Stories from the Road: Don Frye

---

“I finished Brian’s tour, while at the same time, I’m training for Gilbert Yvel,” Frye said. “The last time I had fought was four years ago, when I beat Eric Valdez. Now I’m fighting before 45,000 in Japan against Yvel. I strained my adductor muscle in my right leg, my push-off leg, when I was training. The last thing I wanted to do was let them know I was hurt. On fight night, they taped it up and shot it full of lanacane for me. I went out there, and right from the start, I shot on Gilbert and took him down. The next thing I know, I blow out my leg. I just felt something curl up on my right thigh. It blew. I felt it half way up my spine, down my ass and to my right calf. Gilbert kept eye gouging me. He wanted to take my eyeballs home as a souvenir. He scratched me up pretty good.

“I’m glad he fought that way, though, because he attacked me,” he added. “If he would have just stayed away, stuck and moved, there is no way I would have got him. I couldn’t move at all. He came to fight, until they saw him scratching at my eyes. It was a pretty nasty fight. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

The referee eventually disqualified Yvel. Afterwards, both fighters were taken to the triage room of a local hospital. Frye was there to have his eyes assessed by doctors.

“I’m lying down with the doctors hovering over me, and all of a sudden, there’s this commotion, a big commotion,” Frye said. “This door opens up and there’s all of this yelling and screaming. It’s Gilbert. His people come charging in, I jump up and I’m figuring, ‘Ok, we’re going to go at it again!’ But Gilbert came to apologize.”

BRIEFS OR BOXERS?

Frye’s nomadic fight career covered boxing, pro wrestling, shoot fighting and MMA. Between those stints in and out of the ring, he was a fireman in Santa Fe, N.M., and then worked as a self-employed farrier, eventually starting his own farrier business.

“I took some odd jobs, working three, four jobs trying to make money,” said Frye, who has 13- and 14-year-old daughters. “And then, finally, I had just two jobs as a fireman, and on my days off, I’d shoe horses. I got divorced, called up Dan Severn to get some small fights around the country. I just didn’t think it would take off the way it did -- especially in Japan.”

Steve Owen, Frye’s renowned trainer, goes way back in Frye’s career. He is an interesting go-to guy who can fill some missing gaps in Frye’s distinguished career, even things “The Predator” himself would prefer to block out -- like having a teenaged Japanese boy ask for his autographed underwear.

“In Japan, they have cards for the fighters, even cards for pro wrestlers, like we have baseball cards here in the United States,” Owen said. “There’s a multitude of these cards, and they’re really professionally done. They come in different backgrounds. They sell the autographed cards. Don would be very serious about representing America wherever he went, and Don would get mobbed everywhere he went. Don would sign everything. It would take Don 45 minutes to get out of a restaurant. He fought and wrestled professionally, and there was this one Japanese kid -- and he was a pretty big kid, about 240 [pounds], 6-foot-2, so he was obvious -- and he would show up everywhere.

“He’d asked for signed baseball caps, photographs, anything extra,” he added. “He would bring about a half a dozen cards and have Don sign everything. There was a period where Don was a villain where he had long hair in a ponytail. This kid would bring that old card every time he would see us. Don thought he had signed the card before for the kid. He did. What we found out was the kid was selling this stuff.”

The situation came to a head when Owen and Frye were in the lobby of the Tokyo Hilton after a fight. The large Japanese kid appeared again, asking for Frye’s shorts. Owen and Frye curiously looked at each other. They thought the kid meant Frye’s competition shorts. No, no, no, it was explained to Owen and Frye. The kid wanted something else.

“He wanted Don to take off his underwear and sign it for him. I’m not kidding,” Owen said. “We signed everything: autographed shirts, caps, cards. We have hundreds of people around us all crowded around in the lobby, and all of the fighters are dying laughing, because no one is coming to them to sign anything. It got really comical. Frank Shamrock was with us, and Frank can be a little bit of a camera hog, and he’s laughing, too.

“The kid wanted Don’s underwear,” he added. “Normally, Don was gracious when we were mobbed by autograph seekers. Japanese fans are extremely courteous and polite. This kid wasn’t. He was very aggressive and pushy.”

Frye looked at the autograph seeker and said, “[Expletive] off!”

Through everything Frye encountered -- the overzealous autograph seeker, the thumb-drilling miscreant, the times he fought and was not paid -- it has served a greater good. Most would agree that MMA would not be where it is today without the Don Fryes of the world.

Joseph Santoliquito is the president of the Boxing Writer's Association of America and a frequent contributor to Sherdog.com's mixed martial arts and boxing coverage. His archive can be found here.