Читать книгу Beyond the Lion's Den - Ken Shamrock - Страница 8

1

The Road to the Ring

I CLIMB INTO A STEEL CAGE AND FIGHT; that’s what I do for a living. Some people have a hard time with that. They don’t understand how I can slam an opponent to the ground, climb on top of him, and then beat him unconscious with punches, knees, and elbows. They don’t understand how I can give that same opponent a respectful hug or handshake when he wakes up. The explanation really isn’t that complicated. First of all, I’m a born athlete and competitor. I thrive off the thrill of battle, and when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, you won’t find any tougher battles than you do in the rings and cages of mixed martial arts competition. Second, the sport allows me to channel my rage into something positive, and in my eyes, that is nothing short of a miracle.

I didn’t begin this life on a very positive note. As one of the only white kids growing up in an all-black neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia, during the late 1960s, I found myself brawling in the schoolyard, brawling in the park, brawling all the neighborhood kids who wanted to drop kick me in the head and turn my pockets inside out. Just as fighting became a way of life, my family moved away from the ghetto and settled in Napa, a city in California’s wine country where young boys didn’t need to fight for their survival. I tried to be normal, but a switch had been flipped in my head and I couldn’t turn it off. I got in trouble at school and with the cops, so I ran away and lived in an abandoned car parked behind a convenience store. Then one night an older runaway tried to stab me in the face with a locked blade. While I was in the hospital getting stitched up, a couple of cops dropped by to haul me kicking and screaming down to juvenile hall. I was ten years old at that point. I spent six months locked up with seventeen-year-old men who’d done hard time in California Youth Authority. I fought, always fought, but most nights it was hard to sleep because of the lumps on my face and the blood draining down the back of my throat. When I got out, it was off to a string of group homes, each one worse than the last. So I spent some time on the street, and then I spent some more time in juvenile hall. I learned how my body could be used to hurt people to survive.

Eventually I landed in my adopted father’s group home, Bob Shamrock’s Group Home for Boys, and I found a home and people who cared about me. I built a life for myself, but all that rage was still bottled up, still searching for a way to escape. It haunted me for ten solid years, and it wasn’t until I stepped into a ring and engaged in battle—a battle that had no rules—that I finally found a release for all my anger and rage. I no longer had to get into scraps out in the street; I no longer wanted to.

I took the ball and ran, never looked back. It was the best decision I have ever made. Competing in mixed martial arts (MMA) competition has allowed me to walk through life proud of who I am and what I have accomplished. Without it, I don’t know what I would have done. But finding the path I was meant to travel didn’t happen overnight. Between the time that I left my adopted father’s group home and the time I had my first professional fight at twenty-seven, there were ten years of soul searching, ten years of jumping from one job to the next in hopes of finding my niche.

That long and winding road began with bouncing in bars at eighteen years of age. Although I was well below the legal age limit to work in the bar, it’s amazing what a reputation can do for you. I was already known as “One Punch Shamrock” by that point. It’s not that I went out looking for fights, but in the sunny small town of Susanville, California, fights came looking for you. This was especially true if you were one of the city slickers being raised in Bob Shamrock’s group home. A lot of our guys came from gangs in the city. They wore flannel shirts with only the top button fastened and strutted from place to place. Needless to say, the young cowboys in town didn’t like us invading their turf. They despised everything about us, and I guess I can’t really blame them. After all, we stole all their women.

So there were some fights between the local rednecks and us hoodlums. Actually, it would better be described as a war, and I happened to win a majority of the battles in that war. And when I wasn’t fighting cowboys, I was fighting anyone else who stepped up to me. I beat up this one kid who happened to be dating an ex-girlfriend of mine. He was pissed off about something or other, and he skipped a beer bottle across the hood of my father’s car, a mint ’57 Eldorado. If you knew my father, you’d know how much he loves his cars. I happened to be the caretaker of that car for the day, so my anger went through the roof. I hit the kid so hard I literally knocked him out of his shoes. Another time, a couple buddies and I were sitting in a parking lot when a group of college baseball players came up and accused us of throwing something at their car. We hadn’t thrown anything at their car, so when they pressed the issue, I solved the matter with my fists. Even when I broke my neck on the high school wrestling mats and had a god-awful halo bolted to my head, I was still scrapping at the drop of a dime. As I already mentioned, something had snapped in my mind at a very young age and I couldn’t seem to turn it off.

My name started getting around. By the time I graduated from high school, people had heard about me two hours in every direction. It’s probably not something I should have been proud of, but I was. I wasn’t the best in school, and I didn’t know where I was headed or how long it would take to get there. My fists were something to count on, something that made me stand out. And besides, my reputation as a brawler got me a job bouncing in a bar three years before the law allowed.

At first sweeping the floor with barroom drunks was only a way to pay the bills. I was going to be a professional football player, end of story. I had done well on the high school field, and I wanted to jump right to the pros. When I realized that achieving such a goal was highly unlikely, I enrolled at Shasta Community College near my home to play ball, even though school was the last place I wanted to be. I played inside linebacker for two years, but because I had neglected to sit through even a few of my classes, I didn’t earn enough credit to go on to a university. Just as I was beginning to wonder if I might never fulfill my dream of playing with the pros, I got drafted by the Sacramento Bulldogs. It was a semipro team, but it seemed to me like I was halfway there.

It didn’t take long for me to realize the semipro ball was not even close to being in the same league as professional football. It was basically just a bunch of weekend warriors who got together to practice a couple of times a week, and the paychecks were so minimal they hardly put food on the table. So it was back to the bars, only now I was working in some of the big clubs over in Reno, which was just an hour or so drive from my home. I wasn’t all that happy about where I was or what I was doing. I was searching for something exciting, something to get my blood pumping, and then I heard about this Toughman competition they were having over in Redding, California. I was still bouncing in a couple of clubs in Redding, and since it wouldn’t be that far of a drive, I thought I would enter the tournament and see what it was all about.

Ihad no official fight training at that point, just what I had learned on the street. I didn’t have a flawless right cross or a string of savage combinations tucked away in my arsenal. But I did have several advantages over my opponents. First, I was strong. I had always been strong, and having fought for so long in the street, I knew how to use that strength to my advantage. Second, I had no fear. You would think that climbing into a ring in front of hundreds of people and putting your pride on the line would make a twenty-year-old kid nervous, but it didn’t. I felt just as comfortable in the ring as I did walking down the street. No sweaty palms, no cotton mouth. Nothing but a chest full of rage.

Although my first two competitors outweighed me by a good forty pounds or more, I ran right through them. I broke one guy’s ribs and knocked a couple of teeth out of the other one. When I stepped into the ring for the final match, my opponent never showed up. He claimed to be injured or something and skipped out the back door.

I got my hand raised and a nice wad of cash in my pocket. I would have competed in future events, but soon after my victory the city of Redding shut Toughman down. I guess at one of the events a whole slew of Hell’s Angels turned up to support their boy in the tournament, and when their boy lost a controversial decision, they incited a full-fledged riot. So, once again, it was back to the bars.

I tried to pull in cash wherever I could. I was working at the Premier Club in Reno, and every so often a group of male exotic dancers would come to the club to entertain the local women. I don’t know how it happened, but one night when these dancers were in town, a couple of the women in the audience talked me into putting down my flashlight, hopping up on stage, and then taking off my clothes. I did pretty good, made a nice wad of one-dollar bills, so I decided to stick with it. From that point on, every time the dancers rolled into town, I’d hop up on stage. As you’ve probably guessed, I was desperate for money.

I was going nowhere in a hurry. In addition to pealing my clothes off to make a couple of extra bucks, I was also beginning to party more and more. I’d stay out too late, pour down too many beers, get into too many fights, and then wake up the next afternoon and start all over again. I still had the goal of becoming a professional football player, but I realized if I waited around for that to happen I might be too fat or drunk to play. What I needed was something to identify with, a job that could make me feel a part of something. I didn’t want to be sitting behind a desk or pumping insecticide under somebody’s house. I needed a job that would make me feel proud, so I decided to join the Marine Corps.

When I broke the news to my father, he was irate. He’d spent nearly a decade trying to get rid of my anger. He’d spent countless hours by my side when I felt as if I were going to explode with rage. He’d gotten me into football and wrestling, drove me to every game. After all those years getting me to a point where I could function in society and live the life of a normal human being, he feared that the Marine Corps was going to revert me back to the bundle of rage I had been when the state dumped me on his doorstep.

“I don’t want you to become a professional killer!” he shouted and then threw up his hands and stormed off.

He didn’t talk to me for a week, but that didn’t stop me from following through with my plans. In the summer of 1984 I went down to Camp Pendleton in San Diego to begin my basic training. I had heard that Marine boot camp was weeks and weeks of living hell, but I didn’t find it all that hard. I blew through the physical training, which was their primary tool for breaking young soldiers down. What I did find hard, however, was not punching my superiors every time they got in my face. I mean, these guys got right up in my face, their spit pelting me in the eyes. And they were always barking orders—get down and give me twenty push-ups! Get down and give me a hundred sit-ups! I don’t think any of them knew just how close they were to getting their jaw broken.

But I guess I did OK keeping my cool because they made me platoon leader. They placed my bunk up at the head of the barracks so I could watch over the sixty other recruits. At first I thought being in a position of authority was great because it meant that I was turning out to be a good soldier, but then came the late-night inspections. If someone in the barracks didn’t shine their boots, the sergeant would flip my bed upside down. If someone forgot to make his bed, the sergeant would get in my face and let the spit fly. If someone forgot to put away his toothbrush, the sergeant made me do a hundred push-ups. There were over sixty men in that barrack, and at least one of them forgot to do something every single night.

I got my aggression out when we did hand-to-hand combat training. Instead of letting us beat on each other with our fists and feet, they gave us long sticks padded with foam and told us to go to town. As it turned out, I was just as talented with a pugil stick as I was with punches. I was knocking out guys left and right. I was shaping up to be quite a fine soldier, and my sergeants recognized that. They treated me different than most of the others. I was becoming somewhat of their poster boy, and I liked it.

Five weeks in, I knew that I was going to be a lifer. Just like my father expected, all that anger I had worked so hard to subdue came rushing back to the surface. I was already acquiring the mind-set that would allow me to kill. I wouldn’t have necessarily liked some of the things that the Marine Corps would have made me do, but I would have been good at it. They could have dropped me in a swamp in some third world country, and I would have done my best to kill everyone in that swamp. I might not have made it out alive, but I would have died with honor. That’s what my father had worried about. He knew me better than anyone, better than I knew myself sometimes. He understood the way I thought, the strange code that I lived by. He knew that the Marine Corps would turn me into a professional killer, and he was right.

Fortunately I didn’t have the option of taking that road. Six weeks into my training, the Navy discovered that I had broken my neck in high school. I had given that bit of news to my recruiting officer, and he hadn’t cared. Apparently, the Navy did. They wanted me out, but the Marine Corps didn’t want to kick me out. Here they had this young soldier who was strong, could fight like a banshee, and was down for whatever they threw his way. It became quite a little battle to decide my fate. The Navy called my father to come down and pick me up, but he ended up staying in San Diego for two weeks because neither side was willing to budge. Eventually, however, the Navy won.

I was so devastated when I heard the news that I actually got a little teary-eyed. Some of my drill sergeants saw this, and they got in my face. As a kid, I had gotten teary-eyed often when someone got in my face, and I learned that the only way to keep my eyes from spilling over was to start throwing punches. And it worked wonders—the moment my first punch landed, my eyes would instantly dry. That was part of the reason why I’d gotten into so many fights. I hadn’t had to worry about that in a long, long time, but now I found myself in a little bit of a pickle. I wasn’t about to let my sergeants see me cry, so I only had one option. I went crazy. I started by flipping over a desk, and then I went after everyone in the room. My drill sergeants had seen what I could do with a pugil stick, and none of them wanted to find out what I could do with my fists. They all went running out of the barracks and that was the end of my military career.

I was back to square one. I had no money, no job, and no direction. I began fighting in the nightclubs, on the street, anywhere. If someone was picking on someone I was with or someone I even vaguely knew, I would always get in the middle and be the first one to throw a blow. It didn’t matter if that someone wanted to settle his own matters, I beat him to the punch. If a fight was going to happen, I wanted to be the one in the thick of battle. It was a temporary release for my pent-up frustrations, but I knew that if I kept it up, it was only a matter of time before I found myself locked behind bars. I needed to find a direction, and I needed to find it quick.

Not long after I got out of the military, I remember sitting next to the fireplace in my father’s home, my head sunk down into my hands. My father was talking to me, trying to cheer me up, but I was pretty down in the dumps. Then he said seven words that struck a cord. He said, “You ought to be a professional wrestler.”

I lifted my head out of my hands, thought about it.

“I don’t know, pop, professional wrestling is fake.”

My father took offense to that. It’s not what I said, but rather how I said it. He’d been watching men fly from the top ropes since he was a kid. Back in the fifties, most households only had one television. My father, Bob, used to flip to the station that had pro wrestling. His father would then flip to a different channel, calling pro wrestling stupid and fake. My father would then flip the channel back, putting up a fight. He knew it was fake then, and he knew it was fake now. But that didn’t stop him from loving the hell out of it.

I hadn’t watched much professional wrestling at that point, and the little I had seen didn’t seem all that appealing. But when my father told me how much money a professional wrestler could make, my ears perked up real quick. We got to talking about the sport, and by the end of our conversation I decided to give it a whirl. After all, how hard could fake wrestling be? If it could put some change in my pockets, I was all for it.

My father did some research and learned that “Mad Dog” Buzz Sawyer had a school down in Sacramento, which was just a couple-hour drive from our house in Susanville. I learned that Sawyer had been a big-time wrestler back when Rick Flare was really young. In 1982, he took fourth place in PWI’s “Most Hated” Poll, and in 1983 he was beat out only by Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan in the “Inspirational Wrestler of the Year” Poll. So my father was pretty jazzed about the opportunity for me to learn from him. I didn’t expect much, and I expected even less when I walked through the doors of his school. There wasn’t a big fancy ring like you see on TV, just a bunch of grungy mats spread out on the floor. There were no punching bags or weight-lifting equipment or jump ropes. I wasn’t quite sure what a pro-wrestling gym should be equipped with, but whatever that was, this gym certainly didn’t have it.

Then I met Buzz Sawyer the man, and things started to perk up a little bit. He was a big guy, pushing upwards of 260 pounds, and I learned that he was a NCAA champion at the time, which meant that he could also do the real wrestling. So after a little talking, my father paid the $250 tryout fee, and Buzz and I climbed onto the mats. I was expecting that he would grab me in some sort of headlock and then grunt and groan as if he were really putting it on. Then we would switch rolls and I would get to see how well I could grunt and groan. That didn’t happen. What did happen was Buzz came at me with power and speed, trying to put the hurt on young Kenneth. As I have already mentioned, I hadn’t seen much professional wrestling, but I had seen enough to know this certainly wasn’t it. Buzz wanted to wrestle for real, which suited me just fine.

At the time I had no idea that Buzz had a scam going on, and that I was intended to be the next victim of this scam. I guess he’d advertised his school all over the place, seeking out men young and old who’d always dreamed of learning how to fly off the top ropes from a real-deal guy like Buzz. I don’t know what Buzz promised them when they called for further information, but he managed to get a lot of guys to show up. He’d collect their $250 nonrefundable tryout free at the door and then send them onto the grungy mats he had thrown down on the floor. Instead of showing them classic wrestling moves, Buzz twisted and wrenched on their limbs for the next thirty minutes straight. He slapped on holds that you would never ever see in a professional wrestling match, holds that caused a great deal of pain. By the time he was through, the guys who had come with such high hopes wanted nothing more to do with professional wrestling. They walked out the door without the slightest complaint about their $250 and were never seen again.

When I climbed onto the mats with good old Buzz, he thought I was just another one of those guys. But a few minutes after we put our paws on each other, he realized I wasn’t. I hadn’t wrestled since high school, and I only weighed 215 pounds or so, but I made Buzz pay. If what we had been doing was actually professional wrestling, then I think Buzz would have thrown in the towel right then and there. I worked him over pretty damn good.

His scam had come back to bite him in the ass, but being the man that he was, he wasn’t about to give it up. He let me keep my $250, and he said that I had passed the tryout and was now a part of his school. I knew something fishy was going on, but I just thought that was the way the business worked. You had to prove that you were tough before anyone was going to hand over any secrets. So I came back the following week.

This time, however, I wasn’t alone. There were several other guys lined up around the mats, all with $250 in their hands. Buzz collected their money, and then he told them to climb onto the mats with me to get their introduction to the world of professional wrestling. If they could pass the tryout, then they were in.

I hadn’t learned a single professional wrestling move, so I did what I knew how to do, which was wrestle for real. The first guy I went up against weighed nearly 270 pounds. He was a college football player who looked meaner than hell. With all the other candidates standing around watching, I shot for his legs, took him to the ground, and bloodied his nose with a solid cross-face. Then I let him back up and shot in again, throwing in another cross-face and causing more blood to spill. After working this big, burly football player over for ten minutes, all the other guys standing around watching approached Buzz and asked for their money back. Buzz, puffing out his barrel chest, kindly informed them that there were no refunds. They could climb onto the mat with me and attempt to pass the tryout or they could scuttle their butts straight out the door. They all scuttled their butts straight out the door.

At the end of the day, Buzz told me that I had done a great job, that we would begin my professional wrestling education as soon as he got his school off the ground. Then he handed me fifty bucks and told me to come back the following week.

I came back the following week, and then the week after that. I don’t know how Buzz did it, but each week there was a new group of men lined up around the grungy mats on the floor with $250 in their hands. They all had to fill out a questionnaire before they were allowed inside, and if they were going through college, working in nightclubs, or just scraping by, I would beat them up. But if they had good jobs or Buzz knew they had money tucked away, they would be taken on as “students.” I remember this one guy came in who had his own plumbing company, and Buzz convinced him to cough up a big chunk of cash up front to get him into the business. Eventually the guy started wondering why he wasn’t learning any moves or getting his career off the ground as promised, so Buzz brought him over to Japan to do a match with him. A couple minutes into the match, however, Buzz did a power bomb with him off the top rope and broke the guy’s neck.

After nearly a year helping line Buzz’s pocketbook, my father realized Buzz had no plans of coaching me on professional wrestling. I hadn’t yet stepped into a ring, and other than a few hammerlocks, I hadn’t learned a single professional wrestling hold. Although I still hadn’t the slightest clue what professional wrestling was all about, I had it set in my mind that I was going to be a professional wrestler.

While my father did some more research to find me a legitimate school, I lived up the Reno nightlife. Sometime during this partying spree I learned that the wrestling trials for the 1988 Olympics were coming to town, and I signed up. Then I forgot about it. A few weeks later I was coming home from the bars with a friend of mine, Lance Hill, and I remembered that the trials were that day. The sun was just coming up. Both of us were still drunk, and neither one of us had slept. We didn’t feel like calling it a night yet, so we headed over to the gymnasium to see how I could fare against the world’s best wrestlers after an all-night drinking binge.

A half hour later I was sitting on the wrestling mats with a bunch of other young men who had trained all their life for this moment. They had spent years bleeding, sweating, and pouring out their hearts every day during training just to get a shot at the Olympics. You could see the determination in their eyes as they taped their broken fingers and stretched their limbs in preparation for battle. And here I was, sitting off in a corner trying to conceal my booze breath and focus my vision. I had no idea it was going to be so serious. If I had, I might have taken the time to do a little research. I might have even discovered that freestyle wrestling, which is what they did in the Olympics, was nothing like high school wrestling, which was all I knew. I thought wrestling was wrestling.

I learned that that wasn’t the case when I climbed onto the mats with a muscle-bound kid from Syracuse, New York. We started going at it, and then all of a sudden he starts racking up points in three-increment blocks for doing these silly little turns. The more points that he racked up, the angrier I got. Eventually I realized that there was no way I was going to beat this kid on points, not with this lame scoring system they had in place, so I flipped him over to his back and pinned him. One, two, three—you’re out.

I walked off the mats still grumbling about the rules, but I decided to hang around and see if I could take it all the way. Not understanding how to score points, however, did me in. The coach came over to me before I left and gave me some words of encouragement. He said that if I’d trained in freestyle wrestling, as all the other boys had, I would have gone to the Olympics. He suggested that I get the training that I needed, and then come back in four years. I might have followed his suggestion if I hadn’t already made up my mind to do an entirely different kind of wrestling.

Not long after the trials, my father told me that he had discovered a legitimate school out in North Carolina run by Nelson Royal and Gene Anderson, two legitimate wrestlers. Both of us were excited, but we also knew it would require some pretty big sacrifices. I had married the previous year, and my son Ryan was on the way. My father would have to sell his home. But after getting together and talking about it, it sounded like the best move to make, even though everything about it was so uncertain. Just a few months before we were supposed to leave, I got an invitation from the San Diego Chargers to come down and try out for the team, but my sights were already locked. The family was headed to North Carolina.