Fighter's Mind, A Read online

  Renzo laments the rudeness in America, even while he agrees it makes life simpler, the hermetic modern life where you never acknowledge anyone you don’t know.

  “Back in Rio, on the beach, I used to fight three or four times a day. And no one really held a grudge. The police would just send you home, maybe yell at whoever started it. But here everything is so serious. A guy insulted my wife and kids at a gas station”—here the mind reels—“and I went over to talk to him, to get him to apologize, and so he insulted me and I slapped him. He throws himself on the floor, crying for the police, says his neck is hurt. I had to go to court five times, pay fifteen hundred dollars, all for this damn slap we do harder every day in practice.” He pauses and shrugs, then says with a hint of melancholy, “Life here is simpler. You don’t waste time saying hello to everybody.”

  Respect—the essence of the fight game—was a huge part of Renzo’s growing up. “My father, my grandfather, I respect them so much I am very quiet around them. I wanted to make sure that anything that came out of my mouth made sense. I idolized them, but I saw they were human, too.”

  Renzo’s father, Carlson’s brother, was an integral part of the family and eventually president of the Federation of Jiu-jitsu in Rio.

  “I recently realized how important my father was, because he was always telling me that the impossible is nothing. Even though I was extremely weak physically, and small, he would always tell me that I was so smart and technical that without time limits I could finish anyone in the world.” The old vale tudo fights were often fought without time limits, as that was closer to a real fight. The Gracie style could be played in a safe, defensive, relentless way that would eventually yield a choke or submission, given enough time. Fighting without time limits is something they miss.

  Renzo laughed hard, something he did about every third sentence, with a face like a cherub. His heavy Brazilian accent is iconic. It’s not only his accent but the rhythm and variations in tone that are so signature Brazilian jiu-jitsu, my friend. He’s almost cartoonishly animated, his eyes flaring wide, eyebrows reaching for the heavens.

  “Now, that wasn’t true back then. When I fought good guys who were big, they could give me trouble. But my father was always placing little pearls in my brain. And I believed him!”

  Renzo grew up in the perfect environment in which to groom a fighter, and he fell deeply in love with jiu-jitsu and with competition. He would be a warm-up to best guys as a kid. His confidence grew. By the time he was a man he knew as much jiu-jitsu as anybody in the world (with the possible exception of Rickson).

  “Every time I step in the ring, or onto the mat, I always feel that there is nobody that knows this better than I do. It’s not a magic box. There’s no surprise for me, no situations or positions that I can’t understand. So I am very relaxed for fights. I even fall asleep before fights. A few times, in Pride, I bring a pillow from the hotel . . . and they have to wake me up to get me to warm up!” He finds that hilarious.

  Renzo’s career is unique—he is astride the transition of MMA. He fought in Brazil in the “old days,” in the vale tudo. He fought in Japan in Pride, in front of forty thousand fans, and he fought for the UFC, for the IFL, for Elite XC . . . he’s outlasted most of these promotions. He shrugs when he thinks about it. “It’s been an unbelievable ride up to now,” he says.

  Early in his career Renzo had come to America. He wanted to teach in New York, and he struggled. He was doing okay but was having problems with his native partner. “My worries had a base, because in the end he kicked me out of the country. He tried to call immigration on me and my visa was under him . . . it was a mess. I had to go home with my tail between my legs. That’s one thing when you are alone, but another thing when you have a wife and three kids.”

  He needed money and took some fights, first Eugenio Tadeu, a luta livre star; and then two weeks later, Renzo was fighting in Japan. “So I fight, jump in a plane and then fight Akira Shoji at Pride One. I needed the money. I give it straight to the lawyers and split from that partner and get my green card.”

  He glosses over it blithely, but I press him. I know about the Tadeu fight, one of the last famous vale tudo matches. Luta livre basically means “wrestling” in Portuguese and it was the name taken by Gracie students who split off from the family (and the gi), often poorer guys from the favela in Rio who couldn’t afford the gi. They wrestled and grappled no-gi and fought vale tudo and of course had a deep and undying enmity with the Gracies. I used this opportunity to ask Renzo about the age-old question: gi or no-gi?

  MMA fights are not allowed with the gi on, so is it better to train without one all the time, or for jiu-jitsu do you need to practice with it? Greg Jackson’s guys have high-level jiu-jitsu and they never train with it. Eddie Bravo threw away the gi but still wears the gi pants (and let me just say this: rolling in gi pants is NOT no-gi). Usually, the answer is pretty standard. The wrestlers feel like you don’t need it, and the guys who come from traditional jiu-jitsu feel it’s important. Renzo’s take was interesting.

  “If you want to be a really good grappler, you have to learn with the gi. With a gi on, everything is so much harder, a hundred times harder. With no-gi, you take a good wrestler and in three months he understands where the danger comes from and his game will be fine. The moment you put on a gi, the opponent has handles to grip, so everything is much harder—harder to pass guard, to defend guard—so it teaches your hips to be extremely active to get out of the way.

  “What I see in MMA now is a lot of guys go straight to no-gi and then MMA. So their guard is a joke. Poja, I been on the bottom in every fight that I did and I never get hit. You see BJ Penn, he never takes damage on the bottom—and he trains in the gi all the time. He comes from my brother’s school. I see these other guys go in there and lock their legs but they get hit the whole time they’re in guard.

  “When you train in the gi, your hips are better, sweeps are better, your escape from the mount is ten times better. With a gi on, the mounted guy has a hundred attacks, and without it, he has two or three. It’s a joke.

  “In Brazil, the luta livre guys trained with us for a while. They were purple belts when they separated off and stop training in the gi. They were big guys, taking steroids. They were tough and strong-minded, but we never lose to them. We beat the shit out of them, and we train gi all the time and only no-gi right before the fight.”

  Renzo was fighting Eugenio Tadeu in Rio, in one of the last vale tudo fights without gloves, pure old-school.

  “I took the fight on last-minute notice, and the money wasn’t good, but I had to pay lawyers in New York. I just wanted to make sure that the floor was canvas, because I knew he was going to come full of oil. Whatever his body touched on the mat, I couldn’t stand on it.” Renzo means Eugenio would be greased up—making him much harder to submit.

  The luta livre guys and the Gracie family had a long feud and had met many times before in vale tudo matches and informal fights on the beach that could turn epic.

  “It was an interesting match because I always dislike him, his attitude, his way of being. He was always with the wrong crowd, surrounded by criminals and drug dealers. I was always on the police side. I train a lot of police. I was on the sport side. He was always playing the role of being from the ghetto, so it was an important fight for me because I don’t like him.” You can see the class difference coming out; the Gracies had long trained only the upper echelons of Rio society.

  “My only pleasure in that fight was going to be to punch him in the face, because I knew right away he was completely greased up and hell to hold on to, like trying to hold a fish.”

  This was a grudge match, and the luta livre guys had been filling up the arena for hours—they’d come in early and taken all the seats around the cage. And here the danger of Rio and Brazil starts to appear. It’s not that all Rio is so dangerous—in Ipanema, little old ladies walk on the street at night—but it is a place where shit can go wrong, really wrong.<
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  “Now his people had invaded the event. He brought two hundred guys with guns and knives and they surrounded the cage. Even before our fight they wouldn’t let nobody get close. We were afraid of a riot, so we sent our guys up into the stands. When I walked out I saw the cage was surrounded by luta livre guys. There were no jiu-jitsu guys except my brother and a couple of others.”

  When both fighters were in the cage, they fell into a long, wild-west gunslinger staredown, both men frozen and staring across the ring for minutes. Totally still. Watching it, you can almost hear the theme song from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

  When the fight began, Renzo was having some success early on. He even took Eugenio’s back a few times but couldn’t keep him down. Renzo started to look for a little ground-and-pound, as he couldn’t get any submissions going.

  “I took him down, and every time I put my head against the fence—to keep him pinned down—they kick me through the fence. Someone cut me with a knife or maybe some keys through the fence, not deep but it was a mess.” Renzo was bleeding from his shoulder.

  The luta livre guys were swarming outside the cage following the action, scuffling with the cameramen and ringside officials. Whenever Renzo and Eugenio got close to the edge, the sides of the cage pulsed with screams and insults.

  “I started seeing the guys outside the cage doing it. One time, when the ref separates us, I see one of them hanging with his body half inside the cage, talking shit. So I’m looking at Eugenio and I move a little and get close, and then I land a straight shot right to the middle of the forehead of the guy outside the cage. He fell down and my brother kicked him in the face. So then the riot starts.”

  Renzo laughs.

  “It was such a mess. The lights ended up falling into the ring, I started to feel this intense heat, and I looked up to see the big lights have fallen into the cage, and people are screaming to turn the lights off because it’s gonna set the place on fire. As the lights go out they pull out guns, they’re shooting all over the place.” Renzo is bored with this story, “it was a big mess.”

  Then, two weeks later, Renzo flew to Japan to fight Akira Shoji in the inaugural Pride show. “I was still purple with bruises and cuts.” It ended as a draw, this being the early days of Pride without clear scoring.

  I asked Renzo if these were his toughest fights. He declined to answer, in a completely sincere way. I could feel what he was thinking: fights that are in the past aren’t tough anymore. Who cares about those fights?

  “Always I think the toughest one is the next one . . . every fight is tough, a surprise box! You never know what’s gonna happen. Victory is certain, and then you have your arm broken with seventeen seconds left! Like the Sakuraba fight! I was thinking that fight was mine, all I need to do is manage the time, and then I lost.”

  Renzo fought an epic battle with Kazushi Sakuraba, who was a Japanese fighter and one of the all-time greats. Sakuraba was a natural 185-pounder and much bigger than Renzo and they had one of the standout, fantastic MMA fights in history. The fight ended with Renzo’s arm horrifically dislocated in a kimura, but with Renzo staring calmly, not tapping, hoping to continue.

  “And there are fights when everything seemed lost, and I won. The toughest is always the next, because the other ones fade in my memory. I have to watch tapes because I can’t believe I did this, it’s so funny! Even my record, I have to check to see who I beat . . . but the ones I lost, those I always remember. I know exactly what happened, that’s the difference.

  “With my students, I always tell them that the loss is where you can get better. Once you make a mistake in a fight or a competition, you never do that again. It’s burned in your brain. See those mistakes and cover those holes. That’s why you learn more when you lose than when you win. When you win you forget.

  “What is a champion but a guy that didn’t quit? I always try to tell them there’s nothing better than a day after another. Life is a continuous experience. You only fail by not learning.

  “For jiu-jitsu, the smarter you are, the better you understand the leverage and positions and the middle. For instance, my head instructor is John Danaher, and he was a philosophy teacher at Columbia. He’s a smart guy.”

  Danaher, or “New Zealand John” as he’s sometimes referred to (being a Kiwi), is the head professor at Renzo’s academy. He has a PhD in philosophy from Columbia and did in fact teach there. Renzo said, “He was one of my first students here, and I was able to bring him out of everything he believed in and get him into jiu-jitsu. It was one of the best things I have ever done.”

  I had heard about John, that he was the real genius at Renzo’s—a master of jiu-jitsu, an innovator who never competed, a guy who was quietly changing the game with his private lessons. George St. Pierre and other notables took private lessons with him. Real guys knew what was up—Danaher was an open secret. Renzo said that even now, when he had questions about a move, he’d go talk to John first. Jiu-jitsu is a dialogue.

  New Zealand John is a fine-featured man with a pale, narrow face, longish hair, a bald spot like a tonsure, and a muscular build. He has a deformed knee, a result of a childhood surgery gone wrong. He’s so quiet and soft-spoken I practically had to put my ear to his mouth to hear what he was saying, sitting next to him on the mat. He’s articulate in his murmuring Kiwi accent, and you don’t want to miss a word he says.

  John had come to the United States at twenty-four years old and gone to Columbia for his graduate degree. To supplement his income he’d worked as a bouncer—he’d been a gym rat and studied muay Thai in New Zealand, although his bum leg had limited his style to the clinch. He’d come to be Renzo’s student the usual way, by word of mouth. He hadn’t been a natural, or taken strongly to jiu-jitsu; with a wry smile John said, “I had an undistinguished entry into the sport.” But when two of Renzo’s top instructors left to form their own schools, he was asked to step up and teach. At that point he began to take it seriously and it took over his life.

  When I asked him about his take on the mental game in jiu-jitsu, he turned professorial.

  “The two most misused words in the English language are ‘mental’ and ‘spiritual.’ You hear people use the words so sloppily, with such an ill-defined manner, it’s unclear what you mean.”

  John had studied and taught epistemology, questions about the nature of knowledge. He was concerned with semantics, specifically “knowledge” as opposed to “belief.” He wasn’t going to let me skate on some vague questions.

  I sweated and babbled and eventually John took pity on me and helped me out.

  “I see two things that fighters deal with, two emotions that create weakness—fear and anger. And for the first, it’s not fear of injury. The idea of failing in front of a great crowd is massively harmful to us, as such social creatures.” I recalled how David Horton would tell everyone he knew that he was going to run the Appalachian Trail, or Pacific Crest Trail, because that added social pressure helped him continue.

  “Anger just makes people inefficient. Their breathing gets shallow, they’re too muscularly tense—they gas faster. Part of what I admire in a fighter like Marcelo Garcia is his ability to control his anger and stay focused. He often gets abused physically. He’s a smaller guy in the open weight competitions, but you never see him distracted. He’s like a laser, focused on finishing. He has one physical, cold goal in mind and nothing distracts him. The abuse is irrelevant.

  “Anger can take you away from your goal. You can get caught up in a desire for revenge, which distracts you. Experienced fighters will create this in opponents.”

  To John, what sets the top guys apart is the idea of “relaxed poise.”

  “The single definitive feature of the überathlete is a sense of effortlessness in a world where most men grunt and strive and scream. It comes easy to the best, and what creates that? I think it’s a sense of play. No fear or anxiety about their performance. Like when the first time you ever drove a car, you came out sweating and ex
hausted. Now when you drive a car it’s effortless and smooth. Fear and anger are motor inhibitors.”

  Danaher reflects on his teacher. “Renzo has no fear of fights. He doesn’t see them as serious events. He can’t get mounted and pounded out. He may lose but he won’t get smashed—there goes the gravity of the situation for him.”

  When I ask Renzo about Danaher, he gushes.

  “He’s completely unconventional, unpredictable, but he does jiu-jitsu the way I learned it: nothing matters but finishing. Position is just a way to get to the finish. His mind is good, and one of the most important things to teach is your own mind. If I just show you ten moves, you’ll never do them like I do them. But if I show you why I get there, and how I think, then it’s better for you. And almost more important, if I teach it the right way, then I have it pure in my mind.”

  Renzo fell silent, ruminating on that.

  “The most important part of jiu-jitsu is the middle of the way. It’s the path between one position and another—the transition—that makes the difference between a mediocre fighter and an unbelievable fighter. A bruiser, a guy who is just headbanging and pushing his way through, it stops when he meets someone stronger, and for every ten victories he’ll have ten defeats. But when you have an understanding of the middle of the way, the ability to think and to see, your situation will get better.”

  I was instantly reminded of Marcelo Garcia, and what everyone always said about him—he was a master of the transition; he lived in the middle of the way. Renzo liked Marcelo’s game because he’s trying to finish all the time. “The beauty of Marcelo is that he developed such good defense, being the little guy at the academy, that he brushes off all finishing attempts on him, he’s so efficient and focused on the finish. It’s pure jiu-jitsu.

  “I realize now that my jiu-jitsu is much simpler than when I was a purple belt. When I was a purple belt I tried the most amazing moves—I ran a marathon to get five miles away. Now, everything is much clearer, you don’t waste time or strength, you just go straight to the point. I used to see this on Rickson a lot—his jiu-jitsu is very simple, he just goes straight for the finish. Even though everyone knows what he’s trying to do nobody could stop him. He’s very simple, with direct moves and objectives. He’ll go right there and get you right there. Even though you knew what was happening, his precision and his tightness were so good that you couldn’t stop him. The better you get the simpler everything gets.