Can Ken Shamrock Find Himself Again?

A certain type of person would be expected to hang a lavender banner of a Thomas Kinkade painting, embossed with the script “The Gift of Friends,” in the entrance of their home. The godfather of mixed martial arts is not one of those people.

Then again, you also wouldn’t imagine Ken Shamrock living in a repurposed wood-paneled Windsport motor coach behind a gym in north San Diego. Yet Shamrock, 51 year-old grandfather of 11, loser of 7 of his last 10 fights, is living like a monk three weeks prior to his first competitive fight in five years, a pairing against a former YouTube star clinging to his 14th minute of fame.

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On Friday, June 19th, Shamrock will fight Kimbo Slice at Bellator 138 in St. Louis. But first, breakfast. The RV – his castle, he calls it – has no running water, so Shamrock must ferry it in from the gym so he can cook. The RV has no air conditioning, so he cracks the window open to catch a breeze. The RV has no shower, so he takes care of that after training or at his 27-year-old son Ryan’s house. The RV has no working television, so at night, he curls up and falls asleep watching YouTube clips on his iPhone of his own youth ministry work.

The front seat passenger seat is littered with dozens of empty gallon-sized water jugs, and a pile of clothes has accumulated to the left of his bed. Over to the right, a Glock rests on his bedside table.

“I don’t want to be here,” he says, in a soft, sandy voice that suggests it would be ludicrous for me to imagine otherwise. “I don’t want to stay in this position.”

That’s not exactly true; Shamrock can move out whenever he feels like it. His silver BMW is parked twenty feet away, and he can turn the ignition and get home to Reno, and his wife Tonya, in under nine hours. Or he can stay at a hotel in the Gaslamp district, or he can rent a furnished apartment, or do anything he wants, really. He is living here entirely of his own volition – and has been since March – because he believes this is his only path to salvation. In order to find his true self, he must shed all the trappings he fought (literally) his entire life to acquire.

Gone, then, are the catered meals and the attendants and the entourage and the peloton of hand-picked sparring partners – all of the things that make training easy. Shamrock wants this training to be difficult, which seems counterintuitive considering he lost his last fight in under two minutes to a tubby journeyman named Mike Bourke, who had a 9-16-1 career record.

“Sometimes people look at me and don’t understand why I do what I do,” he says. “When [my father] was alive, he said, ‘You’re just a different person, but your thought process always comes around to being correct.’ Or at least, understand[able].”

Shamrock wants people to understand him. Or, more accurately, he wants them to approve. This is why he can talk so frequently about his legacy without coming off as garish. It has less to do with his own ego than with his desire to make his fans proud. In person, he’s disarmingly friendly, happy to chat with whoever says hello. A few days a week, he goes to a chryotherapy center called ChilTonic in a strip mall where he eagerly talks training with the attendant, a 24-year-old CrossFit competitor. Shamrock tenses up for a second when an amateur fighter barges in on one of his workouts to snap a photo. But he quickly buries any perturbation beneath a handshake and a grin wide enough to slap onto a campaign poster.

On a most basic level, Shamrock took the Slice fight because he knew people wanted to see them brawl after a planned fight was aborted seven years ago. So he decided to give it to them. In a February television appearance on ESPN, Shamrock said, “the fans are going to enjoy this meal, because I’m going to serve it up to them on a platter and we’re going to take our time and eat this meal.”

It was as good or better than any promo he did during his days as a professional wrestler in Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation. Ken Shamrock has never forgotten how to entertain, even though he may have to shrug off five years of rust.

But when will Shamrock decide to finally stop doing that entertaining in the octagon? His body has been so ravaged by injury that many of his fights are tied to parts of his anatomy: hamstring (Bourke); ACL (Tito Ortiz); shoulder (Kimo Leopaldo). By his own admission, he almost died in the ring once, after his fight against Kazuyuki Fujita was stopped on account of heart palpitations.

At one point in time, every member of his family had asked him to retire. As far back as 2008, when Shamrock was 44, UFC President Dana White declared that he’d rather pay the federation’s first bellwether to stay home instead of seeing him fight again.

And yet Ken Shamrock, 51 years old, is still convincing anyone within earshot that it’s Kimbo Slice who should be afraid. After all, Shamrock practically invented modern cage-fighting. Plus, he says, he’s healthier now than he’s been in a decade, the result of vanquishing a mystery illness that he refuses to identify.

Shamrock knows that most people won’t believe him. He knows that based on his last ten fights, they probably shouldn’t. But he is is tired of being doubted and ridiculed. He’s tired of regretting the last chapter of his career. More than anything, he wants to go out a winner.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that people are going to go, ‘Oh, my goodness!’” he says. “People are gonna see the difference.”

***

It might be worth taking Shamrock’s word since nothing is more implausible than what he’s achieved already.

Shamrock was the first all-around fighter in MMA in part because he was one of the first Americans to train in Japan. In 1993, he became the first foreign MMA champion in Japanese history after winning the inaugural King of Pancrase tournament. Two years later, he became the inaugural UFC Superfight Champion – the title now known as the UFC Heavyweight Championship – by defeating Dan Severn at UFC 6. He was the sport’s first mainstream star; his nickname, The World’s Most Dangerous Man, was borne out of his involvement on an ABC special about the deadliest things on earth, unheard of recognition for an MMA competitor in the mid-90’s. Then, as purses dried up in the latter part of the decade, he became MMA’s first crossover star by jumping ship to the WWF. There was no UFC Hall of Fame until 2003. Naturally, Shamrock—together with his arch rival Royce Gracie—was part of the two-man inaugural class.

This is a Ken Shamrock highlight video set to a Creed song.

Age has sapped much of his natural ability, but he’s still an imposing figure. His hair is a bit longer, his face more weathered, but the only distinct change in his physical appearance is his facial hair. He calls it his Wolverine look, in homage to the comic book hero: A thin pair of sideburns that jut down to the outline of his chin, the slightest fleck of white lurking around the edge of the left one. He is still six feet, 210 pounds, and incredibly muscular. ChilTonic’s owner, Matthew Bergman, sized Shamrock up on their first meeting and thought to himself, “That man is made to hurt things.”

On the day we meet, Shamrock leaves his young sparring partner’s left hand twitching after he tried to parry one too many Shamrock kicks. He thinks it’s broken until Shamrock takes a look and assures him that it’s probably just a spiral fracture. He then slips off his glove to show the kid his own hand; he’s endured this, and much worse.

He was born Kenneth Kilpatrick at Warner Robbins Air Force Base in Warner Robbins, Georgia, and he was barely out of diapers before his biological father was out of his life for good. His mother, Diane, relocated him and his two older brothers, Robbie and Richie, to a subsidized housing project in Savannah, working nights as a go-go dancer to make ends meet. It was there he first encountered violence. Left to their own devices, the brothers roamed the streets and regularly were attacked. Fighting quickly became Shamrock’s preferred means of resolving conflict; perhaps the most distinctive memory Shamrock has of his early years was punching his kindergarten teacher in the stomach.

When he was five, his mother married an Army aviator named Bob Nance, who eventually moved the family to Napa, California. Kenneth Kilpatrick became Kenny Nance, and everything seemed ripe for a fresh start and a chance at a normal upbringing. But while Bob Nance knew how to instill discipline, he didn’t necessarily know how to parent. Bob beat the brothers with his belt when they acted out.

The brothers frequently ran away from home, sometimes for weeks at a time. In Napa, they were known as the toughest kids on the street. By the time he was 10, Shamrock had taken to holding up older kids at knifepoint for their lunch money. He habitually stole from stores, mostly for subsistence during the weeks that he slept in an abandoned car. He fought constantly; one particularly bad skirmish ended with him getting stabbed. He spent months in juvenile hall, and it had the opposite effect of soothing him instead of scaring him. “I didn’t mind it,” he said in his 1996 book Inside the Lion’s Den: The Life and Submission Fighting System of Ken Shamrock. “Compared to home, it was quiet and rather peaceful.”

When Shamrock was 13, he and his brothers were disowned by their stepfather, and he spent the next year getting kicked out of foster homes almost as soon as he arrived. The last resort for him was the Shamrock Boys Ranch in tiny Susanville, California, run out of a mansion owned by a man named Bob Shamrock. It was there that Kenny Nance turned his life around. He and another boy, Frank Juarez III, were legally adopted by Bob Shamrock, who treated them as his own sons. They became Ken and Frank Shamrock, the greatest pair of siblings MMA has ever known, and among the most accomplished brother duos in sports history.

Frank Shamrock retired in 2010 at the age of 37 content with his success. Why can’t Ken do the same? He has elevated an entire sport. He has made plenty of money. He could have ended up like his brother Robbie, swallowed up by poverty and serving out a life sentence.

Shamrock knows he can’t give an adequate answer. But for him, it’s simple: he has failed himself. He has lost his edge. For much of his life, he programmed himself to approach everything he did – football, bouncing, street fighting, mixed martial arts, pro wrestling – with total urgency, as though whoever or whatever force opposing him in that fraction of time threatened his entire existence. He once played high school basketball with a halo bolted into his skull two months after suffering a neck injury that, he was told, would end his career in contact sports. He even got into a fight while wearing it. “When people know what [a halo] is, they go, ‘Why did you do that?’ I just didn’t have that switch of cautious… I don’t know any other way. Full bore, front, put it in forward and go.”

It was an exhausting way to live, a dangerous one. Nevertheless, he says, “sometimes, especially in those situations, it’s a matter of being successful or not successful, of having a life or not a life, or having a life that means anything or not.”

That is who Ken Shamrock has been for the majority of his life. It is not, he says, who he has been for his last ten fights. Recently, fight after fight, he would get backed into a corner and felt powerless to brawl his way out of it.

“I knew it wasn’t me, because I have too much willpower for me not to push through something,” he says. It’s not the 3-7 record that’s worn on him for the past five years, then. It’s all the times he searched within himself for that reckless teenager and has not been able to find him. Some might regard that as personal growth. Shamrock calls it regression.

“The kid that did that wouldn’t have those ten fights,” he says. “That’s not who he is.”

When Shamrock was in his heyday, he regarded the intricacies of his opponent’s fighting as peripheral details. He would do his diligence and recruit a sparring partner to approximate the body type of his next victim. But on fight night, he says, “I would go in and just go, and kick ass. It’s my fight, not yours. I’ll fight the way I fight; you’ve got to keep up.”

This is how he is approaching Kimbo Slice. He fears nothing about the one-time Internet sensation. If Shamrock respects him at all, it is only for the back story that put Kimbo on the map in the first place. Shamrock was once a street fighter himself, after all. But to Ken Shamrock, Kimbo Slice is little more than a hologram.

“People look at Kimbo and he’s ‘bare-knuckle,’ the fake stuff,” he says, disdain seeping into his words. “But that’s me. That’s who I am.” In his mind, Slice is a charlatan, a big talker without a ground game who, up until this fight, took a great deal of pride in that fact. Slice’s flippancy about grappling makes Shamrock seethe.

“To watch the way he’s presented himself and carried himself from that point on is disrespecting the sport,” he says. “And what he says about people who do grapple, who do further themselves in the sport – he’s disrespecting MMA and he’s taking advantage of it.”

More than anything, Shamrock says he took the fight to confront that disrespect. He is the venerable samurai returning to protect his village against a foreign invader.

“For me, it goes much, much deeper than just my personal issue with him,” Shamrock said. “It goes much deeper into my love and honor of the sport that I helped build.”

Shamrock does not foresee retribution being much of a problem. He is extraordinarily confident.

“There’s no way that he belongs in the ring with me,” Shamrock says. For that reason, he says, a mere victory isn’t enough to prove the point he wants to make. He needs to dominate. He believes he will have failed to do so if Slice makes it out of the first round. “It’s so important for me to fight the fight I know I’m supposed to fight, not the fight that’s going to win the fight for me,” he says. “Because this isn’t about beating Kimbo – that’s a done thing. This is going to happen. It’s about how I beat him. That’s the question.”

How he answers that question will set the tone for the final act of his career. Dominate, and Shamrock will again be recognized as a facsimile of the indomitable champion who lodged fear into the psyche of every opponent. Aged, but with grace. Short of that, he calcifies himself for good as the fragile legend who couldn’t let go.

And this is where the mysterious illness comes in. Shamrock still refuses to name the condition, or reveal how it was treated. But it was the illness, he argues, that sapped his strength and discipline for close to a decade, even if fans are skeptical. “When people take their lives, I understand it now,” he says. “It’s almost like a point where it feels like you’ve got nothing more. What else is there? What else am I good for? Everybody else sees me as this and after that, people are calling me a scumbag, a has-been, you suck, you never were good – all the bad things you could think people say to you. And they don’t think it matters. They don’t believe it affects anybody, and it may not with the guys who are still fighting. But it does to the people who are retired.”

But Shamrock says he isn’t a has-been anymore. He says he’s been at full strength since 2012, and that one day we will learn the details of his affliction after he retires, either in a sermon or maybe in a book.

“I want to use that as a motivational piece for people that are struggling with their own issues,” he says. “It has to do with me being able to show people, ‘Hey, if you’re strong enough and mentally tough enough and really want something, you can achieve whatever you want.’”

Shamrock, for all his tactical and experiential advantages over Slice, is a massive underdog. Perhaps bettors are leery because of what happened the first the time these two were supposed to fight, on Oct. 4, 2008 for a fledgling promotion called EliteXC back when Slice was undefeated and at the crest of his popularity. The fight was called off two hours beforehand when Shamrock suffered a cut over his eye during warmups. The promotion replaced him with an unknown named Seth Petruzelli, who promptly wrote himself into MMA lore and provoked Gus Johnson into Rocky-themed histrionics by TKO’ing Slice in 14 seconds.

EliteXC sunk almost immediately, and from the wreckage bubbled up frenzied speculation that Shamrock cut himself intentionally to get back at the company following a dispute leading up to the fight. The rumor has taken on enough of a life that Slice has recycled it into pre-fight fodder, going so far as to warn Shamrock that he will pursue him to the locker room if he tries to “pussy out” again. Shamrock doesn’t bother trying to conceal his own bitterness about what he terms “the incident.” He refers to EliteXC only as “that company.” He clenches his jaw and speaks through his teeth.

“There’s a time when you just want to say, ‘Yeah, I did it. I stuck it back to you,’” he snarls.

All of this is why Shamrock believes in his bones that he must win on Friday night.

“Anybody that has any pride at all in themselves and in their job never wants to go out on a bad note,” he says. Winning scrubs some of the stain off his record but far more importantly, it will make him relevant again. Perhaps all of that is why, staring dead into my eyes, he insists once again that this fight will be different from the ten before it. This time, it sounds less like braggadocio than a simple plea: “All I’m saying is, ‘Look at my results.’”

For as much as Shamrock is loath to consider the idea, there is another scenario to consider.

What happens if he loses?

How slippery must the slope become for him to realize that no amount of training or fresh opposition will allow him rehabilitate his legacy. What if there is no storybook ending?

“I’m pretty good at understanding, ‘When it’s time, it’s time,’” he says. But he will always identify himself as a fighter–the bouts themselves but also each mundane leg lift and tape job leading up to it. Fighting is his vocation as well as his hobby; it is his outlet for camaraderie with other men, the way some guys choose to hunt or fish or even watch football games. I try to point out to him that one of these things is not like the other, that those activities can be enjoyed at almost any age and carry minimal safety risk. But he has none of it. “Well, I don’t know if it is: I’ve seen people get shot by their own people,” he says, with a laugh.

This time, Shamrock insists he really would walk away. For years, he sustained himself with the belief that health was the primary obstacle toward ending his career on his terms. Now, there would be no such excuse and, accordingly, no reason to press on.

“If I don’t go in there and do what I’m supposed to do, I’m not going to drag this on,” he says sitting in the beater RV on a balmy San Diego afternoon. “That’s ridiculous, especially with everything I know now.”

To his left, as if to remind him of the life that awaits back in Reno—family, church, etc.—hangs the Thomas Kinkade banner. “The Gift of Friends.”

Earlier that day, Shamrock visited ChilTonic, the cryotherapy center. The treatment consists of spending three minutes inside a neck-high cylindrical chamber inside of which the temperature drops to negative-200 degrees Fahrenheit.

Just before he stepped inside, Shamrock surveyed the chamber, and felt the subzero air billowing out of it. He chuckled to himself.

“There’s something wrong with what we do to ourselves when we see something frosting,” he says, “and we still walk in.”