Beyond the Lion's Den. Ken Shamrock

they did some sparring and got their ass handed to them, they would no longer be the toughest fighter on the planet. It would hurt their business, so they locked me out.

      It got really frustrating, and I eventually gave up on trying to spar with people who already knew, or thought they knew, how to fight. Instead I searched for people who knew absolutely nothing about fighting so I could build them up from scratch. It was slow going in the beginning, but eventually I stumbled upon Vernon White, my first student. He was a gifted athlete who was eager to learn, so every afternoon we worked out in the attic of my home. Submission fighting is nothing like karate—there are no katas or flashy punches and kicks. There are no belt tests or secret moves. If someone puts in the time and hard work, he can usually excel relatively quickly, and that is what Vernon did. It didn’t take long until he could put up enough of a fight to give me the kind of work-outs I needed to stay in shape.

      Word started to get around, and soon more young men who knew absolutely nothing about fighting started dropping by. It was hard to convince them that what we were doing was going to be the wave of the future because everything was so informal—we were training in my attic, for crying out loud. I had made some decent money over in Japan, so I decided to open up my first school. It wasn’t much, just a small storefront in a local strip mall, but I still felt it deserved a name. I didn’t want the name to give people the wrong impression—I didn’t want them to think it was another karate school. I toiled over it for quite a while, but then one afternoon I was watching a National Geographic special on lions. They talked a lot about the lion’s den, the lion’s home, and how lions will creep off into the grass to go hunting. It seemed to fit what I was trying to establish. I didn’t want a bunch of guys who felt like they had to bow to me or go through ridiculous rituals. I wanted the gym to be a home away from home for everyone who was a part of it. I wanted it to be a gym full of ruthless fighters.

      As I was getting my gym off the ground, I got word from Funaki that the first Pancrase event was going to be held on September 21, 1993, in Tokyo Bay Hall. Suzuki was going to be on the card, as well as Bas Rutten, a famous Dutch kickboxer. The organization wanted more Americans on the card to build controversy, and I told him that I’d gotten Vernon up to speed. We decided to pair him against Takaku Fuke, the second young boy I had wrestled when I went through my tryout over in Japan a few years prior. The card was starting to fill up, but Funaki and I still weren’t in the mix. I asked him what was going on, and he said that he had arranged it so that he and I would fight in the main event.

      I trained hard for that one—had to. Funaki is the best submission wrestler out there.

      When it came down to fight night, I wasn’t nervous; yet I wasn’t calm. Funaki was my instructor, a man I deeply respected. If it weren’t for him, I would never have gotten as far as I did. But the moment we climbed into that ring, our friendship would have to be put aside. It wasn’t going to be like those thousands of sparring matches we’d had in the gym. We wouldn’t pull our punches and kicks, and we wouldn’t go easy on the submission holds. When we stepped into that ring, we were going to try and hurt each other.

      The under card fights went really well. Suzuki caught his opponent in a rear naked choke in less than four minutes. Rutten, who would later claim the heavyweight title of the UFC, knocked his opponent out in forty-three seconds. Vernon did well, but Fuke caught him in an arm bar in a little over a minute. You could tell by looking out into the audience that the bouts weren’t what the crowd was used to. They had grown accustomed to long, drawn out fights full of reversals and close calls. These were real fights, and I think the crowd recognized the difference. I think it confirmed their suspicions that what they had been seeing all those years in professional wrestling was just a little too dramatic to be real.

      Then Funaki and I climbed into the ring. Both of us were extremely popular in Japan at the time, and we had the crowd hanging on the edge of their seats. It wasn’t a one-sided beating, that’s for sure, but I did manage to catch him in a chokehold that forced him to tap in submission in a little over six minutes. It was the first time I had beaten him. It was a big victory for me, but it was also a big victory for Funaki. He was the one who had trained me, the one who taught me everything I knew.

      The first event was a huge hit with the Japanese public, and over the next few months everything skyrocketed. After fighting in two more events, suddenly there were Ken Shamrock video games, Ken Shamrock posters, Ken Shamrock T-shirts. I was in over a dozen magazines each month, and my face was all over the news. Pancrase was becoming the biggest thing in Japan since rice, and for a while I was the star of the show.

      The organization was growing so fast that they were in desperate demand for fighters. The Japanese public particularly liked the matches between Japanese and foreign fighters, so part of my job became recruiting Americans to fight over in Japan. The organization basically wanted fresh meat, bodies for their fighters to beat up in the ring. I wasn’t about to do that. I wasn’t going to go up to someone on the street and say, “Dude, I got this fight, you want to go?” If I did that, I knew what would happen. The guy would get his ass handed to him in the ring, and then he would come back to me and say, “Why did you do that to me?” I didn’t want to have that on my conscience. I made it real clear to the organization that if I was going to send fighters over, they were going to be prepared.

      In order to do that, I moved the gym out of the strip mall and into a warehouse in an industrial district of Lodi. In one room I had weight-lifting equipment, every machine you could think of. In another room, I had 2,550 square feet of mats. And in the third room, I had a full-sized ring and dozens of punching bags hanging from the ceiling. There were no fancy pictures or weapons hanging on the wall. It was a hard-core training facility. It was perfect.

      Once I had the gym set up, I then had to fill it up with young fighters. It was different from trying to get people packed into a karate school. There was no way I could accept just anyone who wanted to learn how to fight. A lot of people think they want to learn how to fight, but when it comes time to actually climb into that ring, they suddenly realize that they can’t handle the stress. Then all that hard work and instruction just goes down the drain. I wasn’t offering self-defense classes. I wasn’t trying to boost anyone’s self-esteem. I was in the business of turning out fighters.