were some loud “Oooos” and “Aaaas.” I could feel them in my chest, and it filled me with a sense of accomplishment.
That satisfaction continued to grow when I won the bout and got my hand hefted into the air. It was the first time I had done anything like this, the first time I had competed in the UWF, but the crowd started chanting my name. I looked out into the rows of seats for the first time since I climbed into the ring, and I could see seventeen thousand faces staring at me, praising me for what I had just done. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be.
“This is awesome,” I muttered under my breath.
After the match, people came up to me right and left. They all wondered if I was OK. The UWF wasn’t like WWF—everyone thought it was real. They all thought I had been knocked out a couple times during the match, and they wanted to know if I was going to the hospital. Still selling it, of course, I told them I was probably just going back to my hotel to get some rest. If I didn’t feel better in the morning, then maybe I would go to the hospital.
In addition to making an impression with the fans, I also made an impression with the promoters. A month after my first match, they gave me a match with Funaki, my instructor. He was the king of the hill when it came to professional wrestling in Japan, and he was also the best submission wrestler out there. When we stepped into the ring together, it was a knock-down, drag-out, grappling match. We pushed each other to the limit for twelve minutes straight. It had already been determined that he was going to win the match, but when he tried to pick me up and slam me down for the finish, he toppled over because he was totally out of gas. Despite the anticlimactic ending, the fans appreciated how we had laid everything on the line. Even though I had lost, that fight brought me to instant stardom over in Japan.
Never had I been so fulfilled in life. I was in the gym every day, learning countless ways to defeat my opponents with submission holds. I was making good money, $1,200 a bout, which was a huge step up from what I was used to. And I started to fall in love with Japan. The food began to taste better, and although everything was just as cramped as it had been on my first visit, I seemed to fit in fine wherever I went. I had finally found the niche I had been looking for in my life. It seemed too good to be true, and then I realized that it was. Not long after my fight with Funaki, the UWF broke up.
I guess they were having trouble in the head office. Several of the better-known wrestlers started their own spin-off companies. There was the UWFI, RINGS, and Fujiwara-Gumi, which was run by Yoshiaki Fujiwara. I had gotten pretty popular after my match with Funaki, and each of the organizations wanted me to go with them. I liked them all, and I would have been happy working for any one of them, but I decided to go with Fujiwara-Gumi because Fujiwara was friends with Sammy Saranaka, and Saranaka’s family had given me my start. I also wanted to go where Funaki went. I was loyal to him because he was my teacher, but I also knew that he would push for more realistic bouts.
The day I signed the contract with Fujiwara, Saranaka came into my hotel room and dumped thirty thousand dollars onto my bed. The bills were bundled into ten-thousand-dollar stacks, and there were three stacks! I had never seen so much money at one time in my life. I thought I was rich. I was rich; at least for a little while. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money to have sitting in front of you, but it’s not a lot of money when you have to ration it out for a whole year. Six months later it was all gone, and I still had another six months on my contract. Yeah, I learned a lesson with that one.
At the time, however, I couldn’t have been happier. I would stay in Japan for a month and wrestle all day, every day. I became a human sponge, absorbing techniques from everyone. Sometimes I stayed in a hotel, other times I’d sleep in the dojo. Then I’d do a match and fly back home for a month. A month later, I’d fly back to Japan, do another match, and then stay until my next match. It was a pretty good system—I got to learn the art of submission fighting as well as see my family.
In just a matter of months, once Fujiwara brought his company up, I was the top dog in Japan. There were Ken Shamrock T-shirts and Ken Shamrock phone cards. I was doing so well the organization started to bring in other foreigners to try to see if they could have the same success. I remember one time Saranaka brought over Dwayne Kowalski, a Greco-Roman wrestler on the U.S. Olympic Team. We were going to do a match together, so we got together in the dojo to work out the details. He was a phenomenal athlete, accustomed to manhandling everyone on the mat, so when it came down to deciding who was going to win our match, he made it clear that he didn’t want to “put me over,” which meant that he didn’t want to let me win.
I knew exactly where he was coming from. He was just like me in that he hated to lose. It wasn’t going to be a real loss, but the people in the audience weren’t going to know that. If it started to get around in the amateur wrestling world that a professional wrestler had beaten him, he would never hear the end of it. And that’s what he considered me, a professional wrestler. He had never before done submission wrestling, and I didn’t feel he took it all that seriously. After all, he was a world-class Greco-Roman wrestler.
Kowalski didn’t want to lose, nor did I want to lose. As we were trying to work out this detail, Saranaka came up with a solution. He suggested that we both climb into the ring and fight for real right there and then.
“Whoever wins goes over,” Saranaka said, meaning whoever won the real fight would also get to win the fake one.
Kowalski was all for it. He wasn’t gloating like he had already won, but I could tell that he was confident. He didn’t think anyone could touch him on the wrestling mat.
“If you feel something painful, tap,” Sammy told him, already knowing what the outcome would be.
With a nod of his head, Kowalski assumed his fighting stance in the ring. The moment we got the go-ahead to begin from Saranaka, I shot in on his legs, took him to the ground, and caught him in a heel hook. I forced him to tap.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, truly perplexed.
“A heel hook,” I said.
“Well, I wasn’t ready. I’ve been doing Greco, no one has shot in on me for years.”
I agreed to give him another shot, so we climbed back into the ring. This time it took me twenty seconds to get him to the ground and catch him in a heel hook, and once I had it sunk, I put it on nice and tight just to let him know that I could break his leg. He still couldn’t believe it, but he didn’t demand another go. And when we stepped into the ring in front of twenty thousand fans a week later, he put me over without complaint. It went fairly well, too. Then, a short time after the match, I started coaching him in submission wrestling.
I was becoming an animal in the gym, learning hundreds of different ways to make an opponent scream in pain. I could catch my opponents all the time during practice, but I knew that was different than catching an opponent in a real fight. When two people are going at it with bad intentions, adrenaline is flowing; there’s more at stake. A hold that worked in training might not have the same effect when your opponent’s pride is riding on the line. I was Fujiwara’s biggest star, wrestling in front of twenty-thousand people each month, but it was getting harder and harder for me to put my fellow wrestlers over. I didn’t want to pull my punches and kicks. I didn’t want to release my submission holds once I had them sunk. I wanted to test out my newfound skills in actual battle.
Six months into my new career, I finally got that chance. At the time, there was a heated feud going on between the Japanese submission wrestlers and the Muay Thai kickboxers. For the past twenty years, the kickboxers had been widely regarded as the toughest fighters around; no one could touch them, but when the UWF had been in full swing, they claimed that their grapplers were tougher. The feud had never been resolved, so Fujiwara decided to give his organization a boost by capitalizing on the controversy. He called out Don Nakaya Nielson, the middleweight Muay Thai champion. Although Nakaya Nielson lived in Hawaii, he trained in Japan and was extremely popular. The bout was supposed to be worked, everything predetermined, but a few minutes into the bout, Nakaya Nielson threw a huge knee to Fujiwara’s face and split him open.
Afterward, Fujiwara decided to settle the feud for real.