Читать книгу Beyond the Lion's Den - Ken Shamrock - Страница 10

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Land of the Rising Sun

ONCE MY BROKEN BONES HEALED UP, I WASTED little time getting back into the ring. Not long after my return, Dean Malenko, a wrestler known as “The Man with a Thousand Holds,” approached me at one of the shows. I had done some wrestling with his brother, Joe Malenko, over in Japan. Dean and I started talking, and I learned that he was going to be in town for a couple of months, so I invited him to stay at my house so he wouldn’t have to rent an apartment. He had spent a considerable amount of time wrestling over in Japan, and one afternoon he pulls out a videotape of the matches going on over there in the Union of Wrestling Forces (UWF). I didn’t have the best time while I was over in Japan, so I hadn’t paid much attention to their wrestling organizations after I left. This videotape, however, completely blew me away. It didn’t look like they were wrestling; it looked like they were fighting. The match that I found particularly intriguing was Masakatsu Funaki vs. Minoru Suzuki, two famous Japanese professional wrestlers. It was strictly a submission wrestling match, no kicks or punches allowed, but these guys were going at it. It was super fast paced. They were shooting for each other’s legs, dumping each other on their backs, and wrenching on each other’s limbs with submission holds. Everything they did was technical and precise. I thought it was real—and, in many ways, it was real. They were using real techniques that could cause pain, but they weren’t locking them down. It was a “work,” which meant that it was fake, but it looked a whole lot like a “shoot,” which was a real fight.

By the time the match was over, I was speechless. It was just like the first time I saw a football game—I knew that was what I wanted to do, and I also knew that I would be good at it.

Dean and I kept in touch when he went back home to Florida. I even flew down there a couple of times to do some matches with him. Then one day he gives me a call and tells me that Masami “Sammy” Saranaka, the man who did the majority of the recruiting for the UWF, was coming to town to visit his father, who was a big time wrestler from the 1970s. Dean had talked it over with Saranaka, and they had arranged a little tryout for me down in Florida to see if I had what it took to compete in the UWF.

Tryouts have always been my strong suit, and this time was no different. They threw a bunch of guys into the ring with me, and I beat them with my strength and wrestling ability. I didn’t know any submissions at that point; I just shot for their legs, dumped them to the ground, and then manhandled them. I wasn’t as technical as they were, but I was in such good shape they couldn’t touch me. I passed the tryout with flying colors.

I might have been a decent professional wrestler at that point, but when it came to submission wrestling, I was still green. To get the preliminary training that I needed, I spent the next two months flying back and forth between North Carolina and Florida. I’d train for a couple of days, absorb as much as I could, and then fly back home. I definitely felt like I was starting to get a grasp on some of the different holds and locks, but submission wrestling is not something that you can master in a couple of months, especially if you only train a couple of times a week. I would have liked another couple of months to get a handle on all the basic positions, but as it turned out, I had another tryout waiting for me over in Japan. So, still as green as can be, I found myself on a plane headed back to the Land of the Rising Sun.

The moment I stepped into the UWF dojo in Tokyo, I knew this was going to be like no tryout I had gone through before. The place was spotless, as clean as a whistle, but you could still smell the sweat and blood that had spilled in the joint over the years. I was nervous, but in a good way. I was eager to show them that I had what it took. I realized that for the first time in a long time, someone might actually push me past my physical and mental limits, and that excited me.

The first guy they had me grapple had the title of “young boy,” which meant that he was still in training. He was a tough kid, but he was no match for my strength. We went for a half hour straight, and I handled him. Then they stuck me with another young boy, Takaku Fuke. He wasn’t as tough a fighter back then as he is now, but he was still tough. We went for a half hour straight, and I handled him.

I wasn’t gassed out, but I was pretty damn tired. An hour straight of hard grappling is no walk in the park, let me tell you. So I’m sitting there, trying to catch my breath, and then Minoru Suzuki, one of the men that I had seen do incredible things on Dean’s videotape, pulled me down onto the mats. We went for a half hour straight, and he handled the hell out of me. I got caught in arm bars, chokes, heel hooks—I got caught in submissions I didn’t even know existed. And when Suzuki was done with me, I had to go another half hour with Funaki, the other amazing submission wrestler I had seen in the videotape. He’d catch me in a hold, I’d struggle to free myself, and then he’d apply pressure until I writhed in pain and tapped my hand in submission.

The upper body holds weren’t that bad because I could use my strength to muscle out of a lot of them. But the leg locks killed me. I had no idea how to defend against them. In today’s MMA competition, most people know how to escape leg locks, but back then they were the craftiest submission out there. When I got caught in one, I had two choices—tap or get my leg broken. It made a powerful impression on me, and that’s the reason why I became such a leg tactician. In all the brawls I had been in throughout my life, never once had I thought about attacking my opponent’s legs or looking out for my opponent trying to attack mine. I figured most people were like that, and it left them vulnerable. It didn’t matter how big or strong or fast they were; if I could isolate one of their legs, I could win the fight.

By the time Suzuki and Funaki were through with me, there was no question about it—I had got-ten my ass handed to me. Other than having a phone slammed into the back of my head, it was the first time I had gotten beat up since I was a kid. If the tryout had been in the United States, in my backyard, I would have found some way to beat them down. But I was in their backyard, and they were there to help me. I didn’t take the loss as a blow to my ego, I took it for what it was—a way for them to see what I was made of. And the only way for someone to know what you are made of, truly made of, is to break you down to the point where you can no longer stand, no longer fight, and yet you do.

I had done that, and after two hours of hell, they told me that I was in.

My education began the very next day at ten o’clock in the morning. We went for a run, lifted some weights, and then dove into hard grappling. At noon we all sat down and ate a dish called Chuckle, which was a mixture of rice, beef, and vegetables, from a massive pot. While digesting, we watched videotapes of matches and broke down the moves. A couple of the guys spoke a few words of English, but there was never small talk. If they said anything at all, it concerned training. Then, when our food had settled, we got off our butts and dove right back into hardcore grappling until the sun went down.

I pushed myself hard during these workouts. I was eager to learn, but I also had a lot of pressure on my shoulders. Funaki had scheduled my first match for only seven days after I had passed the tryout. In addition to having to learn all the holds and positions, I also had to learn the rules of their organization. It wasn’t like professional wrestling in the States. There was a red corner and a blue corner, and each corner had a board above it to keep track of the number of knockdowns. For a fifteen-minute fight, they had a three-knockdown rule. If your opponent dropped you with punches or kicks and the ref gave you a count, it was considered a knockdown. If your opponent caught you in a submission hold and you were able to grab the rope, the ref would break you apart, but it would be counted as a knockdown. If you got three knockdowns marked on your board before you could put your opponent away, you lost the fight.

There was a lot to take in, but I felt confident that I could now do enough in the ring not to look like a complete amateur. And if I messed up once or twice, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. There was no way the organization was going to stick me into one of their bigger shows on my first night. I figured before I got a break I would have to prove myself, slowly climb the ladder like I had in the SAPW.

It wasn’t until I walked down the runway and past the aisles of fans that I realized I had been wrong. Up to that point, I considered a large crowd to be anywhere between one hundred and two hundred people. That night there were seventeen thousand fans in attendance. I had never dreamed of performing in front of so many people, and it made me realize the popularity of the UWF. Although they had only been around a couple of years, they were selling out forty-thousand-seat arenas. The submission wrestling stuff was still new, but the whole country was going crazy for it.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous in the least. I had worked out on several occasions with my opponent, Yoji Anjo, and I knew that he was a good practitioner. I wasn’t going to go in there and try to take his head off with a punch or kick, and he wasn’t going to break my leg with a submission hold. If he caught me in a hold, I was going to fight it, sell it, and then slowly work my way to the ropes so I could get an escape. We were going to go at it, turn on the juice, but we weren’t going to hurt each other.

It was my most memorable fight, even though it wasn’t a real fight. I was young and green; yet the match flowed surprisingly well. I let Anjo beat on me with punches and kicks, and I wouldn’t sell his strikes unless they landed. A few of the shots that he hit me with probably would have knocked many people out, but I have a hard head. I purposely took them to the face and jaw because I wanted this match to be the best match ever. And we went wild in the ring. Every time we got a reversal or a rope escape, the crowd would boom out with their “Oooos” and “Aaaas.” Let me tell you, with seventeen thousand people in attendance, those were some loud “Oooos” and “Aaaas.” I could feel them in my chest, and it filled me with a sense of accomplishment.

That satisfaction continued to grow when I won the bout and got my hand hefted into the air. It was the first time I had done anything like this, the first time I had competed in the UWF, but the crowd started chanting my name. I looked out into the rows of seats for the first time since I climbed into the ring, and I could see seventeen thousand faces staring at me, praising me for what I had just done. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be.

“This is awesome,” I muttered under my breath.

After the match, people came up to me right and left. They all wondered if I was OK. The UWF wasn’t like WWF—everyone thought it was real. They all thought I had been knocked out a couple times during the match, and they wanted to know if I was going to the hospital. Still selling it, of course, I told them I was probably just going back to my hotel to get some rest. If I didn’t feel better in the morning, then maybe I would go to the hospital.

In addition to making an impression with the fans, I also made an impression with the promoters. A month after my first match, they gave me a match with Funaki, my instructor. He was the king of the hill when it came to professional wrestling in Japan, and he was also the best submission wrestler out there. When we stepped into the ring together, it was a knock-down, drag-out, grappling match. We pushed each other to the limit for twelve minutes straight. It had already been determined that he was going to win the match, but when he tried to pick me up and slam me down for the finish, he toppled over because he was totally out of gas. Despite the anticlimactic ending, the fans appreciated how we had laid everything on the line. Even though I had lost, that fight brought me to instant stardom over in Japan.

Never had I been so fulfilled in life. I was in the gym every day, learning countless ways to defeat my opponents with submission holds. I was making good money, $1,200 a bout, which was a huge step up from what I was used to. And I started to fall in love with Japan. The food began to taste better, and although everything was just as cramped as it had been on my first visit, I seemed to fit in fine wherever I went. I had finally found the niche I had been looking for in my life. It seemed too good to be true, and then I realized that it was. Not long after my fight with Funaki, the UWF broke up.

I guess they were having trouble in the head office. Several of the better-known wrestlers started their own spin-off companies. There was the UWFI, RINGS, and Fujiwara-Gumi, which was run by Yoshiaki Fujiwara. I had gotten pretty popular after my match with Funaki, and each of the organizations wanted me to go with them. I liked them all, and I would have been happy working for any one of them, but I decided to go with Fujiwara-Gumi because Fujiwara was friends with Sammy Saranaka, and Saranaka’s family had given me my start. I also wanted to go where Funaki went. I was loyal to him because he was my teacher, but I also knew that he would push for more realistic bouts.

The day I signed the contract with Fujiwara, Saranaka came into my hotel room and dumped thirty thousand dollars onto my bed. The bills were bundled into ten-thousand-dollar stacks, and there were three stacks! I had never seen so much money at one time in my life. I thought I was rich. I was rich; at least for a little while. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money to have sitting in front of you, but it’s not a lot of money when you have to ration it out for a whole year. Six months later it was all gone, and I still had another six months on my contract. Yeah, I learned a lesson with that one.

At the time, however, I couldn’t have been happier. I would stay in Japan for a month and wrestle all day, every day. I became a human sponge, absorbing techniques from everyone. Sometimes I stayed in a hotel, other times I’d sleep in the dojo. Then I’d do a match and fly back home for a month. A month later, I’d fly back to Japan, do another match, and then stay until my next match. It was a pretty good system—I got to learn the art of submission fighting as well as see my family.

In just a matter of months, once Fujiwara brought his company up, I was the top dog in Japan. There were Ken Shamrock T-shirts and Ken Shamrock phone cards. I was doing so well the organization started to bring in other foreigners to try to see if they could have the same success. I remember one time Saranaka brought over Dwayne Kowalski, a Greco-Roman wrestler on the U.S. Olympic Team. We were going to do a match together, so we got together in the dojo to work out the details. He was a phenomenal athlete, accustomed to manhandling everyone on the mat, so when it came down to deciding who was going to win our match, he made it clear that he didn’t want to “put me over,” which meant that he didn’t want to let me win.

I knew exactly where he was coming from. He was just like me in that he hated to lose. It wasn’t going to be a real loss, but the people in the audience weren’t going to know that. If it started to get around in the amateur wrestling world that a professional wrestler had beaten him, he would never hear the end of it. And that’s what he considered me, a professional wrestler. He had never before done submission wrestling, and I didn’t feel he took it all that seriously. After all, he was a world-class Greco-Roman wrestler.

Kowalski didn’t want to lose, nor did I want to lose. As we were trying to work out this detail, Saranaka came up with a solution. He suggested that we both climb into the ring and fight for real right there and then.

“Whoever wins goes over,” Saranaka said, meaning whoever won the real fight would also get to win the fake one.

Kowalski was all for it. He wasn’t gloating like he had already won, but I could tell that he was confident. He didn’t think anyone could touch him on the wrestling mat.

“If you feel something painful, tap,” Sammy told him, already knowing what the outcome would be.

With a nod of his head, Kowalski assumed his fighting stance in the ring. The moment we got the go-ahead to begin from Saranaka, I shot in on his legs, took him to the ground, and caught him in a heel hook. I forced him to tap.

“What the hell was that?” he asked, truly perplexed.

“A heel hook,” I said.

“Well, I wasn’t ready. I’ve been doing Greco, no one has shot in on me for years.”

I agreed to give him another shot, so we climbed back into the ring. This time it took me twenty seconds to get him to the ground and catch him in a heel hook, and once I had it sunk, I put it on nice and tight just to let him know that I could break his leg. He still couldn’t believe it, but he didn’t demand another go. And when we stepped into the ring in front of twenty thousand fans a week later, he put me over without complaint. It went fairly well, too. Then, a short time after the match, I started coaching him in submission wrestling.

I was becoming an animal in the gym, learning hundreds of different ways to make an opponent scream in pain. I could catch my opponents all the time during practice, but I knew that was different than catching an opponent in a real fight. When two people are going at it with bad intentions, adrenaline is flowing; there’s more at stake. A hold that worked in training might not have the same effect when your opponent’s pride is riding on the line. I was Fujiwara’s biggest star, wrestling in front of twenty-thousand people each month, but it was getting harder and harder for me to put my fellow wrestlers over. I didn’t want to pull my punches and kicks. I didn’t want to release my submission holds once I had them sunk. I wanted to test out my newfound skills in actual battle.

Six months into my new career, I finally got that chance. At the time, there was a heated feud going on between the Japanese submission wrestlers and the Muay Thai kickboxers. For the past twenty years, the kickboxers had been widely regarded as the toughest fighters around; no one could touch them, but when the UWF had been in full swing, they claimed that their grapplers were tougher. The feud had never been resolved, so Fujiwara decided to give his organization a boost by capitalizing on the controversy. He called out Don Nakaya Nielson, the middleweight Muay Thai champion. Although Nakaya Nielson lived in Hawaii, he trained in Japan and was extremely popular. The bout was supposed to be worked, everything predetermined, but a few minutes into the bout, Nakaya Nielson threw a huge knee to Fujiwara’s face and split him open.

Afterward, Fujiwara decided to settle the feud for real. There weren’t, however, many submission wrestlers at the time that were willing to step into the ring with a Muay Thai kickboxer, especially one as experienced as Nakaya Nielson. They were hesitant because of all those knee and elbow strikes. There had never been a mixed martial arts competition before, at least not in Japan, so they didn’t know how they would fare. They knew that submission wrestling was effective, they just didn’t know how effective.

I had high expectations, so when Fujiwara asked me if I would fight with him, I said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll do the fight.” In addition to wanting to test my skills, I also wanted to get revenge for what Nakaya Nielson had done to Fujiwara.

The fight was put together, and then the press started. Nakaya Nielson talked all kinds of trash. He kept saying how he hoped that I had good insurance because when he was through with me, I was going to need it. He kept saying how he was going to put me in the hospital, over and over and over. The guy was like a broken record, and people were listening to what he had to say. He had been fighting a long, long time, and he was a trash-talking expert.

I, on the other hand, was still relatively green. I was young, and trash talking was definitely not my strong suit. I kept thinking, “What’s with all the hostility, I don’t even know this guy.” So when the press came by asking what I thought about my opponent’s comments, I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I guess we will find out in the ring.”

I still hadn’t worked on any standup fighting at that point. Well, that’s not entirely true. Back when I was fighting in the Toughman competitions on the East Coast, I had enrolled at a boxing gym and started taking lessons. My training had lasted a total of two weeks. They wanted me to reposition my stance, hold my hands in a different way. I was a brawler, and it worked for me. I figured that if I started changing everything I did, my game might fly right out the window.

I didn’t feel the same way when training to fight Nakaya Nielson. I had started to realize the importance of learning how to strike efficiently and effectively, and I would get better and better at it as I got more heavily involved in MMA competition, but at the time I didn’t feel like it made all that much difference. I knew Nakaya Nielson understood nothing about fighting on the ground, and once I brought him down into my world, he would be little more than putty in my hands. If he could keep the fight standing, I might be in trouble, but I doubted very highly that he would be able to do that. This was back in the days when you were either a striker or a grappler, and although competitors from both disciplines had yet to converge in a ring to see how the different styles mixed, I had a hard time seeing how Nakaya Nielson would keep me from taking him to the ground with little to no takedown defense. I had managed to take Kowalski to the ground, and he had one of the best takedown defenses in the world. Nakaya Nielson might be able to catch me with a punch or a knee on my way in, but I had been hit with a lot of punches and knees. If he wanted to knock me out, he would have to hit me with more than one shot.

Because of my confidence, excitement was the only thing that I felt when I climbed into the ring with Don Nakaya Nielson on the night of the fight. Forty thousand fight fans had turned up to watch this first-of-its-kind battle, and it sent a chill down my spine. There was no fear, no hesitation. This was the moment I had been waiting for, a chance to test my skills in combat. A chance to prove myself in front of thousands of people. And to top it all off, I got to prove myself against a guy who’d gotten on my bad side by talking a whole bunch of trash.

We circled each other in the center of the ring for a moment, and when he didn’t go for anything, I threw a couple of jabs as bait. They were not good jabs, and I think they elevated Nakaya Nielson’s confidence because he threw a powerful kick. Before the kick had a chance to land, however, I dropped low and shot for his legs, dumping him hard to his back.

In a matter of seconds I had isolated one of his arms and slapped on a key lock, which put pressure on his elbow and shoulder. Nakaya Nielson had two reactions—he began screaming in pain and furiously slapping his gloved hand against my back. He was trying to tap in submission, let the referee know that he was done fighting, but there was some confusion. Nakaya Nielson had wanted a Muay Thai kickboxing referee to be the other man in the ring with us so the fight would lean in his favor. But there was a downside to that, as Nakaya Nielson was now learning. The referee had no idea what a submission hold was. He thought Nakaya Nielson was trying to punch me in the back. He thought Nakaya Nielson was screaming out of anger. Since the referee wasn’t stopping the bout, I kept cranking on the hold. I could hear the tendons and gristle in Nakaya Nielson’s arm and shoulder crackling, and still I cranked on the hold. Nakaya Nielson was screaming really loud by this point, “AAAaaaaaaa,” and the referee was looking at him like, What? What does he have? What is he doing to you?

It took at least ten seconds for the referee to realize that his boy was in some serious pain and pull me off him. With Nakaya Nielson rolling around on the ground, cupping his mangled arm, I stood up and the crowd went nuts. Forty thousand people went absolutely nuts. There hadn’t been any highflying stunts or flashy strikes; yet they loved it. Right then I knew that mixed martial arts competition was going to be the sport of the future.

After that exciting bout, it was difficult to go back to pulling my punches and releasing my submission holds while in the ring. I loved professional wrestling, don’t get me wrong, but I loved reality combat even more. I had no idea what was going on over in Brazil, that they had been holding mixed martial arts tournaments for half a century. I thought we were breaking new ground by having fighters from different martial arts disciplines square off against each other, and I loved every minute of it. I loved it because in a real fight I was master of my own destiny.

Professional wrestling wasn’t so bad when the fans knew the bout was worked, but that wasn’t always the case. I remember one time Fujiwara wanted me to put him over in a worked shoot. Everyone would think the match was real, only I would lose. I had to pull my punches, and I couldn’t kick. I understood that’s the way the business worked, but I didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t want people thinking that I was getting my butt kicked when in fact I wasn’t. I gritted my teeth and bore it, but when Suzuki and Funaki came to me in secret and said that they were thinking of starting their own organization, one that was going to be more shoot and less work, I was all ears.

I was the biggest foreigner in Japan at the time, and they needed me in order to get their organization off the ground. It was a big risk to take. If I went with them and their organization failed, my professional wrestling career in Japan would most likely be done. Fujiwara wouldn’t have taken me back, and the other organizations probably wouldn’t have taken me in either. Despite what I had riding on the line, the decision didn’t take long to make. In addition to wanting to fight, I was also deeply loyal to Funaki. I wouldn’t have gotten where I am today without him. Fujiwara offered me a substantial raise to stay, but I didn’t take it. I had made up my mind—I was going to fight for a living.