Fighter's Mind, A Read online

  And who you get your belt from matters—lineage is very important in jiu-jitsu. So teachers are stingy, especially with black belts, because they will be judged by the caliber of their students. A brown belt is a very high level of jiu-jitsu. Charles runs his own school and manages fighters, already at twenty-eight on the backside of things, thinking more about the future.

  I told him about the new book and what I was here to do. I asked him to describe Liborio’s game to me. He chuckled. “Rolling with Liborio? You just get flattened. He’s so strong, he’s unstoppable. It’s a methodical flattening. You know it’s coming but you can’t stop it, because he’s more technical and much stronger than you.” He laughed again, “It’s like being pancaked by a steamroller. The pavement thinks it’s pretty tough, but as soon as the steamroller comes through it gets flattened. It’s like rolling with your dad when you’re eight years old. He’s a total nightmare, and he’s not even going full speed. It must be kind of awful to be Liborio, because no one can compete with him.” Charles grew wistful. “It has to lose a little something, it has to get pretty boring.”

  Ricardo Liborio is a burly, powerful man, with no neck and massive rounded shoulders, the classic build for jiu-jitsu. With a distinguished full head of gray hair and a cherubic face with bright eyes, Liborio is always smiling. He’s gleefully welcoming, almost childlike, and he grabs me with a firm hug.

  Over the next week we repeatedly went out to lunch or dinner, and he had no qualms about meeting me every day and chatting for hours, even though the demands on his time were immense.

  He is sure of his “recipe,” his method of building an MMA team. “You have to be open-minded,” he said, “and understand that everybody is different. But there is a recipe, at the same time. You gotta train hard, bring the right people in and do what it takes to move to the next level. It’s about understanding the game. You can get your ass kicked in one fight, and maybe he’s better or maybe it’s just his day, he’s got the right game on the right day, and he matches up with you. But you can improve your game, take it further and jump to the next level.”

  He’d smile at me with tired eyes over his food late at night, or over lunch, and answer the phone and talk to his nanny. He was juggling a gym full of egos, running a business, and caring for a sick infant daughter, and he was wearing a little thin around the edges. But his enthusiasm never flagged, not for a moment.

  Liborio told me stories of when he started jiu-jitsu, back in the early 1980s, when he was fifteen. He was a part of the formative years of the sport, when all the icons of today were young and just finding the gym: Murilo Bustamente was a purple belt, Wallid Ismail, Bebel, Zé Mario Sperry, Amáury Bitteti was just a kid. Liborio was incredulous when he said, “Everybody was so young at the time.”

  “I had a gift for it, I liked it and I got my blue belt in two months. As I progressed I quickly started teaching, too, and I realized that not everything I do is best for my students. The game varies body to body, and you got to understand that.”

  Liborio spoke about Carlson Gracie and his MMA team, probably the most important MMA team of all time. Carlson passed away in 2006, but I had met him in Rio and even gone to cockfights with him. Scotty Nelson, owner of OntheMat.com and a lifelong jiu-jitsu enthusiast, had allowed me tag along when he went to private parties with Carlson. “Carlson really was the original fighter who adapted jiu-jitsu for MMA. He had his power game, and he’s said many times ‘never train jiu-jitsu that doesn’t work no-gi, make sure it works both ways,’” Scotty said. This is something that Marcelo also does, as when he tore through his first Abu Dhabi he’d been training mostly gi.

  Scotty, Carlson, and I had been watching a UFC (with a whole family of old-time jiu-jitsu players around us) and Carlson was critical of Pe De Pano’s game, because he was doing things that were gi-related, in the UFC, and getting stuffed, while BJ Penn’s game was working beautifully. Carlson felt strongly that training instincts to work only in a sport setting was a mistake; you had to train all the time for the fight, for self-defense. Carlson’s legendary team had split up long ago, scattered to the winds, and Liborio was part of that diaspora.

  Liborio talks about the cultural differences. In Brazil, there is a lot of training but less instruction. What he means by “training” is synonymous with “rolling” or “sparring,” when the guys just roll hard with each other, looking for a submission. This is a huge part of learning jiu-jitsu, developing those instincts through struggle. Training against real resistance is essential to learning about the intensity and pace of a real fight. This idea, called randori in traditional Japanese martial arts and promulgated by Jigoro Kano (the founder of modern judo), is the beating heart of jiu-jitsu. You need to develop a feel for what a fight is like, the intensity of the moves, how desperation fuels the struggle.

  For the same reasons it is beneficial, just rolling can be limiting; sometimes you end up in survival mode, doing the same things over and over, sticking to your few bread-and-butter techniques. This trap can be even worse with the pro fighters, who often think they’ve had enough instruction and just want to train. Jiu-jitsu players, probably because of the Brazilian-to-English transition, use “train” like boxers use the word “work”—they use it for everything.

  Liborio makes sure that his pro fighters get instruction as well as training every day. “For the good guys, the black belts, it’s just as important—they need the resources.”

  We talked at length about “Minotauro,” Rodrigo Nogueira, the Brazilian Top Team fighter with whom I’d gone to Japan for the Pride Fighting Championship four years ago. Rodrigo had just captured the UFC interim heavyweight belt from Tim Sylvia and was the first fighter ever to have had both the UFC and Pride heavyweight belts. Liborio knew him well, had trained him for fights, and had interesting insight into Rodrigo.

  “He was born with some kind of slow nerves, man,” Liborio said with his Cheshire cat grin. “He doesn’t get frustrated when he gets beat up. Frustration can take your stamina, your appetite for winning. You get angry at yourself, not the guy beating you. Not Rodrigo. He often gets his ass kicked in the first round and most people would think, ‘What do I have to do different?’ but he just waits calmly for his chances. People say he starts slow, but he starts at the same speed he’s going to run all through the fight. He keeps going at the same level, and by the end he’s going faster than the other guy, who gets tired.”

  Liborio develops his point emphatically, jabbing at me with a thick finger. “You have to unnerstan’ you can lose. Somebody can beat your ass; but you can overcome, don’t get frustrated. You can’t be a quitter, you have to understand loss, that you can lose—it’s not your time, it’s not your day. Just because you lose doesn’t make you a loser. It’s not the same fight every time. One day the guy was so powerful, but maybe he’s not doing everything right and he gives you a chance to be better than him. But you can’t take it, for whatever reason. But next time? Be humble enough to understand it’s not the same fight every time. Most guys will give you a chance if you don’t gas out or emotionally break.”

  He paused and looked around and thought about how he was going to convince me of the importance of this idea.

  “Everyone is the same for the first two minutes, everyone has a chance to win, but after that you start to separate physically and technically.”

  He ponders the point, methodically. “You have to have the fire to develop, to find other ways to win. You can really change your game if you improve in certain ways. You have to keep working hard, withstand the presion, unnerstan’? The pressure. If you can resist it, and not get frustrated, you’ll step up eventually. One day you’ll just start beating other guys, some move you could never do, one day you’ll be able to do it.”

  Sean Williams, a Renzo Gracie black belt (you see the lineage qualifier? He’s not just a black belt, he’s a Renzo Gracie black belt; he trained extensively with the great man) who teaches in Hollywood, California, once told me a story of h
ow when he was a purple belt he’d broken his jaw. It had forced him to the sidelines for two months. “As I was recovering I watched a lot of tape, and when I came back the other purple belts who’d been giving me problems were suddenly easy for me.” It seems to be the consensus—if you keep at it, one day you make a breakthrough.

  I asked Liborio what he thought of Marcelo’s game. The “game” in jiu-jitsu is someone’s style, and it’s a reflection of their environment, their teachers, their body type, and their personality. It’s as much an artistic expression as an athletic one.

  Marcelo had recently moved down from New York, and Liborio had been watching him train. “Marcelo understands balance well,” Liborio said. “He can get you off balance very easily. He gets you to shift your weight around. The way he moves his hips, I’m telling you, you can put a three-hundred-pound guy on him and he’ll find a way to move his hips. He’s got speed, but it’s not ‘Oh wow’ speed, it’s just the way he moves, and he has a lot of knowledge. He researches the position and there’s no wall for him—that I can’t get there.” Liborio is talking about mental barriers, that Marcelo doesn’t think of certain positions as static, or unwinnable. He has the creativity to look for new ways to “get to” good positions from the bad.

  “How does that process happen? How do you get to where you can think three or four moves ahead of everyone?” I asked him. I remembered something Chainsaw Charles had said about rolling with Liborio: he knows what you’re going to do next before YOU even know what you’re going to do next.

  Liborio spread his arms wide and smiled. “It’s just knowledge man. It’s the same for everyone. You go over the basics and pretty soon you’re dreaming about it like everyone else. Be honest and humble enough to learn from everybody.”

  He thought about it for a while. “With jiu-jitsu, you really don’t know what he’s thinking, but you feel how he’s reacting. I can feel when he wants to change the game and I stop it and change it another way. It’s one of the few fighting sports you can do with your eyes closed, because it’s about feel.

  “You have to stop and understand, to listen to the position or you’ll miss an opportunity. Guys don’t listen to teachers they don’t like, or don’t respect, but you gotta be open if you want to be the best. As soon as you close yourself off you start to lose.” That sentiment would be repeated, almost word for word, by every serious jiu-jitsu practitioner I talked to.

  Liborio handles all aspects of running American Top Team, and he’s constantly revising his theories on the team and leadership.

  “The leader has to be open, too,” he said. “He has to be searching, too, he can’t say ‘Oh, I know what everything is already.’ You have to be honest and humble enough to ask how different things go, and learn from everybody, because if you keep your eyes screwed shut and if you think you know everything you’ll start losing. I believe in hard training, in the recipe. You have to respect your limits but unnerstan’ you’re an athlete and push on them. You WILL get your ass kicked. You WILL get tired, but eventually you’ll be kicking ass.

  “I don’t think I was the best fighter, but I can be the best teacher. Because I really care about the guys, all my guys. I care what happens.”

  Just watching Liborio around the gym you can see that nearly everyone feels they have a special relationship with him (me included). He takes the time to have a few private words with everybody, in particular with every single little kid in there. Liborio spends time down on their level, in their private world.

  I know from being a student, and the son of educators, that when a teacher is genuinely invested in you—when a teacher actually cares—you can tell, and it makes a big difference. My mother in particular had taught at a variety of institutions, from New England colleges to Indian reservations in New Mexico, and she had come to the conclusion that basically the best thing you can do is love and show unconditional interest—it was the only real way to connect to students. As a student, you can feel it even if you never put a name to it.

  “I’ve been on different teams. I can remember the struggle to get attention on Carlson Gracie’s team—it’s impossible for one man, with so many good guys, to pay attention to everyone. So now I am just trying to bring in more coaches. You have to put the money back into the team, and the team has to keep growing or they’ll leave.

  “You need someone in charge, though, because that’s the big problem with pro fighters, the egos. When they reach a certain level, with the money and the spotlight, they need a leader. And they need to respect the leader and understand the program.”

  The question of ego was one that I had discussed at length with Eddie Bravo, a jiu-jitsu instructor in Hollywood who developed an innovative guard style and was a commentator at the UFC. Eddie is uniquely positioned in the sport; because of his commentating he was always rubbing elbows with the best fighters in the business. And watching them, carefully.

  “Ego is a big reason that guys stop advancing in the sport,” Eddie said. “Because in jiu-jitsu it feels so bad when you tap. You got killed. Jiu-jitsu is great because it filters out the assholes who can’t control their egos, the douche bags who can’t handle showing physical inferiority. But for these fighters, once they get famous, they can’t just roll, everyone wants to tap them. The famous guys start limiting their training. It’s very hard to take risks to get tapped when you get famous. So they stop progressing.

  “Everybody has ego. I have it, too. But you have to be the black belt and the ego has to be the blue belt—you have to be controlling it. I don’t like tapping. I’m teaching my students how to beat me and they are dying to do it, even though they respect me. But I’ll roll with everybody, and I get tapped by my students. I got some vicious dogs in here. But you can’t be one of those instructors who thinks it’s bad business to show weakness so they stop rolling. I’m selling evolution. You grow or you die.”

  Eddie’s been criticized for his style, which he touts as the future of no-gi, as having ways to be beaten. Eddie just laughs about it. “Of course, nothing’s a hundred percent. Every style has a counter. But it’s good to have options. Rubber guard [Eddie’s style] doesn’t work every time. It’s like a punch combination that doesn’t work—you don’t abandon it. Go back to it. Set it up differently.”

  The only reliable indicator of future success in MMA has always been the quality of training partners. You needed good guys around you to perform at a high level. You need killers “in the room,” as Gable would have it. The best fighters in MMA nearly always come from the best camps, drawn together to push each other. Liborio was well aware of it.

  “The victory is never yours, it’s the teams, it’s everybody. The boxing coach, the training partners, the guy who sets up the training schedules and buys the tickets. It helps to have a big gym, with a lot of big name fighters, because you can get them fights on many cards. I can say to promoters if you want Jeff Monson you need this guy on the undercard.”

  On our last day together, Liborio said something that really stuck with me.

  “Maturity is a big part of success in fighting, because it means you understand the game—that losing is part of the game. It doesn’t mean to let yourself get conquered, but to know that you can win again, at the right time you can be great. The key to doing well in competition is to accept.” Liborio holds the word reverentially in his mouth, emphasizing with his face and body. “Accept you can lose, you can not perform. Take this big bag of rocks out of your backpack, take the pressure off, and you’ll do better. Once you understand that, man, you can do well.”

  At the ATT gym I rolled with Chainsaw Charles and had the familiar feeling of helplessness. You can feel when the guy you’re rolling with is too good for you to threaten, and vice versa. I held my own for a while, but when he wanted to he took me out of my depth, into places where my knowledge was surfeit. Do I grab that ankle? Do I make space with my shoulder? He tapped me pretty quickly. And then I watch him with Liborio, and Liborio is moving at maybe half sp
eed and he’s dominating and frustrating Charles. I’m used to the feeling, but for good grapplers to run into great ones is particularly frustrating and hard on the ego. Charles has a bread-and-butter move that works on everyone but, when he tries it on Liborio, Liborio takes his back, time and again. The deeper knowledge leads to far deeper anticipation. Liborio knows where Charles is going and lets him go there, but he makes it much worse for him when he gets there. Charles’s sense of his ability is a little offended, but he just shakes his head and asks Liborio about it at length.

  Liborio discusses the problems with favorite moves. “Often you have a guy, and he does something that’s very consistent. He has one great takedown that he always does and he gets everybody with it. In his gym. In a different environment, a new, bigger gym, where he can’t take guys down with it, he breaks mentally. In a fight it’s just like that.”

  Liborio went on to the flip side of the problem. “You can be in a fight and you get a chance for an armbar. Now, the guys you train with are all good black belts and they never give you the armbar, you never get it, but you can’t skip drilling the armbar because you might get it in a fight. It has to be in the arsenal.”

  Marcelo Garcia is the latest incarnation of the iconic martial artist, the smaller, unassuming, nondescript man who comes out of nowhere to defeat his opponents with ease. I watched him roll with a former judo Olympian who’s built like a bodybuilder and must weigh more than two hundred pounds. The judo guy spent the whole five minutes running for his life, standing up and leaping out of reach, backing off, playing like he was going to engage but never engaging. It’s the only way to survive with Marcelo.

  As with the movie Ali, about the greatest boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali, there’s something lacking in writing about Marcelo Garcia. The fictional film with Will Smith playing Ali was good, until the fights start—then it falls apart. Because the whole point of Ali was the way he fought, the way he moved. That a big man could be so graceful, so fluid—it’s entrancing to watch. It’s beautiful to watch him fight. I could watch Ali shadowbox for an hour. I often thought they should have just cut to real fight footage in the movie, because Ali as a myth and a man doesn’t really make any sense unless you watch him move, unless you see him fight.