Rich Franklin tries to explain the Ken Shamrock flop

RICH FRANKLIN vs. KEN SHAMROCK

The Ultimate Fighter 1 Finale, 4/9/05

Result: Victory via TKO, 2:42 of round 1

I didn’t notice a big change in my popularity until the Ken Shamrock fight — that’s when things really started to take off for me. That was at the season 1 Ultimate Fighter finale, and my fight followed the Stephan Bonnar/Forrest Griffin fight, which was one of the epic MMA fights of all time. There are tons of stats about how the ratings during that show changed, especially midway through the fights, and how many people started tuning in. It was my first fight on cable television that wasn’t a pay-per-view, and I got more exposure out of that fight than I had in all the previous fights in my career.

Everybody at that point in time knew Ken Shamrock; Ken Shamrock had wrestled in the WWE, and had a huge fanbase. When I was teaching high school, even my students at the time knew who Ken Shamrock was. They didn’t know any of the other fighters, but they knew Ken Shamrock because he wrestled. So it was huge for me. But it was funny, after that fight I wasn’t ‘Rich Franklin’, I was ‘Hey, you’re that guy that beat Ken Shamrock.’

The best I can think of is that he was doing some of sort of baseball-slide ankle-lock type thing and just slipped on the mat. But I remember when it happened during the fight, I didn’t even know what to make of it. I just stood there almost completely motionless for a couple seconds like, ‘What just happened?’ I would like to think that Ken’s heart was in that fight, but when you start looking at some of the fights he had after that, you have to start questioning things. Ken was still competing in PRIDE at that point in time, and he really hadn’t had a big downfall prior to that fight, so I think his heart was definitely still in it.

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This Saturday, Rich Franklin will step into the Octagon for the 18th time to face Forrest Griffin in the co-headlining feature of UFC 126.