Outrageous Conor McGregor: His Irish Roots and an Improbable American Dream

DUBLIN — For Conor McGregor, it all started when his sister told him about The Secret.
Erin McGregor had received a copy of the book from a friend, and she liked the things she read. She liked how the book told her that she could take control of …

DUBLIN — For Conor McGregor, it all started when his sister told him about The Secret.

Erin McGregor had received a copy of the book from a friend, and she liked the things she read. She liked how the book told her that she could take control of her life. As a fitness model and bodybuilder, she was no stranger to discipline. She’d crafted hard, rugged muscles through years of self-control and hard work.

But the book told her she could take things to another level.

She enthusiastically told Conor about the book. Written by Rhonda Byrne and released in 2006, The Secret is based on the law of attraction. It tells the reader that the power of positive thinking can change their life and bring about anything they desire: money, wealth, happiness.

At first, Conor thought his sister was being ridiculous. The law of attraction? It sounded like a bunch of nonsense.

But one day, a year or so after Erin first told him about the book, Conor had a bad day. He remembered the book and how Erin would go on about it and decided he’d give it a look, even if it felt a little ridiculous.

It was also available in DVD form, so Conor and his girlfriend Dee obtained a copy. They sat down and watched it. At first, Conor felt it was what he’d originally thought it was: “Even when I first watched it, I was like, this is b——t,” he says. “But then something clicked for me.”

He realized that the things he focused his thoughts on, whether bad or good, usually came true. And so Conor and Dee started practicing it, figuring there was no harm in at least focusing their thoughts on the positive.

They started concentrating on the things they wanted. At first, they focused on small things. They would drive to the local shopping center and focus on securing the parking spot closest to the door.

“We would be driving to the shop and visualizing the exact car park space,” he says. “And then we’d be able to get it every time.”

They kept visualizing small things, seeing the law of attraction play out in front of their eyes. Eventually, the small things turned to big things: dreams of wealth, success and fighting championships.

Today, Erin says she believes Conor always had the ability to control his life with positive thinking, even as a child. She believes it was always buried inside him. But his father Tony says there was nothing remarkable about him, nothing that would lead you to believe he would eventually become what he is today.

But everyone, from Conor to his parents and sister, believes that the moment Conor watched The Secret was the moment everything changed. This was the moment he slowly began to morph from a quiet boy into a brash and confident man, a man who spoke about the things he wanted and then went about the business of obtaining them. This was the moment when the dreams of a world championship, of financial windfalls and fame beyond measure began to take root.

This was the birth of Conor McGregor, UFC superstar.


McGregor is a fighter, but the fighting world is filled with those, though he is perhaps better than a great deal of them.

What sets McGregor apart—and what has made him a rich man with the promise of even greater riches on the way—is the force of his personality.

He is a quote machine, always good for a headline. He says things few others in the sport of mixed martial arts will, and he takes direct aim at current and future opponents with a razor-sharp tongue.

He inspires fervent devotion from his fans, especially those in Ireland who have watched him since long before he made the jump to the UFC. He creates a palpable sense of hatred from those who believe he’s too full of himself and has been given too much, too soon, simply due to his mouth.

But it is hard to paint McGregor with the same brush as other mixed martial artists who rose to fame because they could talk a good game, mostly because he has backed up everything he has promised so far.

We now view McGregor, who will fight Chad Mendes on Saturday in Las Vegas for the interim featherweight title, as one of the UFC’s biggest stars. But how did he get here? Is he playing a character like so many others? Is he truly as confident as he appears to be?


Tony McGregor, the child of an Irish father and English mother, began his life across the Irish Sea in Liverpool, England. But his family split up when he was seven, and Tony was sent to live with relatives in Dublin.

Tony met Mags at 15 years old. They were walking to school, and they crossed paths. A year later, they both landed jobs in a local factory and a romance sparked. They were married in 1980, when both were 21. Erin was born a year later, and Conor came into the world on July 14, 1988.

Tony and Mags were from the working class, and so they went to work, scraping together money to buy their first small house in Crumlin, a suburb of Dublin. They couldn’t afford a house in the neighborhood in which they’d grown up, so they purchased a two-bedroom house in a different neighborhood. They stayed in Crumlin for 12 years.

As with a hefty percentage of European kids, Conor‘s first sporting love was football. He was a Manchester United supporter and played for a local club. But there was a boxing gym next to the football club, and it piqued Conor‘s interest. He would occasionally pop into the boxing gym before and after football practice, but that was the extent of his interest.

“I was really focused on football,” he says.

When Conor was 15, however, he experienced a life-changing moment. The family moved from Crumlin and settled in Lucan. You’ll find Lucan on the far outskirts of Dublin, out where the hills turn green and roll and remind you of the Ireland you see in travel advertisements. They settled in a narrow house in a quiet neighborhood, where every house is separated from the road by a white picket fence.

The move was painful. Conor was ripped away from his lifelong friends and deposited in a new neighborhood filled with kids he didn’t know.

“It’s difficult for a teenage boy to be taken away from the only thing he knew,” Tony says. “It was a different area, different friends.”

“I certainly did not handle it well. I eventually did. But at the time, I had a lot of resentment towards my family. I actually was really upset for a long time,” Conor says.

Things were awkward. But he believes the exile actually helped mentally prepare him for what would eventually become his life.

“In the long run, it ended up working out better for my career, because I ended up being isolated. I ended up alone with my thoughts a lot more,” he says. “I feel being alone with your thoughts is a good thing. It allows you to figure things out for yourself. And that’s what happened for me in Lucan.”

Lucan also helped connect him to new passions and interests. He began kickboxing, which made him take boxing more seriously. Instead of following the same trail as every other Irish boy, Conor began to blaze his own.

“I realized I was enjoying combat sports a lot more than I was enjoying football,” he says. His love for football slowly began to fade, and a deep appreciation for combat sports began to take root. “Instead of going to the football club, I would go next door to the boxing club.”

Conor kept taking boxing and kickboxing classes, but he also discovered jiu-jitsu.

Slowly, the pieces to his future in combat sports were coming together.

Irish culture dictates that if you are not interested in school—if you have no desire to make your way to university and secure a degree—then you find a trade and you begin your working life.

This is what happened for McGregor. He had zero interest in furthering his education. “I had no use for it,” he says. His mom says he had the intellect for academia, but just didn’t have the interest.

He wanted to focus his time on training. But he lived with his parents, and they insisted he find a trade and a job.

He did, taking a job Mags found for him as a plumber. It offered a comfortable living, and with hard work, Conor had the opportunity to make a lifetime of decent money.

But he hated it from the beginning. It was grueling work. Conor looked around at the people he worked with and saw the effects that years of manual labor had on the body. He saw the stooped postures and the dead eyes.

“I did not see anyone that was in any kind of healthy shape,” he says. “I saw that maybe if I walked away from plumbing I could train two times a day. I could really focus on my diet. It’s hard to focus on your diet or on training when you’re on a building site 10 or 12 hours of the day.”

He continued to train as often as possible while maintaining the job, because that’s what was expected of him. Mags would wake up at 5 a.m. to take him to the construction site, just as she’d woken up early to take him to Sunday morning football matches when he was younger.

He worked 10 to 12 hours each day and then went straight to the gym for training. He fought on the weekends. He wanted to be a high-level fighter.

But such a schedule is incredibly demanding on the body, and Conor found it impossible to maintain. And so he made a decision: He was going to quit plumbing and focus on training full time. But first, he had to tell his parents.

“That’s it. I’m not going anymore,” he said.

“You are going,” they said.

A heated argument ensued. The way Tony remembers it, he and his son nearly came to blows. He and Mags were skeptical, because fighting for a living sounded like a bunch of nonsense.

“The first thing they said was, ‘Who else has done it? What other Irish man has made a career of this?'” Conor says. “And I could not point to another Irish man who had done it, because there was no one before me.”

Still, he’d made up his mind, and he was sticking to it.

“You’ll be sorry when I’m a millionaire,” he told his father. “I remember saying, at 25 years of age I will be a self-made millionaire. And my father laughed at me.

“And you know, I was a year late. I’m 26 now. But I did it. I told him so.”

Tony concedes that Conor did, in fact, tell him so.

“He would say, ‘I’m going to be famous. That’s who I’m going to be.’ He and Dee would sit there and watch the fights,” pointing to the television in the McGregor‘s living room. “He’d say, ‘That’s where we’re going to be. We’ll be in America this time in a few years.’ And he’s there now.”


McGregor made his professional MMA debut on March 8, 2008. When watching footage of those early fights with head coach John Kavanagh at Straight Blast Gym Ireland, it is easy to see his potential was there from the beginning. But he was raw, wild and untamed. He went 4-2 in his first six fights, showing promise but also holes that needed to be filled.

He worked relentlessly on filling them. He constantly badgered Kavanagh to open the gym at all hours of the night, which prompted Kavanagh to give him his own key so he wouldn’t be woken up by phone calls in the middle of the night. McGregor is still the only fighter with his own key to SBG.

He grew obsessed with movement, with stretching and physicality. He woke up each afternoon (he is a legendary late sleeper), crawled out of bed and began stretching. He did bear crawls around the house. He practiced jiu-jitsu and striking against invisible opponents.

And beginning with his seventh fight, something clicked. He knocked out Hugh Brady in just over two minutes.

His next fight lasted 16 seconds, another knockout.

The fight after? Just four seconds and another knockout.

His win streak grew, and his fame—driven by his natural charisma—began spreading beyond Ireland. UFC President Dana White began to hear rumblings about McGregor; the Irish fans were adamant that the UFC should sign him, because they believed he was already the greatest featherweight in the world.

After McGregor racked up eight wins (all finishes) in less than two years, White finally came calling, signing McGregor and matching him up with Marcus Brimage on the UFC’s April 2013 show in Stockholm.

McGregor knocked Brimage out in just over one minute.

A few months later, White brought McGregor to Las Vegas to spend a little time with him while also discussing a new contract. It was here that McGregor was truly introduced to the UFC’s international fanbase.

He released a selfie video of himself riding in the passenger seat of White’s Ferrari, screaming down the Las Vegas strip. Titled “the king’s meeting in Las Vegas,” the video encapsulates all that is McGregor.

“It’s the king of Las Vegas, Dana White, with the King of Dublin, the Notorious Conor McGregor,” he yells over the wind. White, driving the car, has the biggest smile on his face, as though he has realized he might’ve stumbled onto the next big thing. White guns the car, and McGregor laughs maniacally.

McGregor‘s star began to grow. He beat Max Holloway by decision, and then the UFC announced an event in Dublin. McGregor, in just his third UFC bout, headlined the card and knocked out Diego Brandao in the first round. Afterward, he cut a spirited promo in front of the Irish fans. That event is still considered by many to be one of the best in UFC history.

McGregor celebrated afterward with White and UFC executive Lorenzo Fertitta, drinking expensive Irish whiskey and making plans for the future.

And that future was bright. He knocked out Dustin Poirier in 1:46 last September and then did the same to Dennis Siver earlier this year. In less than two years, and in just five fights, McGregor had become one of the UFC’s biggest stars.

The UFC intended to capitalize: It booked him against featherweight champion Jose Aldo in July and scheduled an unprecedented world tour that would take both men to all corners of the globe to hype the fight. The tour ended in Dublin, where McGregor held the fans in attendance in the palm of his hand.

At the end, he stood up from his seat on the stage, rushed to Aldo’s side and grabbed the champion’s belt. He held it up and screamed at Aldo, who lunged at the challenger, screaming while trying to get his belt back. White separated them with a grin on his face. Money was in the air, and promotion for the UFC’s biggest fight of the year was well underway.

McGregor is painted by the UFC as a national Irish conquering hero who, when he steps in the Octagon, takes with him an entire country full of supporters. White once famously said that when McGregor fights, the entire country of Ireland shuts down.

The truth, as usual, is more nuanced.

He is known by nearly everyone in the country. Stop anyone on the street and mention his name, and it is almost certain their face will register a reaction of some sort. Bartenders, cab drivers, hotel bellhops—all of them know who he is. His appearances on network television and in Ireland’s largest media outlets have ensured that he is a known commodity to all on this tiny island.

But there is a great divide among the Irish regarding McGregor and his rise to fame. Those who are young and perhaps already into mixed martial arts love him and everything he represents. To them, he is a hero, someone who escaped the dreary life of a plumber and made something of himself. And he is a fighter, which endears him even more to the Irish. Shout his name in a pub, and you are likely to be met with a chorus of fervent supporters.

But there is little love lost for McGregor among older Irish citizens. Many older than 35-40 years old generally don’t like the way he handles himself. They’d like him to be a little more humble. Irish sporting heroes have generally been quiet and unassuming; the boxer Katie Taylor is often referenced as one of Ireland’s greats and held up as an example of the ideals they would love all athletes to strive for.

At the massive Croke Park, the home of Gaelic football, hurling and perhaps a future location for a McGregor fight, 72-year-old Francis Curran—a diehard hurling fan who came to Croke to take the Etihad Skyline tour (a walkway on top of the roof of the stadium that must be experienced to be believed)—acknowledged that he knows who McGregor is; he just doesn’t appreciate the way he behaves.

“I hope he gets beaten. And not just beaten, but beaten badly, so he’s bloody,” Curran said. “I’d like to see him lose, and then he can go back down and try to make his way back up with a little respect. It was the same thing with Muhammad Ali; we wanted anyone to come along and beat him.”

This is a common refrain among the older Irish, most of whom do not watch the young-skewing UFC. Most are fans of hurling, gaelic football or football. If they watch combat sports, it is usually boxing. Tony, Conor‘s father, says this is not surprising, because mixed martial arts is still often misunderstood.

“The older generation, they just don’t get it. This is a brand-new sport. And it’s a brand-new sport to Ireland,” Tony said. “And for Ireland to have this brand-new sport, and to have a hero that goes along with it? It’s incredible. So the old folks just don’t get that.”

Ireland does not have many sporting heroes. It is a small nation with a rich and proud history, but it has not produced the same kind of laundry list of athletic greats as England and other countries in the region. And so those who make it—regardless of their chosen sport—are often instantly catapulted to fame.

“Even if you were playing tiddlywinks and you won the world championship, you would be instantly fated as a hero,” Tony says.

Conor says he has never experienced any kind of hate in his home country, even from older citizens, and notes that the way he’s portrayed on television does not wholly reveal who he is.

“I am not arrogant when anyone meets me. I am nice to people. I keep to myself, and as long as people are nice to me, I am nice to people,” he says. “I’ve never encountered anything like that. Usually, if people have that opinion of me, they walk away from meeting me thinking differently.

“But I can’t control what people think of me. I live my own life the way I see fit. I cannot worry about the way people portray me, because people portray me in many different lights. This is the life I am in, so I can do nothing but accept it and carry on.”


McGregor‘s bout against Aldo was derailed when, in late June, it was reported the champion had suffered a broken rib in training. After several days of uncertainty, the UFC issued a press release saying Aldo’s ribs were only bruised, not broken, and that he was planning on defending his championship.

The Brazilian doctor who examined Aldo insisted that his ribs were broken, however, and on June 30, the champion withdrew from the bout.

Perennial top contender Chad Mendes had already been tabbed as a replacement for Aldo in case the fight fell through. The UFC announced that McGregor and Mendes would fight for the interim featherweight championship while Aldo healed.

McGregor focused on staying positive, despite the chaos. All of the things he’d learned from The Secret, and all of the ways he’d seen the law of attraction help him prosper, helped him get through a time when the biggest opportunity of his career faltered and then vanished.

“We’re all human at the end of the day. For me, it’s just when something happens, I take a step back and put myself in a positive frame of mind,” he says. “If it’s something I can control, I will control it. And if it’s not, I let it be. I have things that motivate me. I think of where I am in this game and where I was before, and then I carry on. And that helped me through it.”

And so McGregor will be at UFC 189, carrying the pride of his country on his back. Thousands of Irish fans have booked flights to Las Vegas; they will turn up in droves, taking over the casinos and the bars and the attractions. Many of them will be adorned with the Irish flag. If you are in Las Vegas this week, do not be confused: You have not been transported to Dublin; rather, Dublin has been transported to you.

McGregor has come a long way from Crumlin and Lucan, from the directionless boy to the focused man. His family—especially his mother—misses him greatly, but they realize he’s on his own journey now and that he must see it through. They talk to him occasionally, texting messages here and there, but mostly they leave him to his mission.

And what is that mission?

To be the greatest fighter on the planet. To be the best fighter of all time. To leave a legacy in the fight game for Ireland, a fighting country constantly in search of heroes. To make as much money as possible. And to continue to grow the sport, both at home and abroad.

“That’s what I take great pride in. We are a fighting nation. So to be first on this stage, and leading the way? I have no doubt the next generation will come on and continue my legacy,” he says. “We will continue to run the game long after I am retired.

“I am happy to play a great part in history. But long after I am done, my story will be told.”

 

Jeremy Botter covers mixed martial arts for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter

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Inside Ken Shamrock’s Quest to Show He’s Still the World’s Most Dangerous Man

SAN DIEGO — Next to the bed in his Windsport motor home, parked behind a discount tire store in suburban San Diego, “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” has a Bible and a Glock.
“That’s the American way,” Ken Shamrock says, breaking into a smile with…

SAN DIEGO — Next to the bed in his Windsport motor home, parked behind a discount tire store in suburban San Diego, “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” has a Bible and a Glock.

“That’s the American way,” Ken Shamrock says, breaking into a smile with just enough malice to make you wonder. “Me and my Bible will beat the faith into you.”    

In the next room, a timid pit bull whines, tail between its legs. She’s been Shamrock’s only company as he prepares for Friday’s much-anticipated fight with Kimbo Slice. There’s a greasy George Foreman grill in the back. A ubiquitous and eponymous energy drink is everywhere. There are no luxuries here.

“Because of who I am and what I’ve accomplished, everything is pretty much given to me,” Shamrock says. “People cater to me all the time. It’s almost like I’ve lost that edge—lost the ability to want something and then put in the work necessary to get it.

“I have to earn whatever it is I get from here on out. Right now I don’t even have running water in that trailer. I have to go and shower at the gym. Shave at the gym. I have to bring in water in jugs in order to have water to boil for food. It’s been rough.”

A UFC Hall of Famer, the 51-year-old Shamrock was the first man to earn seven figures for a fight in the Octagon. That was 10 years and a lawsuit ago. Now, in a sad motor home in a questionable part of town, he’s looking for one more chance—a chance to write that happy ending all fighters dream of but few can realize.

A pink sign hanging on the door reads “The Gift of Friends.” That may work for Mama Shamrock, but the grizzled cagefighter inside belies that message. The bathroom looks like it belongs to a college freshman. There’s a pan on the bed to catch the drip, a rare spring storm having created a significant leak.

Last night, he says, he was forced to sleep on the couch with the dog. He says it with a twinkle in his eye.

Ken Shamrock looks happy.

“I feel really good,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been given a second chance to do what I love doing. I thought I had lost my opportunity to go out of this sport the way I wanted to go out—and that’s to go out fighting and go out fighting at a relatively high level.”

Twenty minutes later, down the road at Cully’s Restaurant in Poway, Shamrock is no longer in quite the same jolly mood. We walk into the place, a definitive greasy spoon where Shamrock eats each morning, and then walk out and back in again. We do it several times as reality television cameras from Spike TV attempt to capture the perfect authentic greeting from the restaurant staff.

Eventually they give up. They’ll shoot it again when we’re done. Reality, after all, is malleable. You quickly become inured by the cameras in Shamrock’s presence. If it’s not Spike, it’s a team shooting a documentary on his life. If it’s not them, it’s a Marine with a cellphone camera. If you’re with Shamrock, you are being documented.

It’s easy to forget the two cameramen and the producer, though, when Shamrock has a bone to pick.

More than 21 years after his first professional fight, there’s still a raging intensity just underneath the surface. There’s a face Shamrock used to make as a WWE wrestler when he applied his signature ankle lock submission. He’s wearing it at breakfast while chastising Spike’s team for what he feels is a Kimbo-friendly slant.

“He’s been last in everything,” Shamrock complains. “Last one out at every press appearance. Getting the last word in the TV commercials. It’s supposed to be a promotion of equals. That’s OK. They’ll see.”

The interview, at some point, turns into a performance piece. It’s my interview, but there are notes for me as well as for Ken, who orders pancakes and six scrambled eggs, insisting all the while that it probably won’t be enough food. He’s fighting at heavyweight and still hitting the scale at a svelte 217 pounds. The weight, he says, just won’t stay on anymore in the face of all the intense workouts he’s putting himself through.

“Eat more aggressively,” I’m told, and I give it my all. Ken is instructed to stab violently into his eggs, covered in ketchup, while he discusses how much he loves to make an opponent bleed. He literally pounds his food while talking about inventing the MMA strategy of ground-and-pound.

At first, it seems a ludicrous claim. Invented it? But there he is on tape, sitting in Royce Gracie’s guard at UFC 5, 20 years ago, creating a sport with the power of invention and desperation.

“Technique is certainly a lot better now. But when you talk about countering the guard, I developed that in MMA to fight Royce,” Shamrock says. “If you stay in the guard and control the hips and flatten him out, you can control him. And that was the start of ground-and-pound.”

In a way it’s like listening to a basketball player discuss inventing the jump shot, a reminder that this is still a sport very much in its formative stages. Shamrock is MMA’s most enduring star. Part of a pro wrestling troupe determined to put on matches that weren’t fixed, he hit his physical prime at just the right time to make a global impact.

Within months of the first legitimate pro wrestling match in decades, Shamrock was one of the breakout stars of the very first UFC. He’s been a presence on the scene ever since.


The doors at the San Diego Combat Academy roll up to let in the air. UFC fighter Liz Carmouche and a business partner have claimed two bays in an automobile repair shop. Instead of rebuilding engines, they are building fighters—even reclamation projects like Shamrock.

For Ken, this camp is a family affair. Waiting for him, in addition to trainer Manolo Hernandez, is Pete Williams, one of Shamrock’s top students in the formative days of his legendary Lion’s Den training camp. The first MMA “supergroup,” the young men who met Shamrock’s exacting standards and lived in his famed fighters’ house went on to great success in the sport’s early days. After all, if you could survive a training session with the 1995 version of Ken Shamrock, you can survive just about anything.

“He used to wake me up by whispering, ‘I’m going to beat the f–k out of you today,'” Williams says with a laugh. He can laugh after two decades. But at the time it wasn’t always so funny.

“There were definitely days we would be stretching and warming up and dreading whether or not Ken was going to come in that day,” he says. “Because if Ken came in, it was going to be an intense day. When Ken showed up, it went to another level of intensity. Depending on what was going on in his life. The worst days were when he was looking to blow off some steam. Then he was going to beat the crap out of some people. You had to either up your game or get your ass kicked on a daily basis. It was a live or die situation.”

Shamrock smiles when he hears Williams’ description of their early days together. If you squint hard enough, you can pretend it doesn’t have a predatory edge.

“It wasn’t that bad! But I can imagine that’s what they all thought,” he says. “To me, it was all about toughness. It was about preparing these guys for a career. It was bare-knuckle at that time and pretty brutal. That was the only way you were going to make it.

“If they were going to do this, they had to know what you were getting into. My whole thing was getting in there with these guys and really pushing their limits. Testing their toughness and their desire.”

The Williams sighting is kind of a big deal in the MMA subculture. Over the years, since riding a losing streak right out of the sport just as things finally started looking up, Williams has been a complete recluse.

More than a decade since his retirement, sporting a gnarly graying beard and a bit of a paunch, Williams is looking to reinsert himself into the fight game. Once again, Shamrock is leading the way. Williams has been there since the beginning, serving as Shamrock’s main training partner for almost every one of his big fights.

Does his mentor still have what it takes to compete?

“I think 51 is probably too old to compete with the 20-somethings or try to go in and get the belt,” Williams says. “But a grudge fight or a superfight where the opponent is also over 40 years old—I think it’s totally viable.”

That’s certainly fine with Bellator promoter Scott Coker. Sitting cageside at an event in Temecula, California, he says he has no intention of pushing either Shamrock or Slice into title contention. Instead, the two big names from yesteryear are intended to be a bridge—to connect lapsed fans to the promotion’s current crop of exciting young fighters.

“We do some fights like this that I call fun fights for the general fan and other fights for the hardcore fan. We have something for everybody,” Coker says. “The fun fights we do are designed to cast a net for the audience that used to be there.

“The beauty of all those eyeballs is that they’ll get to see Pitbull [featherweight champion Patricio Freire] and they’ll get to see Michael Chandler. The same way the Tito Ortiz and Stephan Bonnar fight basically launched Will Brooks. We’re going to build stars every time we have one of these fun fights. We’re really going after it.”

Even the normally unflappable Coker, a living repudiation of his bombastic UFC counterpart Dana White, couldn’t hide his excitement for the fight—or his surprise that Shamrock was willing to step back into the cage again after five years on the outside. When Shamrock pointed at Royce Gracie at a legend’s convention and said, “I want to fight that guy,” Coker says he nearly fell out of his chair.

“I thought he was kidding,” he says. “I asked, ‘Wait, are you still interested in fighting?'”

Then the wheels really started turning.

“The next thing I asked was ‘Would you fight Kimbo Slice?’

“And he said ‘I’d love that fight.'”


At the San Diego Combat Academy’s flagship gym, Shamrock’s son Sean laughs at the idea he might be surprised his dad is stepping back into competition.

“He’s going to be 80 years old and walking to the ring with an oxygen mask,” he says. “He’s gonna do it until he can’t no more. It’s exciting that he’s getting back to what he loves to do. It’s like things are back to normal.”

If you were expecting trepidation and fear about Grandpa Shamrock returning to action, you’ll be disappointed in Clan Shamrock’s shoulder-shrugging nonchalance.

“I’m not worried at all. It’s going to be fun,” Sean’s older brother Ryan says. “I hear what everybody is saying, that because he’s old he can’t do it. But I see his training. Just wait until he gets in the ring and everybody sees what he does.”

If their confidence seems misplaced, have a look at this recently posted picture of Shamrock defying Father Time:

In the gym at least, the old Ken is back. He does a circuit that includes leg presses, flys and bicep curls on a balance ball. More insidious are the “wheel of doom” and the Indo Board.

The motivation for Shamrock is simple.

“I don’t want to be disappointing again—to myself or my fans,” Shamrock says.

He’s open about his last several fights failing to live up to his own high standards. His problems go all the way back to a fight in Japan in 2000, when he was forced to quit during a fight he was winning handily, asking Williams to stop the bout with the haunting cry of, “Petey my heart.”

“No matter how tough you are or how much willpower or determination you have, if there’s something wrong with your body it’s going to shut down and stop,” Shamrock says. “It’s good to have those qualities, but it’s important to know what you’re pushing against. And I almost pushed myself into the grave. I was frustrated. I was disappointed. I was depressed. This is not me. This can’t be all I have. This can’t be it. But there came a time when I had to accept that it was.”

He claims to be back on the right track now. And while there’s every reason to be skeptical that a man’s physical condition would be better at 51 than it was at 36, Shamrock’s strength and conditioning coach Bill Crawford says the fighter’s work in the gym is a powerful counterpoint to any critics.

“I can’t really throw anything at him he can’t handle,” Crawford says. “I train fighters from the age of 19 all the way up to Ken. All I know is that he does the same workouts they do.”


Inside Team Shamrock, there’s much talk about his spiritual walk and how much he’s changed over the years.

“Getting a chance to live with him since he’s been going to church and living the way he’s supposed to live, you can definitely tell a difference,” Sean says. “Anybody who knew him before can see that.”

But glimpses of the old Shamrock emerge from time to time.

At his trailer, Sean somehow manages to take up three parking places. “I park where I want to park,” he says. The lax attitude doesn’t extend to others’ cars, and when the Shamrocks are forced to take a short walk because a Mustang has blocked the entrance to the motor home, Father Shamrock screams, “Hey, whose car is this?”

The anger is palpable as he stalks the parking lot looking for the culprit. It quickly dissipates when an older woman, not at all impressed with the hulking fighter, calmly comes out to move her car.

If Shamrock needs to access his dark side, it’s not far from the surface. Just the mention of Slice can get him going. The two men have a long and sordid history. In 2008, they were set for a fight on CBS, a bout designed to continue Slice’s launch into the MMA mainstream.

For Shamrock, it was a stormy time. He knew he was there as the opponent, expected to lose to a man most famous for backyard street fights on YouTube. Already in a dark place because of his father’s failing health, a fight week contract dispute with promoter Elite XC sent him spiraling on a downward trajectory.

“They told us they didn’t have to meet with us,” Shamrock says. “We could do the fight or they would see us in court.”

And then, in the midst of the madness, it happened.

“I got a friend of mine, Dan Freeman, and we moved all the stuff out of the way in the hotel suite and started rolling around,” Shamrock says. “Easy stuff like you’d do in the locker room to warm up. Just to get my mind back on the fight.

“As I had his back, my head came down just as he popped his head up. Boom. He caught my eye. It wasn’t really that hard, and we even kept moving. Then I saw blood.”

It was a bad cut, on the day of the fight no less. Shamrock was scratched from the card, forcing Kimbo into a fight with the unknown Seth Petruzelli instead. Petruzelli knocked Slice out in 14 seconds. Shamrock was surrounded by whispers that he had cut himself on purpose in protest over Elite XC’s poor treatment.

Neither man has ever really recovered from the incident. Slice claims to this day that Shamrock was looking to duck out of the fight because he was afraid. In Team Shamrock, this is literally only mentioned in whispers. Even today, it’s a claim that stings.

“When Kimbo said that, I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? Who are you? Where did you come from?’ I would never say that about another fighter. Because I don’t know their situation. I would never do that,” Shamrock says. “To me that’s just a guy that’s got no character, he’s got no morals, he’s got no respect for life or for people.

“I fought all over the world against everyone. I ain’t afraid of nobody. Fighting in a ring is not scary. On the street, with guns and knives, where I came from? That’s scary. Fighting in a ring? Please.”

With Shamrock, you have to take these displays of temper with a grain of salt. His years in the WWE have made him a master salesman and, over and over again throughout his career, a series of opponents have been turned into his arch-nemesis for the purpose of ticket sales.

Still, there is the sense that there is truth here, lurking just under the surface.

“He called Ken a coward,” Shamrock’s business partner Des Woodruff says. He shakes his head, unbelieving.

“When I watch them interact, you can feel how much they dislike each other,” Coker says. “This is going to be a fight. These guys are going to fight. They are going to come out, and it is going to be on. When they walk in, I’m going to have goosebumps. It’s going to be that kind of fight. The emotions are so high it’s going to be a special night.”

As Shamrock towels off to leave the gym, a month before the fight, he looks ready to go. He’s on track, he says, already in shape to do three rounds. He’s fueled by many things—his doubters and his opponent among them. But most of all, there’s a burning desire to prove something to himself.

“I’ve been saying forever that I needed to do this again. Inside of me, I knew I had something more,” Shamrock says. “People who are given second chances often squander them. This is my second chance, and I promise you I am going to go into that ring and give everything I have.

“And it’s not just about winning. It ain’t about winning a three-round decision. It’s about finishing him in the first round. It’s not a fight I want to go to a decision. I want to finish this guy because I can.”

 

Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.

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