Uncaged (16 page)

I also learned how to use superglue to close a cut on a guy's face. I saw a doctor do it once. I asked him about it and he told me that superglue was invented for this, in Vietnam, as a way to close cuts in a hurry. I later found out that wasn't true at all, but it was good enough to get my attention. I started using superglue in the gym to close cuts when guys got injured.

If you are fighting or training and you get in close and take an elbow, you might get a one-inch gash on your forehead or eyebrow. That's very common. If you go to the emergency room, getting that gash tended to can be a five-hour procedure costing thousands
of dollars. And if you don't get a doctor who really knows his stuff, you could wind up with a pretty ugly scar. Or there's superglue, which will close a cut immediately and perfectly. But you have to be careful. One time I saw a doctor who was nervous and shaky and he superglued my guy's left eye closed. It took about a gallon of Vaseline to get it open again.

By necessity, I got pretty good at emergency medical situations, to the point where I had my own doctor's bag, which I would constantly refill in emergency rooms and locker rooms around the world. I've popped fingers and wrists and elbows back into place. I've taped up broken toes. I've helped guys with broken noses. For a nose that is still straight you just lean the head back, put a lot of ice on it, and wait. And don't blow your nose. That's a massacre and your whole face will turn black and blue. When your nose is on the other side of your face, it's a quick crack with your thumbs to align it with your mouth.

The really horrible broken limbs you send to the doctor. I saw a guy get his whole forearm snapped in a telephone lock. That was an ambulance ride.

Otherwise, I learned a lot about active release and contusion relief massage. If you take a lot of kicks, or you get a lot of bone-on-bone damage, you have to do this, and you have to do it right away. The blood accumulates and everything gets stiff and hard, and if you don't massage it right away you can get into real trouble.

I remember when Brian Ebersole fought Cung Le; Cung kicked the shit out of Brian's leg. When it was over, he could hardly walk. I thought he had taken care of it, but I found out that after the fight he'd just had a few beers and gone to bed. Five days later, his leg was dark purple from his butt to his toes. He couldn't get out of bed. So we sat down with him and, for the next three days, massaged the dead blood out of his leg. We iced his leg from butt to foot so it wouldn't hurt. We froze water in Styrofoam cups, and used the
cylindrical ice tubes to squeegee and massage the dead blood out of his leg, like squeezing sausage out of its skin. We could see the leg changing color as the dead blood drained out and the new blood flowed in. It's a very slow process, and horribly painful, but it works. It works better if you do it right away, and if you do it in public, immediately after the fight. Otherwise the guy's going to start crying and go home.

I knew a lot about pain—my own pain. Running had become hard and painful for me. Maurice understood that, so he got me into the water, which was a godsend. It took all the impact of training out of my knees and shoulders. But it also meant I had to train twice as hard because my swimming technique was so terrible. The training put me in a bad mood, especially the swimming. It was the only time I ever got mad at Maurice, and the only time he ever yelled at me. Maurice's biggest strength is that at forty he has the energy of an eight-year-old. He has this old man strength, and this old man knowledge, but he's enthusiastic like a kid. He brings all that to the training.

For the swimming, we were working with this Brazilian guy who'd been a water polo champion. We were swimming in competition, for conditioning. Maurice didn't think I was trying hard enough. He kept teasing me. He would say, “Come on, Frankie. Come
on,
Frankie.” Finally I lost it. I screamed at him. I stormed out. It's the only time in my life that I've ever yelled at a coach, or walked out of a training session.

I sulked for a while and came back. We went back to training.

Maurice really helped make me strong and helped me stay healthy doing it. Part of my strength as an athlete was that I was always good at erasing everything in my mind, once I got going on something. Once I started training, my body would just go until it fell apart or broke. Maurice was very good at helping me go hard but not break down. I needed someone to stop or slow me down sometimes.

The training had been extremely effective. By the time the fight came around I was really ready. And I was mad, too. The fight was going to be held in Sao Paolo, Brazil. We flew down there—Maurice, Angelina, some of my guys, including the disc jockey Big Joe from 94.9 FM, the biggest morning radio show in the Bay Area. He was going to do a live broadcast of the fight during his show.

Right away, Lober started messing with me. He started doing stupid, childish things, like ordering me wake-up calls in my hotel room and ordering room service to my room at weird hours. He sent me dirty e-mails. He was being nasty. He said he was going “to strangle me like JonBenet Ramsey,” the six-year-old girl from Boulder, Colorado, who'd been murdered a year or so earlier. I thought that was extremely crude. It really upset me, way more than it should have. As soon as the fight started, I found I had this heat in my head. I had almost never felt it before. It was as if my brain was on fire. So I decided to beat the shit out of him.

The fight started like the first one. He came out and got ready to go, standing up. He thought his strength would be controlling that. He thought he would be able to knock me down and get on top of me. But I had been training hard with Maurice. My stand-up game was strong. I'd figured out the striking thing, for the first time, and I was really making it work.

So he came out and got squared up and ready to strike. I kicked him in the leg. He threw a punch. I hit him with a punch-kick counter. I did that every time he threw a punch. Pretty soon I was making him fall down. I'd motion for him to stand up, and then I'd knock him down again. I did that quite a few times. I enjoyed it. I didn't want it to end. I was pissed off, and I wanted to hurt him.

It's not good to get that angry. That's why fighting on steroids is such a bad idea. When you're angry, you can't fight rationally. Your body chemistry is all messed up. Your energy goes to all the wrong
places. You can't do anything well except get angrier. That's why I like fighting guys who are pumped up on steroids. Fighting is all about relaxing and releasing tension, so your body is flexible and fluid, able to bend and flex quickly, like water. I like fighting angry guys who are really tense. They can't think right, and they can't fight right.

I'm not sure any of the other popular medications are good for fighting, either. Except for ice, which should be the pain medication of choice in any situation, it's all bad for you. There was a time when all the pro wrestlers were taking the painkiller Nubain. There were guys using Percocet and Demerol. There were guys who ate Vicodin like it was candy. Then there was a wave of steroid use and then designer growth hormone use. If you get into any of that shit, you're done. You're finished.

Then there's weed. In the Brazilian MMA culture, particularly, that's the first drug of choice. There are guys who smoke pounds of weed and then go run twenty miles. The problem is that pain, in our sport, is important. Pain is what tells you that you're doing something wrong, something damaging. You need to know, in this sport, when you're doing something wrong. It's an important teacher.

Being angry didn't seem to hurt me with Lober. I just beat the hell out of him. After a little while, he didn't want any more of that. He started falling down, and falling into the cage to get out of the way, and holding onto me to catch his breath. I could have finished him, and I should have finished him. Two or three times I had him in a guillotine hold, and that could have ended it. But I let him go so I could beat him up some more. Because I wanted to beat him down. I kept making him stand back up.

Finally he'd had enough. I pinned him against the cage, and I was hitting him hard. His face was split open. He was fatigued from falling down and getting back up so much. He was done. He said, “OK, Frank. I'm done. You can stop.”

No way. I said, “I'm not going to stop, you motherfucker. I'm going to beat you to death.” Maurice had never seen me like that before. He loved it. I could hear him laughing his ass off in my corner.

I really wanted to knock him out. The fight ended. I won.

Right after that Angelina and I finally got married. We decided to get married in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai. We booked the wedding at a historic plantation, in the middle of a butterfly farm. The wedding ceremony included a butterfly release. It was a very small wedding. Angelina's mother and brother and stepfather were there. My son was there. He was living with his mom in Utah at the time, so I flew him out.

I didn't have much of a relationship with my family then. My mother was still with Joe. They had settled into the Morro Bay area. I had an on-and-off relationship with my sister Suzy. I had a minimal relationship with Robynn. I wasn't seeing my brother Perry at all and didn't even know where he was living at the time.

I didn't see much of anybody. I didn't have much of a social life at all. I was always getting ready for a fight, or fighting, or recovering from a fight. If you're really doing that, you don't have much room for anything else. It's a full-time job.

I don't think I realized that. And it put a strain on my relationship with Angie. She liked being a fighter's wife. She liked the fights. She loved all the noise and the crowd and the lights and the attention. She liked getting dolled up and being the beautiful woman with the champion. But she didn't like the lifestyle much. It wasn't as glamorous outside of the arena. My life consisted of training, mostly, and napping. I was working out two or three times a day. That meant I needed to eat three or four meals a day—big meals. I needed clean clothes, too, because I went through two or three sets of workout clothes a day. So for the person not training the day was about cooking food and doing laundry. She wasn't into that stuff. She wasn't interested in being a housewife.

I sat down with her and had some serious talks with her, which was very uncomfortable for both of us. It wasn't that important to me that she be a housewife, but that had been our lifestyle, and she had said she was OK with it. I had made all kinds of decisions and arrangements based on her being a part-time housewife. I depended on her to help me. But I was living on Costco frozen burritos and frozen orange juice. That was my training diet, because there was no food in the house.

She wasn't working outside the home. This
was
her job, or that's the way I saw it. We were married. She was my partner. I was training. She was supposed to help me. I was totally happy in my relationship, other than that. I thought she was, too. But there were things that bothered her. She didn't like my snoring, for example. I was always working on my stand-up game and my striking at that time, so I was getting hit in the face a lot. My nose was smashed in all the time. So when I went to bed, I snored.

Also, she was ambitious. She had dreams that she felt she wasn't able to pursue. She had always wanted to be a model, and I was all for that. I said, “Be a model! Go for it!” I put her into things when I could. If there was a photo shoot, I'd say, “Put her in the picture, too.” I encouraged her to go up for jobs and auditions.

All these little issues came to a head when I fought Tito Ortiz. The fight was set for September 1999, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was UFC 22, and it was billed as “Only One Can Be Champion.” I had been the
only
UFC middleweight champion, so I was there to defend my title and retain my belt. Also fighting that night were Chuck Liddell, Jeremy Horn, and a bunch of other fighters. The event was going to be broadcast over pay-per-view. It could have been the last of those for a long time, as the UFC was struggling to keep its finances in order.

Not long before the fight, I got a call from Bob Shamrock. From his tone it felt like he was just calling for no reason, just to say hello
or something. But then he got to the bottom line. He didn't want me to fight Tito. He said he thought Tito was going to hurt me, and he didn't want me to take the fight. I was surprised. Tito was an up-and-coming guy, and he had fought a couple of people and won. But I was the champion.

Bob was serious. He said, “Ken says he's the wrong style for you. He's going to beat you. He's too big and he's too strong for you.” I said I understood and I thanked him, but I didn't get it—at first. Then I realized that half the guys Tito had beaten were Ken's guys. He had fought these Lion's Den fighters, like Jerry Bohlander and Guy Mezger, and destroyed them. After his fights, he would do this thing where he flipped everyone off and act like he was digging graves around his defeated opponents. So he had disrespected Ken, and Ken didn't like it. He may not have wanted me to fight Tito and lose. But he didn't want me to fight Tito and win, either.

It made me more determined than ever to fight Tito. I couldn't see any reason not to take the fight. Everything in my life was working for me. I had been annihilating everyone I fought. I felt good about my chances. I trained hard. When I got to Louisiana, I was in great shape. And I had a plan.

Some years before, Angelina's stepdad, Al, had introduced me to an L.A. lawyer named Henry Holmes. Right from the start I thought he was the coolest guy. He took my call, and we met at his office. It was a big corporate office, but Henry had pictures of himself with every important person in sports, including Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, and George Foreman. I told him my plans. He gave me some advice on how to protect myself and plan for the future as an athlete and as a brand. I didn't think that much about it. But I started hitting him up for counsel every time I needed business guidance. Finally he asked me if I wanted to be his client. I said I did. But when he offered to negotiate a deal for me, and I found out how much it would cost, I couldn't afford him.