Fighter's Mind, A Page 6

  That night we drove through the frozen streets in a caravan to Legal Seafood. I sat between Kenny, Mark, Patrick Cote (a top 185-pounder), and assorted guests. We all listened rapt to Marcus Davis, another UFC professional with a battered friendly face, tell truly terrifying ghost stories. As we ate I felt the warmth of camp all around me.

  THE KING OF SCRAMBLES

  Marcelo Garcia (Courtesy: Marcelo Garcia)

  If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain

  some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something

  wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special.

  —Shunryu Suzuki

  Mixed martial arts, the modern-day proving ground for hand-to-hand combat systems, introduced ground fighting into the collective conscious. Royce Gracie proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that fighters who couldn’t fight on the ground were easy pickings for those who could. He used a family variant of the Japanese martial art jujutsu, called Brazilian (or Gracie) Jiu-Jitsu. What the world didn’t know was that MMA fights had been taking place in front of massive crowds in Brazil for fifty years or more, under the catch-all name vale tudo, “anything goes.” The Brazilians knew the value of ground fighting, and the Gracie family knew how to take a good striker out of his element. The philosophy has always been a part of fighting—take your enemy from where he wants to be, make him fight your fight.

  Simply put, jiu-jitsu is at the heart of MMA. The art today is essentially interchangeable with submission wrestling, or grappling. At this point it’s semantics, although jiu-jitsu usually includes practice in the gi. The gi is the white judo kimono and is how jiu-jitsu was originally taught, but in MMA the rules have been changed so the gi is not allowed. Fighters learn a style they (inventively) call “no-gi.”

  No-gi is quite different than gi. The gi training utilizes the fabric—sleeves, collars, pant legs—to control the opponent, while no-gi is submission wrestling, with no fabric grabbing allowed. I personally don’t like training in the gi because it negates all my natural advantages, strength and slipperiness and conditioning. And my first day in it, in Brazil, I tore my rotator cuff.

  I am focused almost entirely on no-gi, and that’s what I will primarily be referring to from now on. Modern MMA mixes the no-gi game with punching, kicking, elbows, and knees; grappling for MMA is quite different than grappling for no-gi competition, where there are a lot of slick moves that won’t work if someone can punch you in the face.

  A simple rule change to the sport-fight world—allowing fights to continue on the ground—opened up infinite possibilities. Ground fighting is part of the open-ended nature of MMA, a huge part of what makes the sport so exciting.

  At its core, jiu-jitsu is about applying leverage, creating mismatches, through superior position. I find a way to isolate my opponent’s arm and attack the elbow with my whole body. Maneuvers range from wrenching arms out of sockets to cutting off blood flow to the brain (“blood” chokes are allowed, while attacking the trachea is not—temporary versus permanent damage). Viable targets are almost any large joint, from ankles, elbows, and knees to shoulders and neck. The experienced ground fighter has thousands of ways to wrestle his way around an opponent (or to cause his opponent to fall into these positional “mismatches”). He doesn’t match strength for strength, which is what collegiate or Greco-Roman wrestling is, and why wrestling is so exhausting. Though there’s a deep technical game in wrestling, the end goal is physical domination through powering the shoulders to the mat (though there is a lot of wrestling in jiu-jitsu, and strength and size count for a lot). Jiu-jitsu’s goal is harm, and it makes for a completely different game because there are ways to avoid harm without expending lots of energy.

  A submission wrestler tries to choke or threaten such grievous injury that the opponent is forced to “tap” and concede victory (or accept the injury). This is the submission, and the beauty of it is that no real permanent damage is done as long as you submit. It’s by far the most benign way to win an MMA fight. Orthodox wrestling has only a few ways to win—points or a pin—while jiu-jitsu has thousands and thousands of submissions and positions.

  One of the fascinating things about jiu-jitsu or submission wrestling—or catch wrestling (for Josh Barnett, a modern MMA fighter who maintains that his submission wrestling is “catch-as-catch-can” dating back to Burns and Gotch)—is that it is almost wholly about knowledge. It is one of the few pure arts where a more knowledgeable small man can destroy bigger, stronger, faster men, as Royce Gracie has shown. Renzo Gracie (a younger cousin), one of the great practitioners in still fighting, said, “The beauty of the art is that it is so efficient. It molds itself to whomever is practicing. As long as you stick with it, you can be a good fighter. It’s not only certain body types or athleticism. I’ve seen guys that couldn’t run or jump for shit, with no coordination at all, become unbelievable champions because they dedicated themselves. The other fighting arts, even judo, wrestling, boxing, they all depend on athleticism. I train judo my whole life but the moment I get out of shape I lose everything. Boxing you need speed, even when you have a lot of experience. Jiu-jitsu is about dedication and knowledge.”

  Here’s a basic primer on ground fighting (if you train, please skip ahead):

  When two men are fighting they often fall to the ground. The Gracie theory is that 80 percent of fights end up on the ground; certainly there is a very good chance it’s going to happen, particularly if a fight goes past a few punches.

  When you and I fight, you rush me and we tumble to the ground. There’s an initial “scramble” for position, where nothing is set. The first basic truth of ground fighting is that if you can manage it you want to be on top. The guy on top is “winning”; he can punch harder (in MMA—not grappling) and his weight is working for him. The guy on the bottom is at a disadvantage if all other things are equal. However, rarely is everything else equal. Some fighters are extremely skilled at fighting from the bottom position. It all starts with the “guard.” The guard’s development as an offensive position—a place to attack from—revolutionized fighting.

  The guard is basically the missionary position. If I’m on the bottom, I have my legs wrapped around your waist. This is the best position for me on the bottom, because it contains the other basic truth of ground fighting: it’s all about the hips. Your hips (literally, and as an indicator of your body) need to be free to attack me, and you attack with your hips as much as anything. When you’re watching two jiu-jitsu players fight, it’s not what their hands are doing that matters. The real battle is in their legs and hips. So I’m underneath you, but you’re “in my guard,” that is, my legs are wrapped around your waist. If my legs are locked it’s a “closed” guard. By controlling your hips I can greatly limit the damage you can do from the top, and I can set up all kinds of submission attempts from the bottom, as well as sweeps in which I reverse the position, “sweep” you over, and end up on top. I have all four of my limbs against your two. Animals do it—watch the bears fight in the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man; it’s an MMA clinic (with biting).

  Jiu-jitsu has a progression of positions. The top guy, you, works to improve his position to facilitate his attacks. When you’re in my closed guard, there are not a lot of submissions you can attempt on me, and I can control your posture so you can’t punch me too much or too hard. So you work to “pass” my guard—to get your legs around mine, to get your hips free so you can set up the leverage mismatches. If you pass one leg you’re in my “halfguard.” Now, I still have both my legs wrapped around one of yours, and partial control of your hips, but it’s generally not as safe for me. You have a lot more submissions, and it’s easier for you to punch me. In strict submission wrestling, half-guard is very effective for the bottom man, but in MMA, where the guy on the bottom can be eating punches, it’s more dangerous. You throw some punches, drop an elbow in my face—but that’s not the point. The point is you freeing that leg; the real battle is you ge
tting your hips free. Now you pass to “side control.” You free your remaining trapped leg.

  You’ve got your hips and legs free and off to the side of me, at 90 degrees, often chest on chest. Now I’m really starting to be in trouble. Side control is a very dominant position for you. I’m desperate to get back to guard or half-guard, to get my legs back around your hips, to get some control back.

  From side control there are a lot of submissions and attacking options for you and basically none for me. This is also a stable spot; it’s hard to get you off. From here, you might go to “mount,” which is basically guard in reverse. This time you have your legs on top of my hips, and usually you’re sitting on my chest with your knees up under my armpits and raining down punches—think “bully in grade school” position. This is obviously a very dominant position for you, although it’s a little less stable. I have a better chance of sweeping you and reversing things from here than I did from side control.

  The final step is if I turn over to avoid damage and you “take my back.” You climb onto my back, your chest on my back, and attack me from there. There are hundreds of other ways to take my back, from all kinds of other positions. The back is perhaps the most dominant position in MMA, but only if you get your “hooks” in, meaning you get your legs wrapped around my waist from the back so you can cling to me and control my hips and match my movements to stay on my back. Otherwise, I’ll turn and get you off, then you’ll be on your back and I’ll end up in your guard. So as you take my back it’s critical to get your hooks in, and from there you usually start working the choke. Fighters have gotten a lot better at defending their backs, so whereas it used to be the end now it’s not always such a sure thing.

  That’s basically the progression of position in jiu-jitsu and ground fighting in MMA (with apologies to all those who know the game; I know there’s a lot I left out, but I’m trying to keep this basic). Guard to half-guard to side control to mount to the back. Of course, there are hundreds of variations and hundreds of ways to get to any of these positions, and there are ways to skip steps and go right from guard to mount, for example. There are many different styles of guard, with names such as “butterfly” and “rubber” and “x-guard.” There are countless positions for the hands and arms, underhooks and overhooks, and arm drags and so forth. It is this immense variety that gives jiu-jitsu and ground fighting artistic depth. It’s a dialogue between minds, bodies meshed and communicating in a subtle, endless game—a game fueled by a desperate life-and-death urgency, where joints get smashed and fighters choked unconscious.

  The ground game jiu-jitsu still seems more mysterious to me than stand-up fighting (punching and kicking, range and footwork). I understand what I don’t understand in stand-up fighting, whereas watching high-level jiu-jitsu I often don’t even know what questions to ask. I’m getting better, although my training is still interrupted by my ribs popping out with mind-numbing regularity (a recurring injury).

  When I first started studying jiu-jitsu, the first thought in my mind was, wow this is just like chess. And it is, in a sense, because chess also has a strong positional component. In chess, you understand the board, take a strong position, and good things happen. You don’t necessarily see the way you’re going to win, but with a dominant position you start to force your opponent to do things like take bad positions until you capture material. In the beginning you do good things, such as occupying the center of the board, and you position your pieces where they have open files to attack. You develop with tempo, you improve your position and force him to retreat, which builds in a time advantage for you that will show up later, in chances to take pieces.

  Jiu-jitsu (and fighting in general) has this element; you may not be sure what submission you’ll get, but getting into a dominant position is a major step toward winning. And in MMA position is its own reward, because the better your position, the more effectively you can punch and elbow and soften up your opponent.

  What I’ve realized since then is that jiu-jitsu differs from chess in major ways. There is a huge physical component, where strength and speed and conditioning matter, but muscle memory (not a part of chess) plays a titanic role. Moving through positions happens too fast to think. Your body has to have learned what to do, how to protect your arms, how to shift weight to avoid a sweep. In order to be good, you need to log in the mat time, thousands and thousands of hours of just getting beat on by better guys. As Pat Miletich says, “You gotta take a lot of beatings.”

  Still, there are some practitioners who are so good, so dominant, that it seems they must be doing something different. One of the most recent examples is Marcelo Garcia.

  The image that springs to mind is the grainy footage of the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) Submission Wrestling World Championship in ’03, the biggest submission grappling tournament in the world. The tourney, usually just called Abu Dhabi, was created by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nayan, son of a former UAE president. He was a combat enthusiast and friend of the Gracies. With a love of grappling and some money he started a championship in Abu Dhabi, and to this day it is the one contest where pure grapplers can make some money.

  Abu Dhabi happens every two years. Now, due to its size, popularity, and visa issues, it usually takes place in the United States or Brazil. In terms of submission wrestling, it’s the cream of the crop, extremely rarefied air.

  In ’03 Marcelo Garcia appeared out of nowhere to blitz his weight class (66-76 kg). He was awarded Most Technical Fighter and made it to the second round in the Absolute, where fighters from all weight classes can compete. Marcelo’s a small guy with a friendly face, an ordinary physique, and a serious look in his eye. At Abu Dhabi, he was like a killer spider monkey, swarming all over these guys, making the best submission wrestlers in the world look helpless. In 2005 and 2007, he not only won his division but placed second and third, respectively, in the Absolute division. He was competing with the best heavyweights, guys fifty or seventy pounds heavier than himself. Go YouTube Marcelo Garcia right now and come back.

  Mike Ciesnolevicz, a 205-pound fighter at Pat Miletich’s gym in Iowa and one of the better grapplers at the camp, remembers the first time he rolled with Marcelo. He’d seen the Abu Dhabi footage and tracked Marcelo down to a seminar. This was back in 2004, just as Marcelo was appearing on everyone’s radar. Mike recalls with a deep and offended sense of shock how quickly Marcelo forced him to tap out. Mike C is a stud on the ground; he’s a high-level grappler who rolls with the toughest guys and rarely gets tapped. Marcelo tapped him in fifteen seconds. Then he did it again, a minute later, with the same move. It’s the kind of thing that Mike does to me, a smaller guy with about a year of on-and-off grappling experience. Nobody, but nobody, does that to Mike. He laughs about it. “I didn’t know there was someone out there who was that good at jiu-jitsu. I told Charles McCarthy, Rory Singer, all these UFC guys about him and they were skeptical. But now they’ve all trained with him and they all agree that he’s amazing.” Mike laughed some more.

  “First thing they all said, ‘I’ve never been treated like that on the mat.’ He’s not a normal black belt. I can hold my own with most normal black belts. He’s on a different level.” It was Mike C who made me look harder at Marcelo.

  Marcelo isn’t using some secret ninjutsu technique—he’s just doing things so quickly, so well, and so far in advance of his opponents that he makes them look stupid. He just seems to have more options, as if everybody else has learned only a limited form of what he does.

  So I went down to Florida to pick Marcelo’s brain. How does Marcelo Garcia think about jiu-jitsu? He’d recently moved there and was training at American Top Team, under the watchful eye of Ricardo Liborio.

  American Top Team (ATT) is probably the biggest MMA gym in the United States at the moment, with the most top-level pros. It’s the brainchild of Ricardo Liborio, who was a member of the mythic Carlson Gracie Team and a founding partner of the groundbreaking Brazilian Top Team. Liborio is also a name i
n the world of jiu-jitsu; some people say that he has the best game in the world, but his days of competing are long behind him. Now he’s the spark plug and linchpin for ATT.

  I’d met Liborio briefly in Brazil. He’d understood what I was doing instantly (more so than most of the Brazilians), and he gave me his number and invited me down to ATT. He’s an extremely pleasant and warm guy. He’d be the perfect foil to my understanding of high-level jiu-jitsu and Marcelo.

  I flew into Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and rented a car. ATT was in Coconut Creek, a little north of Lauderdale, lost down into the flatlands. I drove through the press of humidity, the flat swelter of the tropics, and the sense of some vast inland mangrove swamp somewhere outside the strip malls. You can’t see much landscape in this part of Florida, it’s so flat; there’s not much except the stormy clouds, epic and tortured mother-of-pearl cumulus over a blazing pastel blue and red sky.

  When I walked into American Top Team a vast, cavernous twenty-thousand-square-foot MMA dream gym, the first person I met was “Chainsaw” Charles McCarthy.

  Charles was a fighter who’d been on the Spike TV reality show The Ultimate Fighter (a guarantee of some celebrity) and who fought in the UFC. He was a friend of Mike C, and he had liked my first book, which was cool. If Mike C vouched for him I knew he must be okay and Charles felt the same way about me.

  Charles is a square-jawed, black-haired young guy who seems a little short to fight at 185 but he actually has a big cut to get there—he’s a very dense dude, a brown belt in jiu-jitsu and a smooth ground fighter.

  Jiu-jitsu players don’t get belts for free. You have to earn them in a very strict sense and be able to do a lot of things to advance, including compete. A black belt may take ten years of study.