Royce Gracie, Ken Shamrock eager to renew rivalry

CULVER CITY, Calif. – A pair of fight legends from the 1990s recently found themselves in a legendary '90s location from a totally different world.

GMT Studios Stage 6 is the space in which the classic video to the Nirvana hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was shot in 1991.

That was a full two years before Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock made history of their own, as they were two of the competitors who launched the sport of mixed martial arts in 1993 at the seminal UFC 1.

Just like Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl and Co. had no clue that what they did on the lot in '91 would forever change the pop-culture business, nor could Gracie and Shamrock have contemplated that on the night of Nov. 12, 1993, in Denver, they were enacting permanent change in the history of combat sports.

Or that they’d launch an animus that would rage 22 years later.

Regardless, there's still animosity on both sides.

“I don’t like him because of the way he acts,” Gracie said. “It’s nothing to do with his technique. It’s the way he acts. Acts like a tough [expletive]. He runs his mouth.”

Gracie and Shamrock meet in the main event of Bellator 149 in Houston on Feb. 19. No one is expecting the fight between the UFC hall of famers to be a classic.

Gracie, 49, of Torrance, Calif., has not competed since a decision win over Kazushi Sakuraba in 2007. Shamrock, for his part, has lingered on and off on the periphery of the fight game, losing eight of his last 10 bouts. The 51-year-old returned from a retirement of five years in June and lost to Kimbo Slice at Bellator 138.

Regardless what one might think of the quality of the action in the cage when they meet in February, the dislike between the two remains raw and real, two decades on. In between shooting vignettes and interviews at GMT Studios, Gracie and Shamrock bickered, coming off something like a pair of middle-aged former high school football opponents wearing their varsity jackets to a local bar.

Gracie and Shamrock met twice in the UFC’s early days. At UFC 1, Gracie submitted Shamrock in 57 seconds in a tournament semifinal bout. The rematch at UFC 5, the first non-tournament bout in UFC history, was also the first with a time limit. The April 7, 1995 match went one 30-minute round, followed by a pair of three-minute overtimes, before the bout, which did not have judges, was declared a draw. It’s still the longest fight in UFC history.

Shamrock’s bitterness in large part stems from the way the Gracie family controlled things behind the scenes in the early days of the UFC.

Those who were around back in the day understand he UFC was never intended to become the big-money, corporate, network-affiliated promotional juggernaut it has become. It was, essentially, designed to be an informercial for Gracie jiu-jitsu as a self-defense technique. And while the fight outcomes weren’t predetermined, Rorion Gracie, behind the scenes, made sure the rules favored brother Royce.

Gracie was allowed to wear his gi at UFC 1. Shamrock, who had a wrestling background and had competed in shootfights in the Japanese Pancrase promotion, was not allowed to wear his wrestling shoes.

So, to this day, Shamrock disputes the finish, in which he claims Gracie used the gi to choke him out.

“It’s personal,” Shamrock said. “The fact is, if you go back, the Gracies, their family put on the event, and the day before the fight, I had never gone into a ring without shoes before. So the day before the fight I go into the fighters meeting and they say I can’t wear shoes.

“I go in there, and we’re grappling, and I can’t push back because my feet are slipping. So I go back and he’s on top of me and it's like being on ice. So he grabs his gi and he wraps it around my neck and he’s choking me. And as he’s choking me, this is all within the fight is what I’m thinking. It’s a weapon. So the refs like, ‘He tapped,’ and I’m like ‘He choked me. He choked me with the gi.”

Gracie, for his part, rolled his eyes at Shamrock’s claim and made a crude gesture with his hand.

“Is that why he lost?” Gracie mocked. “He could have used the gi to his advantage. And then he said he didn’t know where he’s going. He’s a grappler. The guy before that, he beat up like nothing. And the guys, after that, he beat up like nothing. So, excuses, excuses, excuses.”

Thus was MMA’s first grudge born. Anticipated tournament rematches never materialized. Shamrock didn’t participate at UFC 2, in which Gracie repeated as tourney champion. At the chaotic UFC 3, Gracie pulled out of the tourney with an injury following a first-round win over Kimo Leopoldo, at which point Shamrock, who had defeated Feliz Mitchell in the semifinals, also withdrew (Trivia note: Into the void stepped Omaha police officer Steve Jennum, who became the most unlikely UFC tourney winner ever as a substitute when he defeated Harold Howard).

By UFC 5, the promoters had wised up to the fact that short of matching up what by this point was their two most popular fighters in the first round and eliminating one right off the bat, their chances of the two meeting in the finals or even semis were a crapshoot. So with the UFC’s initial popularity cresting, they met in Charlotte in the first billed main event in company history.

Here’s where the stories get crossed again. Shamrock says he trained for the months on what amounts to a primitive ground-and-pound game plan, with the idea of slowly wearing Gracie out. He says he didn’t find out about the newly instituted time limit – done in large part to ensure the PPV didn’t run over allotted satellite time – until the day before the bout.

Most of the fight went off with Shamrock in Gracie’s guard. Shamrock was better prepared to defend the choke. Gracie, who could have went all night waiting for an opening if he had to – he once went 90 minutes in Japan against Sakuraba – was willing to play the game.

Shamrock will forever call himself the winner.

“I beat his ass up, I mean, who would you call the winner of the fight?” Shamrock said. “The guy with the blown-up eye or the guy who’s fresh. You can call it a draw or what you want, but he got his ass kicked, and he won’t give credit for that.”

Gracie, as you might expect by now, disagrees.

“He came in to play for the draw,” Gracie said. “If you fight somebody 40-50 pounds lighter than you, and you don’t beat that person ... dude. I’m 178, if I don’t beat someone 40 pounds lighter, and I don’t beat somebody up, I’ll put my head in the toilet and I’ll flush it. That’s why the lightweights can’t finish the heavyweight. For the heavyweights? Imagine [Wladimir] Klitschko feeling happy he fought to a draw with [Floyd] Mayweather. And he walked around dancing happy that he got the draw.”

UFC 5 marked the end of the Gracie family’s involvement with the early UFC. Shamrock, for his part, stuck around, and at UFC 6 defeated Dan Severn for what was then called the Superfight championship, the forerunner of the heavyweight title now held by Fabricio Werdum.

It took two decades to get around to the trilogy fight. Gracie-Shamrock III probably won’t be an artistic masterpiece, but that’s not the point. Bellator’s all about using classic names to lure in viewers for their biggest shows, as everyone from Shamrock to Kimbo to Tito Ortiz and Stephan Bonnar have proven. Or, as Cobain once put it, “Here we are now, entertain us.”

Follow Dave Doyle on Twitter: @DaveDoyleMMA