrase. I was going to have to do something serious, like break his arm or leg. So I did. I broke his ankle. I hit him so hard that I knocked out two of his teeth. But it hardly even slowed him down. He wasn't going to give up. His tooth was literally on the mat, and at one point he took out his mouthpiece, threw the other tooth into the crowd, and went back to fighting! He must have been on drugs. It was insane for him to keep going.

After three minutes of totally dominating him, I was so tired I couldn't get my hands up. He started beating on me, and he kept beating on me for the next twenty-seven minutes. He hit me with a left jab that knocked me down, and then he hit me hard with his right a bunch of times. He knocked me down again with a left. He used my head like a punching bag.

We went the whole distance. Then the judges conferred. When they were done talking it over, I had lost by a split decision. Two of the judges were jujitsu guys, and they'd called it for Lober. I wasn't all that surprised. I was disappointed, but I was
already
disappointed by the way I'd fought. I had wanted to finish him, and I thought I was going to. The judges weren't wrong. If I'd been judging the fight, I'd have gone that way, too.

Lober was smiling, even though his front teeth were gone.

Angelina didn't seem upset that I was all beat up and my face was all mushy. But I was. I felt humiliated and embarrassed. Plus there was the money. I had been on salary with the Pancrase organization, so a victory didn't mean getting paid more. But this was different now that I was a prizefighter. I got $10,000 for fighting, but I would have gotten another $10,000 for winning. At that time in my life, $10,000 was a lot of money.

I wasn't injured. I was drained, emotionally and physically, but I wasn't actually damaged. The part that hurt the most was my pride.

We were staying in downtown Honolulu. I couldn't sleep and was up early the next morning. I put on some clothes and left the
hotel. I walked across Waikiki, and then hiked as far as I could up Diamond Head—which wasn't very far because I was so beat up. I had a jug of water and a cell phone. I decided to sit down and think things over. I ended up sitting there for a couple of hours.

I turned the fight over in my mind. I thought about why I'd lost. I realized that I should have won. I
could
have won. Several times I'd been in a position to break Lober's arm, or break his leg, and I hadn't done it. I hadn't been willing to injure him. I had wanted to fight him, and I wanted to beat him, but when it came right down to it, I hadn't been willing to actually
hurt
him. I realized I had a problem. I had a lot of guilt and fear about hurting people. In sports, as a kid, I hadn't wanted to hurt anyone. I was always worried about it. I think it may be because I had been hurt a lot myself. It also came from my fear of what would happen if I hurt someone—my fear of Joe's anger, of what Joe would do to me if I hurt someone and caused trouble, or if I fought back and hurt him.

I understood that was why I had lost the fight. It was a revelation, an awakening. I hadn't been emotionally ready, and I'd let myself be beaten. I felt completely devastated: emotionally, physically, and financially. And I saw that it was completely unnecessary. I could have won. I didn't have to lose. I just had to change my mind about what I was doing.

I came down off Diamond Head a different person. I made a decision that, in the future, I was going to approach fighting in a different way. When I fought again, I would understand that the other guy was agreeing to fight me. He was offering to fight me, and participating in fighting me. I wasn't taking advantage of him. We had agreed to play a game, and there was going to be a winner and a loser. There were rules, and we were going to play by the rules. If someone got hurt, it wouldn't be my fault, it was part of the agreement. Coming off the mountain, I knew. I had that moment, and very few people ever have that moment, when I absolutely
knew.
This is what I'm going to do with my life, and if I die doing it, I will die doing it.

I accepted it totally, and it was incredibly exciting. I came down the hill ready to roll. You could have sparked lightbulbs off my fingertips. If sawing off my arm had been the solution to fighting and winning, I would have sawed my arm off and come out with a nub, ready to roll. I was that committed.

I went back to the hotel. To this day, I've never been back to Diamond Head. I've never needed to go back. I had my moment, and I understood.

That was the true beginning of my life as a fighter.

Almost nine months passed before I fought again. The loss to John Lober had created some drama and some problems. Ken had been in my corner for that fight. He had been a big supporter, and he thought I was going to destroy Lober. I think he was kind of disgusted with me that I lost so badly.

He saw that I was screwing around in training and in leading the team. Ken was off doing WWE and pro wrestling at that point. He wasn't happy about what was going on back home with the Lion's Den. I thought I was doing everything for the team, and the gym. But I believed what we were doing in the gym and in our training was not the best way. We were working with old ideas, on an old model, but we were fighting in a new sport. I felt we needed a new approach. I voiced my concern about this. I was very vocal, and I kept on talking about it, saying what I believed. I kept telling the guys, “Look, we've got to change. There's a better way to do this.” I tried to tell Ken, but no one tells Ken anything! Ken wasn't interested in my ideas about change. He wanted me to run his gym and train his fighters his way.

We were invited to participate in a thing called Rings Extension Fighting, which was a kind of Japanese hybrid fighting. I took over the training of some of the guys from the Lion's Den. They were all really out of shape.
I
was out of shape. I started to have some ideas about conditioning. I felt we should be doing more in that area. Maurice Smith went to Tokyo to fight a guy named Tsuyoshi Kohsaka. Maurice did pretty well, too, but Kohsaka seemed to be carrying him the whole way, and Kohsaka won. Pete Williams fought a fighter named Joop Kasteel and beat him but it was not a spectacular fight.

Kohsaka was the up-and-coming star in Rings, and I was looking for a fight for me, so I contacted the organization. They set me up with Kohsaka for September 1997. We fought in Tokyo. It was a thirty-minute fight, one round, no breaks. I didn't fight all that well and I got tired. But I won by decision.

Ken became much more vocal in his criticism. He was pissed off that we hadn't done better with the Rings fights. I was starting to feel weird about my position in the family. I was working hard. I was doing my job. But he was riding me all the time.

I had another fight scheduled, in Texas, against an American fighter named Wes Gassaway. I had taken some time off after the Kohsaka fight. That one had taken a lot out of me, and I hadn't trained very hard. Wes was a weight class above me, but he had no submission ability at all. I knew I could get him down and submit him without any real difficulty. But I found myself getting really tired after about two minutes. Gassaway was super-strong, much stronger than I expected. He hit me a couple of times in the head, and it really rang my bell. I got hot. I felt dehydrated. Partly that was Texas, and partly it was my lack of preparation. But I remember trying to hit him and feeling exhausted. I won the fight, but it was ugly. I came back home depleted. I remember Guy Mezger saying, “Maybe you should take a break or something.” He could see I was worn out.

Ken finally snapped. He came in one day while I was training at the gym, running one of my classes. He just burst in, and in front of the students said, “I need to talk to you,
now.”
Then he started yelling at me, calling me a crappy trainer, saying my guys should have won their Rings matches. He was angry at me for fighting, too, in addition to training. He told me, “You don't have what it takes. You're not going to be a world champion. You are never going to be a champion. You need to quit lying to yourself and stick with what you are good at, teaching people and running my gym.”