Shamrock still relevant in big picture

Where Frank Shamrock stands among the upper echelon of fighters can be debated, particularly after his loss of the Strikeforce middleweight title to Cung Le on March 29.

But what can't be debated is that there isn't another fighter in the business who is better at marketing himself. The Shamrock-Le match at the HP Pavilion in San Jose gave Shamrock main event spots in two of the three largest paid attendances ever in North America for a mixed martial arts event.

But he did so without the television exposure or the ticket selling value of the UFC name.

Shamrock not only doesn't mind if people hate him, he relishes it, if it results in them wanting to see him fight just to see him humbled. And after being knocked off the horse in the Le match with a broken arm, and five hours or surgery on Sunday which left the arm in a massive cast, he's already planning his next moves.

The timetable for Shamrock's return looks to be in about eight months. He had a plate and six screws inserted to put his ulna bone in his right forearm back together.

He felt it break in the second round but kept fighting on it. It had turned red and started swelling, and he noticed when throwing punches that instead of the impact reverberating up his arm and into his shoulder, it just stopped on one side of the arm, at the forearm. He was able to fight with it, and had Le on the run late in the third round.

But a kick by Le with ten seconds left in round not only turned things around, but in reality, ended things. Le's second-to-last kick completely separated the bone. Shamrock tried to throw a punch with the right arm and immediately realized he was done. He absorbed one last vicious head kick as the round ended.

Shamrock was told it would take four months for the bone to heal, and then he'll need a second operation to remove the plate and screws because he can't fight with them. It will take another ten or so weeks before the arm will be ready for fighting.

The Le fight left Shamrock with several gruesome souvenirs: the big cast on one arm; what appeared to be the world's largest blood blister covering most of his left forearm, also from blocking Le's kicks; nine staples near the top of his head from another kick and a discolored left eye as his souvenirs. But Le also took plenty of physical damage in a fight that took him from being a local star to a national one.

Shamrock didn't appear all that upset over anything, even that aura of invincibility he had over not having been stopped in a fight in nearly 12 years is gone.

"It humanized me," he said, eyeing a new marketing direction to build for a rematch, no longer pushing the idea that he can't be beat as much as pushing the idea he always comes to give people an entertaining fight. "It was a good fight, and it was a good story."

Shamrock felt if the forearm hadn't have completely given out and rendered the arm useless, that he would have taken over the next round.

While he was losing on the scorecards, before the kick that did the final damage, he had the strongest offensive flurry of the fight in the prior minute.

"I felt he was good for three rounds," said Shamrock. "He has a great style but it's not 100 percent biomechanically correct. Throwing all those kicks will tire you out. I felt in the fourth and fifth rounds I'd destroy him."

While one can never be sure, the buzz around San Jose in the aftermath of the fight gives the impression a second fight will do better than the first. But that also depends on Le maintaining the title.

"He was exactly what I thought he was," said Shamrock, conceded some of Le's kicks were harder than expected and he was surprised by Le's ability to take a punch. "I thought he'd run more but he didn't. I clipped him a few times and I figured he wouldn't last. He had no power in his punches when he hit me with clean shots. His kicks were good. Some were hard. Some weren't hard. They were deceptive."

"I tried to be too technical," he said, saying that something he can't fully explained happened to him that changed in his psyche two weeks before the fight.

"I got wrapped up in the technique of the stand-up game," he noted. "When my psyche changed, I lost some of my confidence. I don't know why."

If Shamrock can book his future, which he always tries to do, it'll be a fight with adopted brother Ken Shamrock, the "Blood Brothers" pay-per-view concept that he and Elite XC promoter Gary Shaw have been talking about for months, followed by a rematch with Le.

Even though Ken Shamrock looked shot in his March 8 loss in London, England, to unheralded heavyweight Robert "Buzz" Berry, Frank believes the platform of reaching a completely new audience on CBS can still make the fight big. He recognizes the need for the right television vehicle like a reality show for both to tell their stories, plus the uniqueness of two brothers who were pioneers in the sport and had many ups and downs with each other in the process. And while it's been years since Ken has looked good in a fight, he's one of Frank's legitimate rivals in the ability to sell a fight.

"He can talk the fight up big, but then he doesn't deliver," said Frank. "It's like a girl who's a tease."