UFC Legend Discusses Salvation on "700 Club"
March 22, 2007
The Ultimate Fighting Championship showcases fighters with different styles, techniques, and stories from across the world. Ken Shamrock, by anyone's standard, is legend in the world of the UFC and one of mixed martial arts' biggest stars. To his credit, Ken was the UFC’s first Super Fight champion and the first “King of Pancrase” champion in Japan. But for Ken, the biggest achievement in his storied combat sports career was not one of his championships or even his induction to the UFC Hall of fame - it was his salvation.
Ken's path to accepting Jesus as Savior began at the age of ten. "After several different marriages and failures, my mom started turning to the Lord. So she brought us to church. We got involved with the youth programs, and I got on fire a couple months in like, 'Wow, this feels good.' At 10 years old, you don’t know. It felt good. I remembered that I wanted to take that jump, and I accepted the Lord, got baptized and the whole nine yards. I believe to this day that’s the reason I’m still here."
Shortly thereafter, Ken's mom remarried. Unhappy with the change, Ken ran away and resorted to theft, bullying, and assault just to survive. "I was pretty hardcore at 10," he remembers. After bouncing around through several group homes, a 13-year-old Ken was sent to a home run by Bob Shamrock.
"Ken was like the baby, but he wasn’t the baby. He was the man," Bob recollects. "After a short while [he] kind of took over the leadership of the house because he was ready to fight at the drop of a hat. But the other side of the coin was he had a certain amount of character that a lot of these kids did not have. He had his own [idea] of what was right, what was wrong, and when you’d stop to think where he was coming from, it made sense."
It didn't take long for Bob, who had adopted Ken, to recognize the boy's tremendous athletic ability. Bob believed that sports would help Ken channel his anger, so he encouraged the troubled youngster to play football and to wrestle, which led him straight to the bright lights of the UFC. "As I got into fighting, I got into drugs and alcohol," Ken says. "I got into that life that the devil pushes in front of you. He hands it to you on a silver platter." Ken's wild lifestyle cost him everything, including his first wife.
"I got caught up in all the fame and money. I lost my first wife, and that right there was my fault. There were a lot of things that happened, and I wasn’t living right. But I got brought to my knees. I lost my house. I lost my car. I lost the money. I lost everything... The World Champion Fighter, everybody knows me, and I’ve got a mattress in an apartment on the floor. People don’t know that. I basically have nothing left, and my soul was gone. Everything was gone."
Ken admits that he was ready to give up. but that all changed once he became reacquainted with Tonya, a childhood friend whom he later married. Ken and Tonya had both suffered through difficult divorces, and the two old friends nurtured another. "We knew that God was in our lives but it wasn’t really out there," Ken recalls.
It wasn't until their teenage daughter Sara had joined a church that Ken and Tonya started attending church. Ken admits that while he and his wife were supporting their daughter's turn to the church, the changes they made were really for themselves, as well. As a result, Ken and Tonya rededicated their lives to the Lord.
Ken told Pat Robertson, "I think that the most important thing is the person that you see sitting here. People get this thing on TV, and they don’t know exactly how people get to where they’re at. The road that I’ve traveled has been very rocky. I was in group homes. I was involved with drugs. I was involved with alcohol. I was involved with being split up in a marriage gone bad. There’s a lot of things that I went through, and I think the most that I would want people to know is that you gotta have faith. You’ve got to get saved by God."