13
| 1 | The Road to the Ring |
 |
I CLIMB INTO A STEEL CAGE AND FIGHT; that’s what I do for a living. Some people have a hard time with that. They don’t understand how I can slam an opponent to the ground, climb on top of him, and then beat him unconscious with punches, knees, and elbows. They don’t understand how I can give that same opponent a respectful hug or handshake when he wakes up. The explanation really isn’t that complicated. First of all, I’m a born athlete and competitor. I thrive off the thrill of battle, and when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, you won’t find any tougher battles than you do in the rings and cages of mixed martial arts competition. Second, the sport allows me to channel my rage into something positive, and in my eyes, that is nothing short of a miracle.
I didn’t begin this life on a very positive note. As one of the only white kids growing up in an all-black neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia, during the late 1960s, I found myself brawling in the schoolyard, brawling in the park, brawling all the neighborhood kids who wanted to drop kick me in the head and turn my pockets inside out. Just as fighting became a way of life, my family moved away from the ghetto and settled in Napa, a city in California’s wine country where young boys didn’t need to fight for their survival. I tried to be normal, but a switch had been flipped in my head and I couldn’t turn it off. I got in trouble at school and with the cops, so I ran away and lived in an abandoned car parked behind a convenience store. Then one night an older runaway tried to stab me in the face with a locked blade. While I was in the hospital getting stitched up, a couple of cops dropped by to haul me kicking and screaming down to juvenile hall. I was ten years old at that point. I spent six months locked up with seventeen-year-old men who’d done hard time in California Youth Authority. I fought, always fought, but most nights it was hard to sleep because of the lumps on my face and the blood draining down the back of my throat. When I got out, it was off to a string of group homes, each one worse than the last. So I spent some time on the street, and then I spent some more time in juvenile hall. I learned how my body could be used to hurt people to survive.
Eventually I landed in my adopted father’s group home, Bob Shamrock’s Group Home for Boys, and I found a home and people who cared about me. I built a life for myself, but all that rage was still bottled up, still searching for a way to escape. It haunted me for ten solid years, and it wasn’t until I stepped into a ring and engaged in battle—a battle that had no rules—that I finally found a release for all my anger and rage. I no longer had to get into scraps out in the street; I no longer wanted to.
I took the ball and ran, never looked back. It was the best decision I have ever made. Competing in mixed martial arts (MMA) competition has allowed me to walk through life proud of who I am and what I have accomplished. Without it, I don’t know what I would have done. But finding the path I was meant to travel didn’t happen overnight. Between the time that I left my adopted father’s group home and the time I had my first professional fight at twenty-seven, there were ten years of soul searching, ten years of jumping from one job to the next in hopes of finding my niche.
That long and winding road began with bouncing in bars at eighteen years of age. Although I was well below the legal age limit to work in the bar, it’s amazing what a reputation can do for you. I was already known as “One Punch Shamrock” by that point. It’s not that I went out looking for fights, but in the sunny small town of Susanville, California, fights came looking for you. This was especially true if you were one of the city slickers being raised in Bob Shamrock’s group home. A lot of our guys came from
