CULVER CITY, Calif. -- The Shamrock brothers will be back together again.
Frank Shamrock will be in the corner of his adopted brother Ken when Ken fights Royce Gracie at Bellator 149 on Feb. 19 in Houston, Ken said Wednesday at a media day. Frank will also formulate Ken's strategy for what will be Ken's third time fighting his fellow MMA legend.
The Shamrock brothers have had a very public feud over the last two decades. Frank Shamrock left their adopted father Bob Shamrock's Lion's Den gym during his fighting career to start his own fight team, heightening tensions. Ken has always been upset that Frank did not attend their father's funeral. There were even rumblings over the years that the two men, both taken in as foster children at Bob Shamrock's ranch for troubled boys, would fight each other.
Ken acknowledged Wednesday that the relationship is not what it once was. But there have been steps taken to improve it in recent months and years.
"You gotta forgive and just gotta move forward," Ken said. "And work with what you've got. I think me and Frank have been doing that slowly. He's not fake; I'm not fake. So, it's not like we're gonna smile and hug each other and pretend like nothing ever happened, because it's not true. But what we will do is recognize that we need to move forward."
Ken will be doing his training camp in Dallas and his head coach will be former Lion's Den compatriot and ex-UFC star Guy Mezger. Frank will not be coming down to help Ken in the gym, he said, because he doesn't train anymore and is busy reviving the Shamrock Boys Ranch for at-risk kids in honor of their father. But Frank is happy about working in conjunction with his brother again.
"I've always loved Ken and never really had an issue with him," Frank told MMA Fighting on Wednesday via phone. "It was kind of him with me. I'd like to think we've all grown and we're back to being a family again.
"There was a huge part of my life where he was my teacher and he was my guiding force for a long time. Then he just wasn't there. It was challenging. As a fighter and a student, he was the fighter I emulated. To lose that, it took a lot of searching and a lot of moving around until I was able to rebuild that guiding force again."
Ken Shamrock was one of the UFC's biggest stars from the very beginning, one of the faces of the sport's young days. Frank Shamrock is a former UFC middleweight champion and thought of as a precursor to the new generation -- a fighter who excelled at all aspects of MMA when it was still very much thought of as a style vs. style spectacle.
Ken returned to MMA with Bellator after a five-year absence to fall to Kimbo Slice via first-round knockout in June. This fight against Gracie is the one he has wanted for 20 years. Gracie submitted Shamrock at UFC 1 in 1993 and the two fought to a draw in 1995 at UFC 5.
Frank believes that Gracie's sole weapon is his guard. And it's his job to come up with a plan for his brother to break said guard.
"He doesn't really have any other positions of strength that are gonna hurt Ken," Frank said of Gracie. "Our whole strategy for that -- or my strategy -- will be to change the dynamics of the guard, so that he can't hold it and he can't rest there, and force him to wrestle and box and do the other things that will make a 49-year-old jiu-jitsu man tired."
Ken did his camp for Slice at San Diego Combat Academy and liked it. But he was hoping to turn back the clock from a mental aspect by working with Mezger.
"I want to get back to that mentality I used to have," Shamrock said. "When I see those faces around me, training me, it's been a huge motivational boost for me. Get that edginess and toughness back. In the last fight, I felt soft. I just felt like I could win the fight, like it wasn't a problem. I just went in and didn't put a finish on him. I didn't go in there with that mentality like I did in the beginning where I just wanted to destroy people get the win and hug them later."
That's another reason why he's happy to have his brother back with him. When Ken was at his best, the two worked in conjunction. Even when they were at odds, Ken was still stumping for Frank to be inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame along with him.
"Mentally, having him in the corner with his knowledge of the game and his experience that he has in there, being in world champion fights," Ken said, "that's going to be a tremendous help for me."
Enough time has passed for the cold war between the two men to thaw. Ken is 51 years old. Frank is 43. The two came up together. They were products of "the ghetto," Ken said, and both saved by their adopted father. That bond was easy to forget years ago.
"You don't recognize how lucky you are, the things that you have," Ken said. "Once you start coming down the other side of the mountain, you get humbled a little bit. You start recognizing those things. The difference between the people that turn things around are the ones that recognize that they've made some mistakes, recognize they had some faults and fix them."
It seems like things have turned around for the brothers. Frank came up under Ken's wing. Against Gracie, Ken will be the one taking instructions and strategy from his former protégé,
"Now, it feels like it's kind of come full circle again," Frank said. "The fact that he's asked me to be in his corner and help him with strategy and stuff is just a huge honor to me, to be in a position in knowledge and helpfulness."