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There’s a story from his childhood. It puts some things in perspective. This is before he’d ever won a fight, sanctioned or otherwise. Before he was a UFC champion and then a UFC outcast. Before he changed the game forever and then disappeared from it. Before he was even Frank Shamrock. Back when he was still Frank Alisio Juarez III.
At the time he’s, what, six years old? Maybe seven? It’s hard to know for sure because his brain simply blocked out a lot of his childhood. Call it self-preservation. Maybe it’s for the best.
The memory starts in the hall linen closet. Actually, no, it starts just outside the closet, with young Frank being ordered to remove all the sheets and towels and stack them neatly on the floor. He can never remember exactly why, and maybe it doesn’t matter. He knows he’s being punished for something. He knows, even as he’s careful to stack those sheets and towels just so, that he is creating the space he will be forced to occupy, digging his own little grave.
In, says his stepfather. And so in he goes, squeezing his little body onto a now empty shelf. Then the closet door closes and locks behind him. Darkness. That’s what he’ll remember later. Being alone in the darkness of that closet. So quiet at first. Just the sound of his own ragged breathing, his pulse thumping in his ears, the choked sound of a little boy trying not to cry.
And then from outside comes the sound of the TV switching on. The rest of the family — his mother, his stepfather, his sisters — all gathering in the living room to watch a movie together. A rare treat in that household. Family fun, being had quite intentionally now, almost theatrically. A performance not so much for the enjoyment of those outside the closet but for the added psychological torment of the one inside it.
Imagine that. Everyone else is out there, having fun. They’re being an actual family. And they’re doing it without you. On purpose. To hurt you. And it’s working.
As a metaphor, it works almost too well. Because now Frank Shamrock is 52, decades removed from his life as Frank Alisio Juarez III, that “fat little Mexican boy,” as he puts it, who got forced into the linen closet.
That boy grew up fast but in some ways not at all. He went to reform schools and foster homes. He went to juvenile detention facilities and Bob Shamrock’s sprawling ranch for wayward boys in Susanville, California. Later, when the state of California had deemed him man enough, he even went to prison.
Later still he went to Ken Shamrock’s Lion’s Den gym, a palace of pain and often pointless suffering carved out of the primordial ooze of what would eventually become the sport of mixed martial arts. That in turn brought him to the fighting rings of Japan, where, in the mid-1990s, he would sometimes fight as often as once a month in order to make a new name for himself, the one that would stick.
That was 30 years ago now. For a sport as young and still developing as MMA, it might as well be the Cretaceous Period. Ask fans streaming into a UFC event today to tell you who was the first UFC light heavyweight champion. Siddle up to some guy perched on a barstool at Buffalo Wild Wings watching a UFC pay-per-view and see if he can tell you who’s at the very beginning of the title lineage that eventually went through Chuck Liddell and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Jon Jones. Five-to-one odds he gets it wrong.
In fact, if you ask most UFC fans today to tell you who Frank Shamrock is, the answer you’re most likely to hear in response is: Do you mean Ken Shamrock?
Some of this, probably, is a mere function of time. Shamrock fought his last UFC bout in 1999, defeating Tito Ortiz in a UFC title fight that would later be hailed as a giant leap forward for MMA as a whole.
“That was a big, big fight for this sport,” says Scott Coker, the founder of the Strikeforce fight promotion that later went on to set a new North American MMA attendance record with an event headlined by Shamrock. “People now, maybe they don’t understand how huge that was. When he beat Tito, I don’t think there was anybody bigger in this sport.”
It was also, athletically and stylistically, a glimpse of MMA’s future. Shamrock wasn’t just cobbling together pieces of other fighting disciplines, as was the norm at the time. He was demonstrating a new, more complete form, something tailored to the sport and its rules and its environment.
“That was the first fight that showed what mixed martial arts could be,” says Javier Mendez, a former coach and training partner who now co-owns and operates the American Kickboxing Academy, which has churned out multiple UFC champions like Cain Velasquez and Daniel Cormier.
“Before that, it was always a wrestler who could punch a little bit or a kickboxer who’d learned some takedown defense,” Mendez says. “What you saw in that fight was pure mixed martial arts. And no one had ever seen that before in the UFC.”
But it’s not just that these accomplishments have been buried by the natural erosive properties of time. There’s also the fact of UFC hype machine. It has minimal incentive to shine a spotlight on the fighters of yesteryear even when they’re on the best of terms with the current leadership. For a fight promoter, there’s no money in the past, even the really good stuff. The money is in the very near future. The biggest fight is always the next one. That’s the one you can sell.
The exception to this rule is the UFC Hall of Fame. This is where the legends get their due in the sport of mixed martial arts. Every year the UFC announces new inductees and every summer, as part of the festivities leading up to the UFC’s big “international fight week” event in Las Vegas, some old-timer (who is usually not all that old and not even necessarily retired from fighting) gets to bask in a rare moment of pure appreciation.
This means something to fighters. Their kids get to come and see who dad used to be. Their old rivals are there, clapping them on the back. Fighters have been known to reach out to estranged family members, healing years-old wounds just for the occasion. Professional tough guys cry on stage at this thing every single year.
To its detractors, the UFC Hall of Fame is little more than a glorified employee of the month club. They’ll tell you that the top requirement for induction is being on good terms with UFC CEO Dana White. It’s true that there is no external voting committee to decide which fighters get in. No one outside the UFC gets a say. It is, in that sense, very much a company hall of fame. It also doesn’t even really exist in the usual physical sense. Yes, there are plaques on a wall in a Las Vegas building owned by the UFC, but you can’t walk in off the street and stroll down MMA memory lane the way you can at the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York.
But you know what else those detractors say? If the UFC Hall of Fame is truly legit — if it isn’t just an insider’s club operating at the dictatorial whims of the company president — then why isn’t Frank Shamrock in it?
Ask him now and Shamrock will tell you he doesn’t know why. Except, OK, yeah. He does know. He did and said some things. Some of those things were rooted in certain principles and others were just because he was pissed off. He did this to himself. Kind of. But not really. And you know what? He’s not sorry. Except for when he is.
Frank Shamrock was one of MMA's all-time greats. Will he be remembered as such?
Gabe Ginsberg via Getty Images
Hang around Frank for any length of time and you’ll hear some stories. They come from all over. They come from Corcoran prison (“I was 18 years old and Charles Manson was on the next yard over from me”) and they come from the intersecting worlds of pro fighting and organized crime in Japan (“I’d get brought into these meetings with guys in leather suit jackets where all I did was bow and then stand there while they talked — it was weird”).
He has a story about the time he used the Heimlich maneuver to save his dear friend Mauro Ranallo from choking at a restaurant, only to later receive a phone call from the son of Henry Heimlich, who seemed to be on a personal quest to prove that his father’s life’s work was an elaborate con job.
“He wasn’t calling me to say good job. He was calling to see if it was fake or not,” Shamrock says. “His sole purpose was to expose people who were using the Heimlich for attention. He basically thought his dad was a charlatan and he wanted to prove it.”
That story ends, as many of them do, with an attempt at media monetization. Once Shamrock understood that this was what the heir to the Heimlich name was doing with the legacy, he saw the potential for a docuseries. He called the people he knew from doing fight commentary on Showtime. He started setting up meetings. The deal fell apart, according to Shamrock, because Heimlich kept leaving voicemails for Showtime executives accusing Shamrock and Ranallo of faking the entire thing.
“I sent him a nice note just saying, 'Bro, I can’t do business with you.' That’s the weirdest s*** ever,” Shamrock says. “Then he invited me to lunch.”
He has darker stories too. From his childhood, growing up with an abusive stepfather who would sit him down at the kitchen table, hands hidden from sight, and make young Frank look him in the eye as he grilled the boy with seemingly random questions, one right after another.
“If I got it wrong, he’d slap me,” Shamrock says. “But you never knew what was the wrong answer and what was the right one. It was just constant anxiety and fear. It’s horrible. I was a little boy. It’s confusing enough being a kid.”
His stepfather was an angry man. He’d fought in the Vietnam War and then came home to work as an appliance repairmen. This, Shamrock says now with a surprising degree of empathy and understanding, was probably not his dream. Still, he met Shamrock’s mom and provided for her and her kids. He had a life that was hard, Shamrock says, “and it changed him drastically and he expressed that to me in his parenting.”
Sometimes his stepdad would make him kneel down and touch his nose to the wall as a punishment. He’d stay this way for what felt like hours, listening intently to every footfall in the house so he could hear when it was safe to sit back on his heels and take a rest. For a while his stepdad made him sleep in a shed in the backyard, which didn’t even seem all that strange to Shamrock until he started checking out books from the school library.
“I’m going, wait, none of the kids in these stories sleep in a shed.”
And then there are the stories about the early blood-and-guts days of MMA, the insanity of the Lion’s Den gym, where his adopted older brother Ken seemed to think the only way to learn to fight was to get beaten mercilessly until the technique and skill entered your body through osmosis. Or else you just got broken and quit. Either way.
“Just the dumbest s***,” Shamrock says. “One day he comes in, like, ‘We’re going to learn Muay Thai kicks today.’ I’m going, OK, great. Then he has you lift up your shin and he just kicks you in the leg repeatedly. The next day none of us can walk. I’m going, 'What were we supposed to learn from that?'”
The relationship between Ken Shamrock (pictured) and Frank Shamrock has long been a complicated one.
Josh Hedges via Getty Images
The story of how he ended up there is, toward the end of one of his many stays in various youth correctional facilities, he got essentially paroled into Bob Shamrock’s care. This meant living with a bunch of other boys, all of them troublemakers and youthful criminals of one type or another. Bob’s ranch sat on the rural edge of Northern California, closer to Reno than to Sacramento. Frank was glad to go. Couldn’t believe his luck, actually. Here was this older man, tough and serious but kind and honest. He’d always wanted boys of his own but couldn’t have them, so he started this ranch where he took young men who were on a perilous path and tried to do a little course-correction through discipline and labor and sports and love.
“He was the first man I ever met who wasn’t trying to rob me or molest me or beat me or do me wrong somehow,” Shamrock says. “Just a lovely man. A solid Christian man. He gave me more than any man has ever given me in my life just by being a good man and saying, 'This is what's right. This is how things work. Do this and you'll get this.' He wanted to help me and he loved me in his own way. It wasn’t until I was grown that I could see the love and the pain behind that journey for him.”
Not everything that happened at Bob Shamrock’s ranch was great. In his autobiography, “Uncaged: My Life As A Champion MMA Fighter,” Shamrock writes about being molested at the ranch when was 13. A counselor there had recognized his fondness for alcohol and would secretly provide it to him.
“After he got me drunk, he would suck me off,” Shamrock writes in the book. “I was only thirteen. I hadn’t really had sex with a girl yet. I had all kinds of ideas in my head about sex being wrong and dirty. … I knew that what he was doing to me was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I could have told somebody. But who would I tell? He was a trusted employee of the Shamrock ranch who had been there for years and I was some punk kid who was always in trouble.”
The lessons he learned at Shamrock’s ranch didn’t always stick the first time. Young Frank was still half-feral. He was discovering a self-destructive love of alcohol that would pop up throughout his life, threatening to unravel all that he’d painstakingly woven together. He tried to be good, he says, but it very much felt like an effort. He had to constantly talk himself out of stealing things. He was aware that most people didn’t need to have that argument with themselves on a nearly daily basis. It was an argument he didn’t always win.
So yeah, he stole a car. An impulsive thing. Walking home drunk and cold and there it was, keys in the ignition and the engine running. Some guy letting his car warm up as he got ready for work. He watched Frank jump in and speed off and called the cops right then. Frank didn’t get far.
There followed more juvenile detention, other group homes. Bob stayed in contact with him through it all. Frank robbed local businesses. He worked at Payless shoes and ran a scam from the register. He worked at Taco Bell and came back after closing one night to squeeze in through the drive-thru window and give himself a raise. He got married young, had a baby while still just a frightened teenager himself. When his crime spree finally got him sent to prison, Bob came to visit him. Nobody else did.
“When I got sent to Corcoran, he came in and told me the truth,” Shamrock says now. “He was like, ‘Son, you f***ed your life up. Look where you are.’ But he also was the one to tell me, ‘You can still turn it around.’ He didn’t leave. Just him believing in me? I mean, after everything I put him through, he still showed up and he was my dad. Nobody had ever done anything like that for me.”
Prison life had a certain simplicity about it. You do a good day, you get a day off your sentence. He avoided falling in with the gangs mostly because none would have him. He was too Mexican for the Whites but too much of a country kid for the other Mexicans. He worked out and read. He kept his head down. Some nights he’d lie there in his bed and listen to a guy up on a higher tier who would sing “Under The Boardwalk” with the voice of angel. It was beautiful. Guys would cry in their cells listening to this. 'What is a guy like that doing here,' he wondered. 'What am I?'
“Prison is easy because society has stripped away all your power, all your rights,” Shamrock says. “You are literally the most powerless person in the world. That’s why every person in there, their sole mission in life is to get some power. Any power. Power over the light switch, over the TV, something. Once you understand that, everything makes sense.”
Once he was finally released, it was Bob’s idea for him to train at the Lion’s Den. Ken Shamrock was nearly a decade older and he’d come through Bob’s ranch before Frank’s time. All Frank knew was that he’d been another messed up kid with a hard luck past who’d been reformed at the ranch and was now making it big as a pro wrestler or something.
Ken Shamrock's Lion's Den was a notoriously difficult training room in MMA's early days.
MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images via Getty Images
Bob Shamrock adopted them both, giving them the last name they would make famous. But at the time Ken resented Frank’s presence in his gym. He beat him bloody one of his first days there, Frank says. He put him in a series of inscrutable leg locks and then wrenched until his knee made worrisome popping sounds. Ken was a man who saw the world in shades of red.
“I never realized how f****** up Ken was until I got a little bit older,” says Shamrock. “He’d been through a lot, too. Nobody grows up eating out of trash cans and comes out all normal. Your brain develops differently. Having Ken as a teacher, I didn’t know at the time how insane a lot of this was.”
But being known as Ken Shamrock’s brother, even if it wasn’t a biological or even all that friendly of a bond, had certain advantages. Ken had gotten in on the ground floor as an early form of MMA took off in Japan. All the Lion’s Den guys had an in with the Pancrase organization, thanks to Ken. Frank fought nine times in 1995 alone. He’ll tell you now he had almost zero idea what he was doing at the time. He wasn’t alone.
“All of us were figuring it out as we went,” says Bas Rutten, who fought Frank three times in Pancrase and later retired as UFC heavyweight champion in 1999. “We learned in the fights. And we’d find someone who knew the parts [of the sport] we didn’t and we’d train with them.
"In those days in Pancrase, you’d fight and they’d say, ‘What are you doing next weekend?’ Nothing, might as well fight again. Frank and I, if we weren’t fighting each other that week, we’d party together. We partied together a lot.”
As the UFC struggled for a foothold back in North America, Shamrock saw an opportunity for stardom. He won the first iteration of what would later come to be known as the UFC light heavyweight title when he submitted Olympic gold medalist wrestler Kevin Jackson in 1997. (It still irks him that Jackson stormed off without shaking his hand after.) He defended the title three times the next year, including a gruesome slam knockout of former Soviet special forces soldier Igor Zinoviev that saw Shamrock nearly drive Zinoviev through the mat, snapping his collarbone and ending his fight career in just 22 seconds.
But by 1999, Shamrock had started to suspect there might be a brighter future for him outside the cage. He had the physique, the charisma, the looks. Maybe he could be a movie star. Or at least TV. He signed a new contract with the UFC, he says, but insisted on a stipulation that would nullify the contract if he ever publicly announced his retirement from the sport.
“They never let anybody do that again,” he says. “I was the only one.”
He’d already decided that he would fight just once more in the UFC, and it was only because he wanted to prove that he could beat Tito Ortiz.
At the time, Ortiz was a star in the making for a fledgling organization that sorely needed one. He was young and brash and cocky. He’d created a recognizable visual brand, with his bleached blonde hair and his flame-embroidered shorts. He had this feud going with the Lion’s Den guys. He’d beat them in the cage and then put on a taunting T-shirt, one that looked like a comically custom job from the local shopping mall. These shirts delivered uplifting messages such as “I just f****** your a**.” Without fail, they sent Ken into frothing rages from the corner.
His brother didn’t want him to fight Ortiz, Frank says now. (Ken Shamrock did not respond to requests for comment.) Neither did his adopted father, Bob. They all thought he’d lose and thus diminish the family name. Ortiz was considerably bigger and stronger. He’d beaten two of Ken’s guys already. It felt to Frank like Ken and Bob were teaming up against him, trying to keep him in his place as the lesser Shamrock. Just the fact that they didn’t want him to do the fight — didn’t think he could win the fight — convinced Frank that he simply had to.
“If you look at the mechanics of it, he’s 35 pounds heavier than me, four inches taller. He’s literally the next size up,” Shamrock says. “So I had to define the system that would beat him. I hired [NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver] Jerry Rice’s track and field coach. First time I’d ever put on cleats and run on grass. I built my conditioning, my body for this fight. Because Tito, he didn’t know s*** back then. I knew I could beat him if I could withstand, physically, the punishment that a bigger guy could dish out. So I built everything around speed, movement, biomechanics. It was designed to make him tired and take his heart. And it worked.”
The fight would end up as Shamrock’s masterpiece. He demonstrated ways of working from his back and off the chainlink fence of the cage that would become staples of MMA. He blended the stand-up game and the ground game into one seamless style, heralding a coming age of MMA as a sport unto itself rather than just an amalgamation of other parts.
Then he did exactly what he’d always planned to do. He retired publicly. He shredded that UFC contract. A possibly apocryphal story from the time claimed that he even gave back his title belt, telling UFC executives to call him when they thought they had someone who could beat him. Legend has it that only later did they realize he’d engraved his initials into the belt like a kid writing his name in wet cement. (Shamrock is still cagey on the veracity of this tale. Perhaps it’s simply too good to refute.)
Shamrock was never seen again in the UFC. Ortiz would later win the title he’d vacated and become a genuine star for the organization. Shamrock went on to help launch the Strikeforce promotion, which held the first sanctioned MMA event in California in 2006, drawing a record 18,265 people (Shamrock can still recite the figure from memory) for an event in which Shamrock knocked out Bay Area rival Cesar Gracie in just 20 seconds.
During this time away, Shamrock worked in one capacity or another for almost every UFC rival that popped up, from Strikeforce to EliteXC to the IFL. Along the way he cast just about every aspersion he could think of on the UFC. His comments on Dana White were often pointed and personal. He couldn’t help himself. Shamrock always knew how to grab a headline. It felt natural for him.
April 11, 2009: Frank Shamrock battles Nick Diaz at a sell-out Strikeforce show in San Jose.
Jon P. Kopaloff via Getty Images
Lately though, he’s been wondering. The dust has pretty much settled in the battle for MMA supremacy. The UFC has thoroughly and completely won. Shamrock could never quite bring himself to play nice. The rebellious urge to break every rule just to prove he has no master still sizzles within. That kid who couldn’t trust love or kindness, who saw every boundary as a cage, he’s still in there. You can see it in his face still, that impish smile, like he knows you’ll be mad at him for what he’s about to do but also knows you like him too much not to forgive him. It’s just that now he has the years and maturity to understand what it’s cost him, and what it continues to cost him.
“I chose the wrong team,” he says. “I chose the wrong team, but I still think I did it for the right reasons. These guys didn’t know martial arts and they didn’t care about people. I didn’t want to be in business with people like that.”
And so he isn’t. He isn’t anywhere in it or near it. When the UFC tells its version of the past, which to many fans is the only version, he’s left out of it.
All these years later. Still locked away on his own. Listening through the door as everyone has fun without him. And it still hurts.
Feb. 8, 2011: Frank Shamrock attends a Strikeforce World Grand Prix fan day in New York City.
Henry S. Dziekan III via Getty Images
The whole thing with the UFC Hall of Fame, it didn’t have to be like this. Back in 2017, Shamrock was approached by Ant Evans (now an Uncrowned contributor), who was then a UFC employee wearing many hats from media relations to content acquisition. The UFC Hall of Fame was Evans’ baby, in a sense. He cared deeply about it, and about combatting its perception as an employee of the month club. He wanted Shamrock in there, he told White. And, after some pleading and convincing, he got the green light.
The plan, according to Evans, was to induct Shamrock vs. Ortiz into the “fight wing” of the UFC Hall of Fame. They would all celebrate it together as “the fight of the ‘90s,” and if that went well then the next year or the year after they would induct Shamrock outright as a full-fledged UFC Hall of Famer. After reaching out through various intermediaries, Evans got Shamrock on the phone to discuss it.
“I explained it and kind of said, 'Look, I know there’s no trust on either side here,'” Evans says. “A lot of bad things have been said on both sides. But we wanted to induct this fight and talk about how it was the first fight that showed what MMA would become in the 21st century and all that. It was four or five phone calls before he said yes. He told me he’d consulted his family, he’d consulted Bas Rutten, who’d already gone in. He actually told me he consulted a priest and I started laughing, and then I realized he wasn’t joking.”
But after Shamrock agreed, Evans says, then came the demands. More tickets to the induction ceremony. Tickets to the UFC event that weekend. The rights to his own fight footage, so he could show his clips at his various corporate speaking gigs. Evans kept saying yes. Then, he says, Shamrock ghosted him.
“I called, texted, got nothing,” Evans says. “I’m sending him press releases for his approval. 'How about this quote in the announcement? How do you want to be introduced? Who do you want to come speak at the ceremony?' We already had a video package all worked up. I still have it on my computer, it’s f***ing fantastic. Just nothing from him. Then I get a call from one of the senior [UFC] execs saying, ‘Frank is doing interviews where he’s just motherf***ing the UFC, and Dana in particular.’ I was like, well, he’s done that for years. Then he said, ‘No, this was yesterday.’”
The combination of Shamrock’s outward hostility to the UFC and his radio silence in communications with Evans scuttled plans for the induction ceremony. According to Evans, the UFC couldn’t trust that Shamrock would even show up. And if he did, what would he say?
Ask Shamrock about this now and you might get conflicting answers. At times he insists the UFC Hall of Fame doesn’t matter to him and he doesn’t care if he ever gets in. Other times, he wishes he could do this part over.
“In truth, I regret that,” Shamrock tells me at one point. “I think I was going through a divorce at the time and just having some issues emotionally.”
Shamrock's early nemesis, Tito Ortiz, was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2012.
Al Powers via Getty Images
There’s also something else, and he’s still not entirely sure what to do with this part. Lately, Shamrock has been starting to worry about his brain. Something is off, he says. He’s forgetful, losing his keys, his phone. He’s had some difficulty with depth perception, which he says led to a couple recent car accidents. He’s gone in to see neurologists and he’s done some testing. No one’s given him any definitive answers yet, but he suspects that the bill for all his years of fighting — and some of the more extreme years of training — might be finally coming due.
“The thing is, I was always so conscious of protecting my brain,” he says. “I learned head movement, defense, all because I didn’t want to take too many shots to the head. But I feel like I started noticing this a few years ago and I had to call my family and be like, 'I’m sorry but my brain is not right. It’s not right.'”
Then there was this other thing, an incident that happened last year. His teenage daughter’s bike was stolen. He had a tracker on it and he followed it to the location highlighted on his phone. He even called the cops to come help him look for it.
“I remember the cop telling me, ‘You need to leave now.’ But I was like, 'This makes no sense. The tracker says the bike is right here. I can hear the beep.' Next thing I remember, I’m in a mental health center, drugged out of my mind.”
He’d been there for seven hours, he later learned. He had no memory of it. He says he contacted the police department for information on how and why they’d taken him there.
“I get a reply back from the sergeant. He’s like, ‘You were driving.’ I have no memory of it. So I asked if they could send me the video. He said, ‘Nope, go through a lawyer.’ So I hire a lawyer, spend $10,000, and I get the video. There I am. I’m driving like he said. No memory of it. It’s beyond scary.”
Maybe this is the kind of thing that can’t help but make you think. You think about legacy. You think about forgetting and being forgotten. You think about what you gave and what you got from an unforgiving sport. You think about what it cost you, and the possibility that the final price has not yet been revealed.
To his peers, the question of his place in MMA history ought to be easily settled.
“He should be in the [UFC] Hall of Fame,” says Rutten, who was inducted in 2015 despite having only two fights in the organization before injuries forced him to retire. “He's a five-time freaking UFC champion. I mean, this is one of those things that Dana has to put this stuff aside, whatever they have toward each other, and just do the right thing. If somebody deserves to be in there, it's freaking Frank.”
Coker, his former promoter at Strikeforce, calls his absence “a disservice to the sport.”
“I don’t know of a bigger star in this sport in America than Frank after he beat Tito in ’99,” Coker says. “It was a pivot point for the UFC.
"I remember [UFC co-founder] Bob Meyrowitz in a nightclub in Japan, pleading with Frank to come back. I mean, you’re talking about one of the most important fighters to the history of this sport.”
Javier Mendez says he still incorporates lessons he got from Shamrock while coaching fighters at AKA, long one of the sport’s top gyms. He was Shamrock’s coach, yes, but he got as much as he gave in that relationship.
“I see him as one of the greatest all-around fighters the sport has ever had,” Mendez says. “He had the wrestling mentality, the striking mentality, the submissions mentality. He was, to me, one of the greats. He should be in the [UFC] Hall of Fame, and I’m astonished he isn’t.”
Does it matter? Maybe not. After the ceremony and the speeches, it’s essentially just a plaque on a wall near a stairwell somewhere in Nevada. He could call himself a UFC Hall of Famer when he shows up to speak to businessmen about leadership or whatever. Someone could add it to his Wikipedia page. Beyond that, what would it change about his life? He knows what he did and what it meant at the time.
But memory is funny. You think it’s set and settled and then something happens that makes you go back for revisions. Take that little boy stuffed into the closet. For the longest time, it was his earliest memory. The wicked stepfather. The torment in the dark. It was terrible but it was something he understood. He had synthesized this information into the rest of his life, his sense of self.
Then just recently he gets a message on Facebook from a woman claiming to be his aunt. Are you little Frankie? I’ve been looking for you. That sort of thing. She says she was married to his mom’s brother. This was before his mom had even met his stepdad. The aunt has this clear memory of showing up to the house one day — they were moving to Colorado, and wanted to say goodbye — and hearing this muffled cry from inside the hall closet. She opened it and there he was all alone. Poor little Frankie.
“I never knew any of this,” he says. “I mean, I feel like I remember it. My mom told me it was my stepdad. But that was my mom, she always blamed everyone else.”
So he called up his mom. He relayed the conversation he’d had with this woman claiming to be his long lost aunt. He listened to the long pause on the other end of the phone.
“Then she says, ‘Well, that’s what happened to me, so that’s what I did to you.’ No apology. Just, 'That’s what happened. That’s what I did to you.' What am I supposed to do with that?”
He could feel it then, this core memory shifting and changing shape in his mind. The story he’d told himself unraveling now, waiting to be formed into something new. This happens in our brains almost without us noticing. We update and revise. New information nudges its way in and overrides the old.
The person telling the story gets to tell it however they please. They can make you the villain. They can leave you out entirely. You can push back for a while but what happens when you’re not there to speak for yourself? What happens when the last person who saw you for who you were is gone? What happens to your legacy if it isn’t carved in stone, or at least under glass? Who were you? And what did it mean? What did any of it mean?
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At the time he’s, what, six years old? Maybe seven? It’s hard to know for sure because his brain simply blocked out a lot of his childhood. Call it self-preservation. Maybe it’s for the best.
The memory starts in the hall linen closet. Actually, no, it starts just outside the closet, with young Frank being ordered to remove all the sheets and towels and stack them neatly on the floor. He can never remember exactly why, and maybe it doesn’t matter. He knows he’s being punished for something. He knows, even as he’s careful to stack those sheets and towels just so, that he is creating the space he will be forced to occupy, digging his own little grave.
In, says his stepfather. And so in he goes, squeezing his little body onto a now empty shelf. Then the closet door closes and locks behind him. Darkness. That’s what he’ll remember later. Being alone in the darkness of that closet. So quiet at first. Just the sound of his own ragged breathing, his pulse thumping in his ears, the choked sound of a little boy trying not to cry.
And then from outside comes the sound of the TV switching on. The rest of the family — his mother, his stepfather, his sisters — all gathering in the living room to watch a movie together. A rare treat in that household. Family fun, being had quite intentionally now, almost theatrically. A performance not so much for the enjoyment of those outside the closet but for the added psychological torment of the one inside it.
Imagine that. Everyone else is out there, having fun. They’re being an actual family. And they’re doing it without you. On purpose. To hurt you. And it’s working.
As a metaphor, it works almost too well. Because now Frank Shamrock is 52, decades removed from his life as Frank Alisio Juarez III, that “fat little Mexican boy,” as he puts it, who got forced into the linen closet.
That boy grew up fast but in some ways not at all. He went to reform schools and foster homes. He went to juvenile detention facilities and Bob Shamrock’s sprawling ranch for wayward boys in Susanville, California. Later, when the state of California had deemed him man enough, he even went to prison.
Later still he went to Ken Shamrock’s Lion’s Den gym, a palace of pain and often pointless suffering carved out of the primordial ooze of what would eventually become the sport of mixed martial arts. That in turn brought him to the fighting rings of Japan, where, in the mid-1990s, he would sometimes fight as often as once a month in order to make a new name for himself, the one that would stick.
That was 30 years ago now. For a sport as young and still developing as MMA, it might as well be the Cretaceous Period. Ask fans streaming into a UFC event today to tell you who was the first UFC light heavyweight champion. Siddle up to some guy perched on a barstool at Buffalo Wild Wings watching a UFC pay-per-view and see if he can tell you who’s at the very beginning of the title lineage that eventually went through Chuck Liddell and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and Jon Jones. Five-to-one odds he gets it wrong.
In fact, if you ask most UFC fans today to tell you who Frank Shamrock is, the answer you’re most likely to hear in response is: Do you mean Ken Shamrock?
Some of this, probably, is a mere function of time. Shamrock fought his last UFC bout in 1999, defeating Tito Ortiz in a UFC title fight that would later be hailed as a giant leap forward for MMA as a whole.
“That was a big, big fight for this sport,” says Scott Coker, the founder of the Strikeforce fight promotion that later went on to set a new North American MMA attendance record with an event headlined by Shamrock. “People now, maybe they don’t understand how huge that was. When he beat Tito, I don’t think there was anybody bigger in this sport.”
It was also, athletically and stylistically, a glimpse of MMA’s future. Shamrock wasn’t just cobbling together pieces of other fighting disciplines, as was the norm at the time. He was demonstrating a new, more complete form, something tailored to the sport and its rules and its environment.
“That was the first fight that showed what mixed martial arts could be,” says Javier Mendez, a former coach and training partner who now co-owns and operates the American Kickboxing Academy, which has churned out multiple UFC champions like Cain Velasquez and Daniel Cormier.
“Before that, it was always a wrestler who could punch a little bit or a kickboxer who’d learned some takedown defense,” Mendez says. “What you saw in that fight was pure mixed martial arts. And no one had ever seen that before in the UFC.”
But it’s not just that these accomplishments have been buried by the natural erosive properties of time. There’s also the fact of UFC hype machine. It has minimal incentive to shine a spotlight on the fighters of yesteryear even when they’re on the best of terms with the current leadership. For a fight promoter, there’s no money in the past, even the really good stuff. The money is in the very near future. The biggest fight is always the next one. That’s the one you can sell.
The exception to this rule is the UFC Hall of Fame. This is where the legends get their due in the sport of mixed martial arts. Every year the UFC announces new inductees and every summer, as part of the festivities leading up to the UFC’s big “international fight week” event in Las Vegas, some old-timer (who is usually not all that old and not even necessarily retired from fighting) gets to bask in a rare moment of pure appreciation.
This means something to fighters. Their kids get to come and see who dad used to be. Their old rivals are there, clapping them on the back. Fighters have been known to reach out to estranged family members, healing years-old wounds just for the occasion. Professional tough guys cry on stage at this thing every single year.
To its detractors, the UFC Hall of Fame is little more than a glorified employee of the month club. They’ll tell you that the top requirement for induction is being on good terms with UFC CEO Dana White. It’s true that there is no external voting committee to decide which fighters get in. No one outside the UFC gets a say. It is, in that sense, very much a company hall of fame. It also doesn’t even really exist in the usual physical sense. Yes, there are plaques on a wall in a Las Vegas building owned by the UFC, but you can’t walk in off the street and stroll down MMA memory lane the way you can at the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York.
But you know what else those detractors say? If the UFC Hall of Fame is truly legit — if it isn’t just an insider’s club operating at the dictatorial whims of the company president — then why isn’t Frank Shamrock in it?
Ask him now and Shamrock will tell you he doesn’t know why. Except, OK, yeah. He does know. He did and said some things. Some of those things were rooted in certain principles and others were just because he was pissed off. He did this to himself. Kind of. But not really. And you know what? He’s not sorry. Except for when he is.
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Frank Shamrock was one of MMA's all-time greats. Will he be remembered as such?
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Hang around Frank for any length of time and you’ll hear some stories. They come from all over. They come from Corcoran prison (“I was 18 years old and Charles Manson was on the next yard over from me”) and they come from the intersecting worlds of pro fighting and organized crime in Japan (“I’d get brought into these meetings with guys in leather suit jackets where all I did was bow and then stand there while they talked — it was weird”).
He has a story about the time he used the Heimlich maneuver to save his dear friend Mauro Ranallo from choking at a restaurant, only to later receive a phone call from the son of Henry Heimlich, who seemed to be on a personal quest to prove that his father’s life’s work was an elaborate con job.
“He wasn’t calling me to say good job. He was calling to see if it was fake or not,” Shamrock says. “His sole purpose was to expose people who were using the Heimlich for attention. He basically thought his dad was a charlatan and he wanted to prove it.”
That story ends, as many of them do, with an attempt at media monetization. Once Shamrock understood that this was what the heir to the Heimlich name was doing with the legacy, he saw the potential for a docuseries. He called the people he knew from doing fight commentary on Showtime. He started setting up meetings. The deal fell apart, according to Shamrock, because Heimlich kept leaving voicemails for Showtime executives accusing Shamrock and Ranallo of faking the entire thing.
“I sent him a nice note just saying, 'Bro, I can’t do business with you.' That’s the weirdest s*** ever,” Shamrock says. “Then he invited me to lunch.”
He has darker stories too. From his childhood, growing up with an abusive stepfather who would sit him down at the kitchen table, hands hidden from sight, and make young Frank look him in the eye as he grilled the boy with seemingly random questions, one right after another.
“If I got it wrong, he’d slap me,” Shamrock says. “But you never knew what was the wrong answer and what was the right one. It was just constant anxiety and fear. It’s horrible. I was a little boy. It’s confusing enough being a kid.”
His stepfather was an angry man. He’d fought in the Vietnam War and then came home to work as an appliance repairmen. This, Shamrock says now with a surprising degree of empathy and understanding, was probably not his dream. Still, he met Shamrock’s mom and provided for her and her kids. He had a life that was hard, Shamrock says, “and it changed him drastically and he expressed that to me in his parenting.”
Sometimes his stepdad would make him kneel down and touch his nose to the wall as a punishment. He’d stay this way for what felt like hours, listening intently to every footfall in the house so he could hear when it was safe to sit back on his heels and take a rest. For a while his stepdad made him sleep in a shed in the backyard, which didn’t even seem all that strange to Shamrock until he started checking out books from the school library.
“I’m going, wait, none of the kids in these stories sleep in a shed.”
And then there are the stories about the early blood-and-guts days of MMA, the insanity of the Lion’s Den gym, where his adopted older brother Ken seemed to think the only way to learn to fight was to get beaten mercilessly until the technique and skill entered your body through osmosis. Or else you just got broken and quit. Either way.
“Just the dumbest s***,” Shamrock says. “One day he comes in, like, ‘We’re going to learn Muay Thai kicks today.’ I’m going, OK, great. Then he has you lift up your shin and he just kicks you in the leg repeatedly. The next day none of us can walk. I’m going, 'What were we supposed to learn from that?'”
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The relationship between Ken Shamrock (pictured) and Frank Shamrock has long been a complicated one.
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The story of how he ended up there is, toward the end of one of his many stays in various youth correctional facilities, he got essentially paroled into Bob Shamrock’s care. This meant living with a bunch of other boys, all of them troublemakers and youthful criminals of one type or another. Bob’s ranch sat on the rural edge of Northern California, closer to Reno than to Sacramento. Frank was glad to go. Couldn’t believe his luck, actually. Here was this older man, tough and serious but kind and honest. He’d always wanted boys of his own but couldn’t have them, so he started this ranch where he took young men who were on a perilous path and tried to do a little course-correction through discipline and labor and sports and love.
“He was the first man I ever met who wasn’t trying to rob me or molest me or beat me or do me wrong somehow,” Shamrock says. “Just a lovely man. A solid Christian man. He gave me more than any man has ever given me in my life just by being a good man and saying, 'This is what's right. This is how things work. Do this and you'll get this.' He wanted to help me and he loved me in his own way. It wasn’t until I was grown that I could see the love and the pain behind that journey for him.”
Not everything that happened at Bob Shamrock’s ranch was great. In his autobiography, “Uncaged: My Life As A Champion MMA Fighter,” Shamrock writes about being molested at the ranch when was 13. A counselor there had recognized his fondness for alcohol and would secretly provide it to him.
“After he got me drunk, he would suck me off,” Shamrock writes in the book. “I was only thirteen. I hadn’t really had sex with a girl yet. I had all kinds of ideas in my head about sex being wrong and dirty. … I knew that what he was doing to me was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I could have told somebody. But who would I tell? He was a trusted employee of the Shamrock ranch who had been there for years and I was some punk kid who was always in trouble.”
The lessons he learned at Shamrock’s ranch didn’t always stick the first time. Young Frank was still half-feral. He was discovering a self-destructive love of alcohol that would pop up throughout his life, threatening to unravel all that he’d painstakingly woven together. He tried to be good, he says, but it very much felt like an effort. He had to constantly talk himself out of stealing things. He was aware that most people didn’t need to have that argument with themselves on a nearly daily basis. It was an argument he didn’t always win.
So yeah, he stole a car. An impulsive thing. Walking home drunk and cold and there it was, keys in the ignition and the engine running. Some guy letting his car warm up as he got ready for work. He watched Frank jump in and speed off and called the cops right then. Frank didn’t get far.
There followed more juvenile detention, other group homes. Bob stayed in contact with him through it all. Frank robbed local businesses. He worked at Payless shoes and ran a scam from the register. He worked at Taco Bell and came back after closing one night to squeeze in through the drive-thru window and give himself a raise. He got married young, had a baby while still just a frightened teenager himself. When his crime spree finally got him sent to prison, Bob came to visit him. Nobody else did.
“When I got sent to Corcoran, he came in and told me the truth,” Shamrock says now. “He was like, ‘Son, you f***ed your life up. Look where you are.’ But he also was the one to tell me, ‘You can still turn it around.’ He didn’t leave. Just him believing in me? I mean, after everything I put him through, he still showed up and he was my dad. Nobody had ever done anything like that for me.”
Prison life had a certain simplicity about it. You do a good day, you get a day off your sentence. He avoided falling in with the gangs mostly because none would have him. He was too Mexican for the Whites but too much of a country kid for the other Mexicans. He worked out and read. He kept his head down. Some nights he’d lie there in his bed and listen to a guy up on a higher tier who would sing “Under The Boardwalk” with the voice of angel. It was beautiful. Guys would cry in their cells listening to this. 'What is a guy like that doing here,' he wondered. 'What am I?'
“Prison is easy because society has stripped away all your power, all your rights,” Shamrock says. “You are literally the most powerless person in the world. That’s why every person in there, their sole mission in life is to get some power. Any power. Power over the light switch, over the TV, something. Once you understand that, everything makes sense.”
Once he was finally released, it was Bob’s idea for him to train at the Lion’s Den. Ken Shamrock was nearly a decade older and he’d come through Bob’s ranch before Frank’s time. All Frank knew was that he’d been another messed up kid with a hard luck past who’d been reformed at the ranch and was now making it big as a pro wrestler or something.
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Ken Shamrock's Lion's Den was a notoriously difficult training room in MMA's early days.
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Bob Shamrock adopted them both, giving them the last name they would make famous. But at the time Ken resented Frank’s presence in his gym. He beat him bloody one of his first days there, Frank says. He put him in a series of inscrutable leg locks and then wrenched until his knee made worrisome popping sounds. Ken was a man who saw the world in shades of red.
“I never realized how f****** up Ken was until I got a little bit older,” says Shamrock. “He’d been through a lot, too. Nobody grows up eating out of trash cans and comes out all normal. Your brain develops differently. Having Ken as a teacher, I didn’t know at the time how insane a lot of this was.”
But being known as Ken Shamrock’s brother, even if it wasn’t a biological or even all that friendly of a bond, had certain advantages. Ken had gotten in on the ground floor as an early form of MMA took off in Japan. All the Lion’s Den guys had an in with the Pancrase organization, thanks to Ken. Frank fought nine times in 1995 alone. He’ll tell you now he had almost zero idea what he was doing at the time. He wasn’t alone.
“All of us were figuring it out as we went,” says Bas Rutten, who fought Frank three times in Pancrase and later retired as UFC heavyweight champion in 1999. “We learned in the fights. And we’d find someone who knew the parts [of the sport] we didn’t and we’d train with them.
"In those days in Pancrase, you’d fight and they’d say, ‘What are you doing next weekend?’ Nothing, might as well fight again. Frank and I, if we weren’t fighting each other that week, we’d party together. We partied together a lot.”
As the UFC struggled for a foothold back in North America, Shamrock saw an opportunity for stardom. He won the first iteration of what would later come to be known as the UFC light heavyweight title when he submitted Olympic gold medalist wrestler Kevin Jackson in 1997. (It still irks him that Jackson stormed off without shaking his hand after.) He defended the title three times the next year, including a gruesome slam knockout of former Soviet special forces soldier Igor Zinoviev that saw Shamrock nearly drive Zinoviev through the mat, snapping his collarbone and ending his fight career in just 22 seconds.
But by 1999, Shamrock had started to suspect there might be a brighter future for him outside the cage. He had the physique, the charisma, the looks. Maybe he could be a movie star. Or at least TV. He signed a new contract with the UFC, he says, but insisted on a stipulation that would nullify the contract if he ever publicly announced his retirement from the sport.
“They never let anybody do that again,” he says. “I was the only one.”
He’d already decided that he would fight just once more in the UFC, and it was only because he wanted to prove that he could beat Tito Ortiz.
At the time, Ortiz was a star in the making for a fledgling organization that sorely needed one. He was young and brash and cocky. He’d created a recognizable visual brand, with his bleached blonde hair and his flame-embroidered shorts. He had this feud going with the Lion’s Den guys. He’d beat them in the cage and then put on a taunting T-shirt, one that looked like a comically custom job from the local shopping mall. These shirts delivered uplifting messages such as “I just f****** your a**.” Without fail, they sent Ken into frothing rages from the corner.
His brother didn’t want him to fight Ortiz, Frank says now. (Ken Shamrock did not respond to requests for comment.) Neither did his adopted father, Bob. They all thought he’d lose and thus diminish the family name. Ortiz was considerably bigger and stronger. He’d beaten two of Ken’s guys already. It felt to Frank like Ken and Bob were teaming up against him, trying to keep him in his place as the lesser Shamrock. Just the fact that they didn’t want him to do the fight — didn’t think he could win the fight — convinced Frank that he simply had to.
“If you look at the mechanics of it, he’s 35 pounds heavier than me, four inches taller. He’s literally the next size up,” Shamrock says. “So I had to define the system that would beat him. I hired [NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver] Jerry Rice’s track and field coach. First time I’d ever put on cleats and run on grass. I built my conditioning, my body for this fight. Because Tito, he didn’t know s*** back then. I knew I could beat him if I could withstand, physically, the punishment that a bigger guy could dish out. So I built everything around speed, movement, biomechanics. It was designed to make him tired and take his heart. And it worked.”
The fight would end up as Shamrock’s masterpiece. He demonstrated ways of working from his back and off the chainlink fence of the cage that would become staples of MMA. He blended the stand-up game and the ground game into one seamless style, heralding a coming age of MMA as a sport unto itself rather than just an amalgamation of other parts.
Then he did exactly what he’d always planned to do. He retired publicly. He shredded that UFC contract. A possibly apocryphal story from the time claimed that he even gave back his title belt, telling UFC executives to call him when they thought they had someone who could beat him. Legend has it that only later did they realize he’d engraved his initials into the belt like a kid writing his name in wet cement. (Shamrock is still cagey on the veracity of this tale. Perhaps it’s simply too good to refute.)
Shamrock was never seen again in the UFC. Ortiz would later win the title he’d vacated and become a genuine star for the organization. Shamrock went on to help launch the Strikeforce promotion, which held the first sanctioned MMA event in California in 2006, drawing a record 18,265 people (Shamrock can still recite the figure from memory) for an event in which Shamrock knocked out Bay Area rival Cesar Gracie in just 20 seconds.
During this time away, Shamrock worked in one capacity or another for almost every UFC rival that popped up, from Strikeforce to EliteXC to the IFL. Along the way he cast just about every aspersion he could think of on the UFC. His comments on Dana White were often pointed and personal. He couldn’t help himself. Shamrock always knew how to grab a headline. It felt natural for him.
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April 11, 2009: Frank Shamrock battles Nick Diaz at a sell-out Strikeforce show in San Jose.
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Lately though, he’s been wondering. The dust has pretty much settled in the battle for MMA supremacy. The UFC has thoroughly and completely won. Shamrock could never quite bring himself to play nice. The rebellious urge to break every rule just to prove he has no master still sizzles within. That kid who couldn’t trust love or kindness, who saw every boundary as a cage, he’s still in there. You can see it in his face still, that impish smile, like he knows you’ll be mad at him for what he’s about to do but also knows you like him too much not to forgive him. It’s just that now he has the years and maturity to understand what it’s cost him, and what it continues to cost him.
“I chose the wrong team,” he says. “I chose the wrong team, but I still think I did it for the right reasons. These guys didn’t know martial arts and they didn’t care about people. I didn’t want to be in business with people like that.”
And so he isn’t. He isn’t anywhere in it or near it. When the UFC tells its version of the past, which to many fans is the only version, he’s left out of it.
All these years later. Still locked away on his own. Listening through the door as everyone has fun without him. And it still hurts.
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Feb. 8, 2011: Frank Shamrock attends a Strikeforce World Grand Prix fan day in New York City.
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The whole thing with the UFC Hall of Fame, it didn’t have to be like this. Back in 2017, Shamrock was approached by Ant Evans (now an Uncrowned contributor), who was then a UFC employee wearing many hats from media relations to content acquisition. The UFC Hall of Fame was Evans’ baby, in a sense. He cared deeply about it, and about combatting its perception as an employee of the month club. He wanted Shamrock in there, he told White. And, after some pleading and convincing, he got the green light.
The plan, according to Evans, was to induct Shamrock vs. Ortiz into the “fight wing” of the UFC Hall of Fame. They would all celebrate it together as “the fight of the ‘90s,” and if that went well then the next year or the year after they would induct Shamrock outright as a full-fledged UFC Hall of Famer. After reaching out through various intermediaries, Evans got Shamrock on the phone to discuss it.
“I explained it and kind of said, 'Look, I know there’s no trust on either side here,'” Evans says. “A lot of bad things have been said on both sides. But we wanted to induct this fight and talk about how it was the first fight that showed what MMA would become in the 21st century and all that. It was four or five phone calls before he said yes. He told me he’d consulted his family, he’d consulted Bas Rutten, who’d already gone in. He actually told me he consulted a priest and I started laughing, and then I realized he wasn’t joking.”
But after Shamrock agreed, Evans says, then came the demands. More tickets to the induction ceremony. Tickets to the UFC event that weekend. The rights to his own fight footage, so he could show his clips at his various corporate speaking gigs. Evans kept saying yes. Then, he says, Shamrock ghosted him.
“I called, texted, got nothing,” Evans says. “I’m sending him press releases for his approval. 'How about this quote in the announcement? How do you want to be introduced? Who do you want to come speak at the ceremony?' We already had a video package all worked up. I still have it on my computer, it’s f***ing fantastic. Just nothing from him. Then I get a call from one of the senior [UFC] execs saying, ‘Frank is doing interviews where he’s just motherf***ing the UFC, and Dana in particular.’ I was like, well, he’s done that for years. Then he said, ‘No, this was yesterday.’”
The combination of Shamrock’s outward hostility to the UFC and his radio silence in communications with Evans scuttled plans for the induction ceremony. According to Evans, the UFC couldn’t trust that Shamrock would even show up. And if he did, what would he say?
Ask Shamrock about this now and you might get conflicting answers. At times he insists the UFC Hall of Fame doesn’t matter to him and he doesn’t care if he ever gets in. Other times, he wishes he could do this part over.
“In truth, I regret that,” Shamrock tells me at one point. “I think I was going through a divorce at the time and just having some issues emotionally.”
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Shamrock's early nemesis, Tito Ortiz, was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2012.
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There’s also something else, and he’s still not entirely sure what to do with this part. Lately, Shamrock has been starting to worry about his brain. Something is off, he says. He’s forgetful, losing his keys, his phone. He’s had some difficulty with depth perception, which he says led to a couple recent car accidents. He’s gone in to see neurologists and he’s done some testing. No one’s given him any definitive answers yet, but he suspects that the bill for all his years of fighting — and some of the more extreme years of training — might be finally coming due.
“The thing is, I was always so conscious of protecting my brain,” he says. “I learned head movement, defense, all because I didn’t want to take too many shots to the head. But I feel like I started noticing this a few years ago and I had to call my family and be like, 'I’m sorry but my brain is not right. It’s not right.'”
Then there was this other thing, an incident that happened last year. His teenage daughter’s bike was stolen. He had a tracker on it and he followed it to the location highlighted on his phone. He even called the cops to come help him look for it.
“I remember the cop telling me, ‘You need to leave now.’ But I was like, 'This makes no sense. The tracker says the bike is right here. I can hear the beep.' Next thing I remember, I’m in a mental health center, drugged out of my mind.”
He’d been there for seven hours, he later learned. He had no memory of it. He says he contacted the police department for information on how and why they’d taken him there.
“I get a reply back from the sergeant. He’s like, ‘You were driving.’ I have no memory of it. So I asked if they could send me the video. He said, ‘Nope, go through a lawyer.’ So I hire a lawyer, spend $10,000, and I get the video. There I am. I’m driving like he said. No memory of it. It’s beyond scary.”
Maybe this is the kind of thing that can’t help but make you think. You think about legacy. You think about forgetting and being forgotten. You think about what you gave and what you got from an unforgiving sport. You think about what it cost you, and the possibility that the final price has not yet been revealed.
To his peers, the question of his place in MMA history ought to be easily settled.
“He should be in the [UFC] Hall of Fame,” says Rutten, who was inducted in 2015 despite having only two fights in the organization before injuries forced him to retire. “He's a five-time freaking UFC champion. I mean, this is one of those things that Dana has to put this stuff aside, whatever they have toward each other, and just do the right thing. If somebody deserves to be in there, it's freaking Frank.”
Coker, his former promoter at Strikeforce, calls his absence “a disservice to the sport.”
“I don’t know of a bigger star in this sport in America than Frank after he beat Tito in ’99,” Coker says. “It was a pivot point for the UFC.
"I remember [UFC co-founder] Bob Meyrowitz in a nightclub in Japan, pleading with Frank to come back. I mean, you’re talking about one of the most important fighters to the history of this sport.”
Javier Mendez says he still incorporates lessons he got from Shamrock while coaching fighters at AKA, long one of the sport’s top gyms. He was Shamrock’s coach, yes, but he got as much as he gave in that relationship.
“I see him as one of the greatest all-around fighters the sport has ever had,” Mendez says. “He had the wrestling mentality, the striking mentality, the submissions mentality. He was, to me, one of the greats. He should be in the [UFC] Hall of Fame, and I’m astonished he isn’t.”
Does it matter? Maybe not. After the ceremony and the speeches, it’s essentially just a plaque on a wall near a stairwell somewhere in Nevada. He could call himself a UFC Hall of Famer when he shows up to speak to businessmen about leadership or whatever. Someone could add it to his Wikipedia page. Beyond that, what would it change about his life? He knows what he did and what it meant at the time.
But memory is funny. You think it’s set and settled and then something happens that makes you go back for revisions. Take that little boy stuffed into the closet. For the longest time, it was his earliest memory. The wicked stepfather. The torment in the dark. It was terrible but it was something he understood. He had synthesized this information into the rest of his life, his sense of self.
Then just recently he gets a message on Facebook from a woman claiming to be his aunt. Are you little Frankie? I’ve been looking for you. That sort of thing. She says she was married to his mom’s brother. This was before his mom had even met his stepdad. The aunt has this clear memory of showing up to the house one day — they were moving to Colorado, and wanted to say goodbye — and hearing this muffled cry from inside the hall closet. She opened it and there he was all alone. Poor little Frankie.
“I never knew any of this,” he says. “I mean, I feel like I remember it. My mom told me it was my stepdad. But that was my mom, she always blamed everyone else.”
So he called up his mom. He relayed the conversation he’d had with this woman claiming to be his long lost aunt. He listened to the long pause on the other end of the phone.
“Then she says, ‘Well, that’s what happened to me, so that’s what I did to you.’ No apology. Just, 'That’s what happened. That’s what I did to you.' What am I supposed to do with that?”
He could feel it then, this core memory shifting and changing shape in his mind. The story he’d told himself unraveling now, waiting to be formed into something new. This happens in our brains almost without us noticing. We update and revise. New information nudges its way in and overrides the old.
The person telling the story gets to tell it however they please. They can make you the villain. They can leave you out entirely. You can push back for a while but what happens when you’re not there to speak for yourself? What happens when the last person who saw you for who you were is gone? What happens to your legacy if it isn’t carved in stone, or at least under glass? Who were you? And what did it mean? What did any of it mean?
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