I pushed myself hard during these workouts. I was eager to learn, but I also had a lot of pressure on my shoulders. Funaki had scheduled my first match for only seven days after I had passed the tryout. In addition to having to learn all the holds and positions, I also had to learn the rules of their organization. It wasn’t like professional wrestling in the States. There was a red corner and a blue corner, and each corner had a board above it to keep track of the number of knockdowns. For a fifteen-minute fight, they had a three-knockdown rule. If your opponent dropped you with punches or kicks and the ref gave you a count, it was considered a knockdown. If your opponent caught you in a submission hold and you were able to grab the rope, the ref would break you apart, but it would be counted as a knockdown. If you got three knockdowns marked on your board before you could put your opponent away, you lost the fight.
There was a lot to take in, but I felt confident that I could now do enough in the ring not to look like a complete amateur. And if I messed up once or twice, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. There was no way the organization was going to stick me into one of their bigger shows on my first night. I figured before I got a break I would have to prove myself, slowly climb the ladder like I had in the SAPW.
It wasn’t until I walked down the runway and past the aisles of fans that I realized I had been wrong. Up to that point, I considered a large crowd to be anywhere between one hundred and two hundred people. That night there were seventeen thousand fans in attendance. I had never dreamed of performing in front of so many people, and it made me realize the popularity of the UWF. Although they had only been around a couple of years, they were selling out forty-thousand-seat arenas. The submission wrestling stuff was still new, but the whole country was going crazy for it.
Surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous in the least. I had worked out on several occasions with my opponent, Yoji Anjo, and I knew that he was a good practitioner. I wasn’t going to go in there and try to take his head off with a punch or kick, and he wasn’t going to break my leg with a submission hold. If he caught me in a hold, I was going to fight it, sell it, and then slowly work my way to the ropes so I could get an escape. We were going to go at it, turn on the juice, but we weren’t going to hurt each other.
It was my most memorable fight, even though it wasn’t a real fight. I was young and green; yet the match flowed surprisingly well. I let Anjo beat on me with punches and kicks, and I wouldn’t sell his strikes unless they landed. A few of the shots that he hit me with probably would have knocked many people out, but I have a hard head. I purposely took them to the face and jaw because I wanted this match to be the best match ever. And we went wild in the ring. Every time we got a reversal or a rope escape, the crowd would boom out with their “Oooos” and “Aaaas.” Let me tell you, with seventeen thousand people in attendance, those 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
