Uncaged (27 page)

Part of that is heart. Part of it is spirit. But part of it is the conditioning factor. During my fighting heyday, I was at the very cutting edge of athleticism in the sport. I had conquered cardio like no one else. No one else trained like I trained. That made me extra hard to beat because I didn't get tired. I didn't lose a lot of energy just keeping up with the other guy. So I wasn't breathing hard, or trying to catch my breath, or running out of gas early in the fight. I was a sprinter, and I could sprint harder than anyone else.

So, because of the conditioning factor, if I could just not get knocked out, or tagged really hard in a way that broke something, I could outlast almost anyone. I could make the fight into a war of attrition. I could just keep coming back at you, round after round, and outlast you. With guys like Tito Ortiz or Renzo Gracie, I knew all I needed was ten or fifteen minutes. Same with someone like Cung Le. His style is all about evasion. It's very physical. It takes a lot of energy to dance around like that. I knew I could grind him down and finish him off.

But that was then. These days, almost everyone in the business is an incredible athlete. You can't just run a guy into the ground anymore like I used to do. The conditioning has become so important. Even the young guys who are wild and partying half the time, guys like Nick Diaz, are in incredible shape. They are super athletes, and that makes them super-hard to beat, the same way it made me super-hard to beat.

With the victory over Phil Baroni, I was Strikeforce's first middleweight champion. I added that belt to my collection. My fight record was 23-8-2. I wasn't sure who to fight next. There weren't that many guys. I was only willing to fight championship fights. I didn't want to fight little local fights. I wanted to do big Showtime
pay-per-view fights that would continue to build my brand and advance the sport.

Lots of names got thrown around. Later on, people would add even more names. People would ask me why I didn't fight Randy Couture, or Chuck Liddell, or Rich Franklin. There was actually never a chance of my fighting any of those guys. First of all, they were always a weight class ahead of me, or even two weight classes. I was always a middleweight or light heavyweight. All those guys were light heavyweight at one time, but never when I was. They're giants, and I'm a little guy. (Check it out: Chuck is six foot two and 205. Randy is six foot one and 205. That's why they fought each other instead of fighting me.) Besides that, when those guys came into their prime, I was almost always in the competing organization. Once I left the UFC, I never got a shot at any of the UFC guys. So I might have fought someone like Anderson Silva, who's really tall but not as heavy as Chuck or Randy, but he was a UFC guy. So he was out, too.

But when people started talking about Cung Le, I got interested. When I started thinking about going head to head in a stand-up fight, I got really interested. Cung Le is a great guy. I would say he is a friend. I trained with him for years when I was younger as a sparring partner. He and I are about the same age. He was born in Vietnam but moved to the United States when he was three years old, escaping Saigon in 1975, just three days before the city fell to the North Vietnamese. He started training in tae kwon do when he was really little, and then got really into wrestling. He was a college wrestling star. Then he took up martial arts, studying san shou, which is a Chinese free-fighting discipline. He excelled in that and was undefeated, with a 16-0 record.

He made his MMA debut on the night I fought Cesar Gracie. Cung went up against Mike Altman and knocked him out in the first round. He went on to beat Brian Warren, Jason Von Flue, Tony
Fryklund, and Sammy Morgan. He was undefeated in his MMA career when we set up our match. In his kickboxing career, including his san shou fights, he was 17-0, with 12 knockouts to his credit.

It was a good match. He was five foot ten and 185, which meant we were the same size. It was going to be a good fight. But I thought it wasn't exactly a fair fight. I knew all about Cung and his fighting style. I knew his skill set. He was very fast. He was able to lean his center quickly in all four directions and avoid strikes. This was important, because it was going to be hard to damage him. I knew he was very good with his feet. He had kicked me in the head a few times over the years.

But I had a game plan. I knew two things about Cung that gave me an edge. First, I knew he didn't have the conditioning. He has never made it, and remained strong, past fifteen minutes. Most of his wins had been in the first round. So I knew he couldn't fight a long fight. I knew if I could keep him fighting and get to the third round, he'd be toast. I also knew that he is afraid to get hit. He hates getting hit. That's one of his dirty little secrets. He doesn't want to have a fistfight.

I also knew that Cung fought way better standing up than on the ground. He was trained as a wrestler, but his ground game is actually not that strong. He is a good wrestler but not a great one. He is not dangerous on the ground. So I knew the odds were that he would not go there. If we got to the ground, I knew I would destroy him.

But that would make for a less interesting fight. I would win, but it would be boring. So I made a decision. I decided to stand up. I decided to fight him at
his
game, not at mine. I knew how to beat him. I knew how to challenge him in a game of martial arts, just like I knew how to beat other guys in a street fight. I had a great camp. I was trained to perfection. I was going into the fight without any injuries of any kind—which was unusual for me. Usually I
am distracted by having to manage some injury or other. I went in without any superstitions. I didn't feel hesitant on any level. I wasn't afraid to be hurt. I wasn't afraid to lose. I was looking forward to the challenge. It was exciting.

The fight was a Strikeforce/EliteXC event, held again at HP Pavilion, the Shark Tank, in San Jose. It was being broadcast on Showtime and pay-per-view, and we had a huge live crowd. It was a middleweight championship fight, and there were big expectations. We were both local, and we were both popular fighters. It was hard to know which way the energy was going, but the energy was enormous. I could feel it when I came into the arena.

We faced each other in the ring. I stared at Cung with my death stare, like I always do before a fight. Cung didn't look at me. He watched the ref and paid me no attention. Then we tapped gloves and it was on.

He stood southpaw style, with his right leg forward. I stood with my left leg forward. I was wearing shorts. He was wearing trunks. We looked very well matched in size and strength.

We had both done some of the same kind of training. During that time in the sport there was a wave of training techniques coursing through MMA. One of them was an oxygen reduction training, or oxygen deprivation training. Both Cung and I were doing it. The idea was to use this special oxygen mask while doing your cardio. As you do your workout, the oxygen supply diminishes, just as if you were training at higher and higher altitudes. We worked it up to something like twenty thousand feet. This was supposed to teach your body to produce at that level, when the oxygen is depleted, so that when they raise the oxygen back to normal your body will be that much stronger. I believed in it, but I didn't like it as much as simply exhausting myself doing an old-fashioned workout. I believed that if I ran as fast as I possibly could for twenty-five minutes then I was going to be just fine during the fight. The oxygen
deprivation theory seemed to be that you could run at medium speed for twenty-five minutes while they just tweaked the science. For whatever reason, I didn't believe in that 100 percent.

I didn't go quite as far as some guys. I heard people were sleeping in hyperbaric chambers, trying to really force their bodies to do something different. I heard Cung did that, but I never tried it myself.

It turned out that training was going to be the issue. We were both extremely prepared. We were going to have a good old-fashioned fight.

The fight started fast. Within the first minute we exchanged some blows. He had some very sharp high kicks, right at my ears. He threw a wide roundhouse kick that surprised me a little. He got a crack at my chin, early in the first round, that rang my bell a little. But I stuck with it. I was determined to stand up. I had said in all the prefight interviews that I was not going to make it a grappling fight, that I was going to fight him on his own level. I wanted people to see, in the first round, that I was serious about that.

But I found myself getting tired, trying to hit him when he wasn't there. He was really fast, and he moved in very unusual ways. He used angles that were not traditional fighting angles and were not the usual modern fighting style. You never lean back and drop your hands in boxing. You never lean forward and drop your hands in kickboxing. But he was doing that kind of thing. It took me a while to figure out how to hurt him, and it took me a while to figure out how to not let him hurt
me.

He had some interesting moves. One of them was a right-left jab and right side kick combination that was very effective. He got me with that two or three times before I started to see it coming. He got me with a right hook to the side of the head that was kind of interesting. I had the center of the canvas, most of the time, but he was hitting me effectively.

The fight started to feel good. I could feel everything that he had, and what he had didn't feel super-strong. He didn't feel sturdy.

With 1:25 left in the first round there was this amazing moment. Cung threw a huge kick at me, a wide spinning heel kick. I ducked it and came inside and socked him hard with a left, right on the button. He went down, and I almost got him in a guillotine choke hold, and then shot him a knee. He got loose but looked very dazed. Like I said before, he does
not
like a fistfight, and he suddenly looked like he was having a very bad time.

But a minute later he shot a foot jab at my left leg, and I reached down to block it with my right arm. Right after, he came with another kick to the body, and I blocked that with the same arm. This time I really put some weight behind it. That was a mistake. I felt my arm crack. I actually felt it, and thought I could hear my bones snap. It was a weird feeling, like someone had stabbed a knife in my arm. I shook my hand. It didn't feel that bad. I knew it was injured, but it didn't seem like that big a deal.

I knew the time was short. Cung and I exchanged a few more shots. I did my sleepytime act, like I was going to take a nap, and then pointing at Cung.
I'm going to put you to sleep.
He didn't seem that impressed.

The first round ended. I went to my corner feeling really good. I had this great big smile on my face, even though my face was a little mashed up. This was a good fight, and the fans knew it, and I felt great about being in it.

I felt composed. Maurice Smith was giving me directions, scolding me for holding back and playing Cung's game. But I was waiting. I had a plan and I was sticking to it. My arm was pounding a little bit. It hurt. But the pain was not disabling or even that distracting. It was just some information, like that arm isn't feeling as good as the other one.

The commentators had talked in the early part of the first round about Cung's kicks and how dangerous they were. One of the commentators had even said that I might wind up with a broken arm defending myself. But he recognized I was doing what I said I would do: “Shamrock's true to his word,” he said. “He stood with Baroni, and he's standing with Le.”

The second round started. I got more comfortable. I was smiling and laughing. But then he kicked me in the side of the head with a roundhouse and knocked my mouthpiece out. He hit me with his shinbone, and I didn't see it coming. We stopped and he let me pick up my mouthpiece, and we grinned at each other. But it made me nervous. I didn't even see the kick. It was that fast. I didn't like being hit by something I hadn't even seen.

I got knocked over about halfway through the round. I sat on my butt and said, “Come on!” I was only kidding. I knew he wouldn't come down to the ground after me. He'd get killed if he did that, and he knew it. So I popped back up. We were going to fight his fight. No problem.

I was still walking him down the canvas. He was still using the right side kick effectively—in the leg, in the side, in the body—but it wasn't hurting me much anymore. It was more distracting than anything else. He did land a right jab that caught me by surprise. I nodded my head a few times, as if to say, “Yeah, that was a good one.”

I got a good one into him, too. I hit him really hard a few times, once in the throat. I felt my fist go in and squish, and I thought, “Wow, that's going to hurt.” I had blocked a few more kicks with my right arm, which still felt weird. When I hit with it, I could feel it vibrating. But it didn't seem all that important. It just hurt.

The third round started. Cung came with a couple of high kicks that got me on the side of the head. I started to wonder if he was going for a decision, just trying to outlast me and score some points
and win that way. I was starting to get tired. I could see he was starting to get tired, too. I could hear him gasp, a few times, on our exchanges. I was glad about that. Maybe my cardio was better than his. Our rhythms were similar. We were moving at about the same speed.

But I also noticed he was starting to look really relaxed. He was finding a range. He was getting comfortable with the kicks. I didn't like that. I needed to overcome that. He could see his range, and I needed to correct that. I remember feeling a sort of urgency about it—like I had to stop that
now.

It's a little like dancing. One guy is usually leading. If the other guy controls the distance and controls the space between the two of you, then he gets the confidence and the timing for where and when the strikes are. If you control the area, you dictate. Most fighters dictate with the strike—with the jab or the punch. Cung was dictating with the side kick, or the fast round kick. He understood that was happening before I did. He had the range, and I couldn't take it away from him. He got more confident, and his kicks increased in power and combination. He kicked me in the body a few times and it really hurt. He got a heel into my face, and that hurt pretty good, too. Then I hit him really hard, super-hard, with a left hook. It didn't seem to do anything at all.