(‘I’m gonna retire you, old man.’ Who knew Nick Diaz was psychic?)

Frank Shamrock spoke with Ben Fowlkes over the weekend about his announcement during Saturday night’s Strikeforce: Fedor vs. Werdum broadcast that he would be hanging up his four ounce gloves permanently and according to the now former fighter, his fight with Nick Diaz a year ago this past April had a major influence on his decision.

"It was just my body and the time. I put the machine back in the shop and ramped it up and it just didn’t perform. The last time in my fight with Nick – it used to be that it didn’t matter how hurt I was going into a fight, I always performed," Shamrock told Fowlkes. "When I fought Nick I didn’t perform. I had injuries that wouldn’t allow me to play my game and to entertain. So I knew when I tried to put my body to work again, it’s done. The machine’s down. I just can’t race it any more."


Wow. Frank Shamrock blaming injuries on a loss? Who could have seen this coming. He couldn’t just say Nick was the better fighter that night and leave it at that? No. Frank had to sully his retirement by making excuses for his performance, or lack thereof that fight to an injury that until now had not been mentioned.

That’s like calling out a handful of fighters and then retiring before you have a chance to back up your claims that you would destroy them all…*cough* Jake Shields…*cough*…Ken Shamrock.

The question I have is, why would you fight with an injury that sounds as serious as the one "The Legend" had?

I’m not a doctor, but if his purported injury was legit, breathing likely would have been painful.

"I got hurt pretty good a couple weeks into training for the Nick fight. It was a very odd injury in my abdominal region that felt like muscle tearing and just weirdness, and it was because my cervical vertebrae were compressed. That compression caused tension and the tension cause my muscles to kind of tear out. It’s just, my whole body kind of reached a point last year, or maybe the tail end of the year before, where it was just like, hey, we’re kind of done. I don’t know quite how to explain it."

Strange, considering he told MMAJunkie last May that he lost because of a rib injury.

"The rib messed me up pretty good. I couldn’t grapple or do much of anything for a couple of weeks. But I went in there believing 100 percent that I could beat Nick Diaz. Regardless of if I had one leg or not, I stepped in there, I picked up the sword, and I believed the sword would strike him down. It didn’t. I just didn’t feel it that night."

Luckily for fans of Shamrock’s commentary, Frank will now be making a full-time commitment to his broadcasting career and says he may help out with Strikeforce’s marketing, pointing out that he was never really a fighter.

"Well, I don’t think I was ever a fighter. I think I was an athlete and a martial artist, and I just happened to be fighting. My art will always continue on, but as an athlete, the machine is done. I can’t keep tying the two together. To me, it makes no sense to go on. I can’t be my best, so I’m doing a disservice to my art. That’s against what I believe in."