Fighter's Mind, A Read online

  Marcelo is something like that. You have to watch him roll to appreciate him. I’m not saying he’s some mysterious Jedi knight who does magical things—although at times it appears that way. Like all great jiu-jitsu players, Marcelo does the basic things extremely well, nearly unstoppably. He does the basic things to the best guys in the world. He took Renzo Gracie’s back for ten minutes in Abu Dhabi—something you wouldn’t have thought possible.

  I remembered what Mike C had said about Marcelo, the excited look in his eyes when I pressed him about it.

  “He’s all he’s cracked up to be. I never had a chance. It was embarrassing because a lot of people at the seminar were watching, and they knew I fought in the IFL. Then I watched him do the same thing to everyone else. You couldn’t tell who was a white belt and who was a black belt—he made everybody look like a beginner.”

  I asked Mike to analyze Marcelo’s game as best he could. Mike thought about it, and then he slowly answered, “He’s so dedicated. He can think so far ahead and he never settles into a position. He’s always moving on you, forcing you into transitions. People don’t realize you have to be in great shape to keep up with him on the mat, and he’ll run you out of gas in a minute. People are used to getting into a position and sort of thinking, like closed guard or half-guard. But Marcelo is gone, he’s attacking, and by the time you get there it’s too late. He’s under you sweeping, he’s arm dragging, he’s x-guard sweeping you. He never stops. I was waiting for my chance to try something. He’s a nightmare—you have to keep up his pace to even have a chance.”

  One of the few things I had learned for my no-gi game was that conditioning could make up for a lot. Most of the guys I roll with are much better than me, but sometimes I can just keep moving, squirming and scrambling, and make things difficult for good guys. Especially in a bad position you have to become a perpetual motion machine.

  “He started out in ’03 with arm drags and x-guard sweeps, and he put them on the map, he dominated with those. Now people start figuring that out, he comes along and he’s hitting crazy guillotines from every position. He has a whole series of back attacks. I’ve been following his DVD series. I’ve got all four sets.”

  Mike is talking about the common practice of famous guys putting together instructional DVDs as a way of making money. It’s the old-school way to learn MMA, to buy DVDs and study your heroes, to go to seminars.

  “While you’re learning what he’s BEEN doing, the old stuff, he’s pulling out new stuff. Stuff people haven’t seen, now he’s got so many ways to get an omoplata and a guillotine and a crucifix, they are the big things his latest set focused on. There were three or four DVDs on the omoplata alone, I didn’t realize there were so many variations. He’s revolutionized different positions. While you’re trying to figure out what he did, he’s moved on to two and three more positions. He had everything mapped out in his head already.

  “Last time I rolled with him, it was all new crazy shit I’d never seen. He tapped me three times with the same move, and I can’t even figure out what it was. I thought it was a fluke at first. Then I saw some pictures, and he taught it the next day at the seminar: an omoplata with one leg to finish, the monoplata. I knew what it was and thought, Oh he’s not getting me with this, so I countered but he shifted to a variation of the triangle armbar, and it was crazy. I had nowhere to go. Now I do it at our gym and blow people’s minds. They make me show them what it was, because it’s a wild thing. And I’d watched all his DVDs and his matches and never seen it.

  “He’s not strong or superfast—he’s got solid athleticism in all areas. His mind is better. He causes scrambles, but it’s all calculated, his mind moves so fast he KNOWS what you’re going to try and do. He knows your options. He’s a solid athlete, but its not that. He causes scrambles and causes you to think when he already knows what’s going on. You’re moving so fast without thinking that you walk right into stuff. He caught me with something three times and I should have figured it out. But he makes everything happen so fast, from different angles and different positions. You don’t figure it’s the same move. You think you’re doing good and then you’re tapping. There were times when he had me in stuff and I was still fighting—I didn’t even realize he had me. I didn’t know I was in a submission. He was just holding me.”

  It all makes Mike laugh.

  “I wouldn’t have thought anybody his size could tap me the way he taps me. The highlight of me rolling with him was I almost got hold of his leg and put his back on the ground.” Mike laughed again. “I almost got to half-guard. He’s like a ball, when you try to put him on his back, he never settles for a position. He’s always got his legs in, elevating, working under you. I’ve never seen him in closed guard looking for something. He’s always moving, causing scrambles. He’s the king of scrambles.”

  Marcelo is also known as not only the nicest guy in the game, but he is jokingly referred to as maybe the nicest guy on earth. So many fighters and jiu-jitsu guys I talked to confided in me that Marcelo was their best friend that it became comical. Everybody is his best friend. From the first time I met him he lived up to that billing, smiling, gracious, warm, and sincerely interested in what I was trying to do. He’s got a round face, wreathed in smiles, and narrow eyes.

  I am a little in awe of Marcelo, and some of that admittedly comes from my inexperience. I’m a low-level grappler and when I see what he does to the high-level guys I find it a little incredible.

  So here I was, finally sitting down to lunch with Marcelo, and as we started talking he wanted to make one thing very clear in his thick Brazilian accent: he’s not so special.

  “Why do I beat a lot of people? Because I love it so much, that’s why. Everything about jiu-jitsu, I love it—the school, the mat, the ring. I always believe that. Maybe I am not better than my opponent, but I know for sure I love my training more.” He smiled at me. It was all so simple. The birds chirping, the sun shining down around us in suburban Florida, Marcelo beaming at me.

  Thanks a lot, Marcelo, I thought. That’s a big help in trying to understand your thought process. It was funny how hard it was to get these guys to talk about how they think. While many will admit that the great jiu-jitsu players do think about jiu-jitsu differently, they get resistant when you try to quantify that.

  I’d asked Scotty Nelson about it; Scotty had been a white belt with BJ Penn back at Ralph Gracie’s gym. “Do some guys think about jiu-jitsu differently than you and me?”

  “Absolutely,” he’d replied. “All the top guys think about it differently. I was hanging out with Nino Schembri. He was the guy, back in the day, submitting everybody. I asked Nino, ‘How did you get good at submissions from all these different positions?’ He said he looked at all the bad positions, all the spots where he wasn’t strong, and tried to figure out a submission from there. He doesn’t fight to get into the right position—he learns and practices submissions from positions he’s uncomfortable in. Nino said, ‘I’ll never be the best wrestler, I don’t want to be, but I figured out all the takedowns and have a way to flow into a submission. Off a double leg, I look for the triangle. Off the single leg, omoplata. If he goes for a high crotch, I dive over for a crucifix. I take what they give me and make a strong position out of a weak one.’”

  Maybe more revealing is the level of dedication that Nino showed, the clinical, thoughtful way of thinking about jiu-jitsu, the depth of his study. It’s that level of commitment that is distinct.

  I found that pattern repeated. Many good jiu-jitsu players will just train and because they know enough to beat most people they stop studying and learning. The great ones, though, are fanatical students, analyzing positions and all the tiny adjustments that make a position or a sweep work. The difference between a regular student of jiu-jitsu and the great players is the dedication to studying the game. Sean Williams, who got his black belt in four years from Renzo despite being sidelined for months with injuries, would fill notebooks after every training ses
sion, writing down everything he could think of. BJ Penn, the so called prodigy, who some think of as a mysterious genius, is the same way. The stories about him from his early days at Ralph Gracie’s Academy are all about his fanatical drilling of small positional changes. BJ would laugh about those days and talk about how jiu-jitsu invaded his dreams and daydreams, in the shower, biking home, lying in bed. All the great players talk about it, how it becomes an obsession.

  I pressed on with Marcelo. We started talking about where he came from, Minas Gerais, a big inland state in Brazil. Marcelo was from a remote town and, like many in Brazil, he started young in judo. Then he saw his first videotapes of the UFC. “I thought, I wanna do this,” he said. Marcelo found his first school and it was an hour and a half by bus away from his home. He was fourteen and could make it only two or three times a week. “You can always train jiu-jitsu if you want to bad enough,” he said. Where he lived there was only a small university and a few options—his father was a retired banker, his mother worked at home. He didn’t have the money to go elsewhere to study. But Marcelo realized he could make jiu-jitsu his profession. “I just enjoy it so much. I hope I can make enough to live off it someday. But I decide to make it my life.”

  In his off days, he would just wait and think about the next time he’d get to go train. “I loved the energy, of matching with each other. I loved the way I felt after training, that I’d done my job today. And after a few weeks I realized I could do this forever. I started with four friends, and I was the biggest one—I grew up early—but I was the worst one. The worst one of my friends. I wasn’t a natural, but even then I enjoyed it so much, and I kept making the long journey. After two months one friend dropped out, and I just kept improving. There was one guy who was a man, and he used to beat me up, but then he stopped for five months, and when he came back I could control him. I had proof that I was getting better. I wasn’t a good student, and even now I never say I am better than anybody, but I know I love jiu-jitsu more than anybody. I love the energy and that it gets deeper the more you study.”

  Inwardly, I sigh. No silver bullet. “Is it just that you know more?” I asked him. “Sweeps, holds, counters . . . ?”

  Marcelo’s eyes lit up at “counters.” He liked that one. “I think I have a lot of counters, unnerstan’? I try to make him go into the position I want. I study a lot. I try not to make any mistakes, I try to be perfect, and I have a little more knowledge than most. It’s something I think about, how to get him to put his hand there or his leg where I need it.

  “Guys who face me, when they believe they can win, and when they are strong and come hard, that’s tougher. When they are tentative, or have too many strategies, when they try to beat me in my game . . .” Here he grins and his face lights up. “That’s not gonna work, guys. Of course I get caught sometimes, but most of the time I can handle it.

  “I’m always thinking when I’m rolling, and sometimes the guy can’t follow my pace and lets me get too far. When it goes too fast, then it’s just reaction. You have to train hard for that, train all the time.”

  When Marcelo was sixteen, his training wasn’t hard enough to satisfy him. He felt stifled by the future in his small town, the long commute limiting his training to three times a week. At a competition a teacher named Paulo Cezar invited him to move to a nearby city and train at his school. “I asked my mom, and she was shocked but she let me move if I finished school there. So two months later I moved and started studying there.”

  Marcelo’s jiu-jitsu training began in earnest. He loved the gym and the teacher, even though the teacher was just a brown belt. There were a lot of people around to train with and Marcelo trained three or four times a day for three years straight. When he started with Cezar, he was living on the mats, sleeping in the gym at night—a common enough occurrence in Brazil for the young, poor, and dedicated. Eventually he was given a small room off the gym, which he shared with a roommate. Over the next few years Marcelo met his wife, got his brown belt, and moved to São Paulo, where he started training with Fabio Gurgel, an elite-level coach. He was constantly competing in Brazil. Then came the Abu Dhabi in ’03. Marcelo had been a black belt for only five months.

  Marcelo actually lost the final of the qualifiers by one point. He’d pulled guard and lost a point and his opponent ran for twenty minutes. So he wasn’t expecting even to compete and was training in the gi for more gi tourneys. Fabio, the old hand, knew there would be last-minute cancellations, and visa problems, so he had Marcelo make weight and, sure enough, Marcelo got his chance. He had been waiting a long time for it.

  “I was really prepared. I felt nobody could take this from me. I had a hard bracket, but I knew that people didn’t know me, didn’t expect much from me, and wouldn’t have a strategy for me. I could play my best game. Everyone else is a big name, he’s a Gracie, whatever. I didn’t want to respect anybody too much. I thought to myself, I can win this thing. And then I started to make it real. I started to win, and I got stronger after each match.” Marcelo not only won his bracket, he submitted Mike Van Arsdale in the Absolute division. Van Arsdale is a former NCAA champion and superstar wrestler who outweighed Marcelo by two weight classes. Marcelo swarmed him, slipped up on his back, and choked him out in a minute or two. In the footage of the match, you can see Van Arsdale’s utter surprise and disgust that anyone could do that to him.

  Marcelo embodied what Carlson Gracie had told me and Scotty—all his gi training would work no-gi, too. He showed how the x-guard, a new type of guard that gets under an opponent and destabilizes him, could be adapted very well to no-gi. And Marcelo was always aware of what techniques would work on guys no matter the size. He had played a lot of triangle games (the triangle is a kind of choke from the bottom, catching your opponent’s head and arm between your legs) in his early days, until he realized he couldn’t triangle really big guys. But he could arm-drag and take the back and choke someone any size. As Eddie Bravo said, “Don’t be fooled. Marcelo is deceptively strong, his legs are powerful.” Mike C had agreed, saying,“Marcelo’s legs are as big as mine. And he’s got bowling balls for calves.” More to the point, Eddie talked about Marcelo’s squeeze: “Marcelo has an incredible squeeze. He developed a squeeze and took it to levels that no one knew existed.”

  When Marcelo puts the choke on, he has developed his squeeze to a high level, where it instantly constricts and fighters are helpless against it. In ’03, when Marcelo rolled against Shaolin, an awesome, athletic jiu-jitsu fighter, Shaolin and Marcelo spun into a lightning-quick war and suddenly Shaolin was unconscious—he hadn’t even had time to tap. Marcelo can apply it from odd places, and fighters think they’re safe when they’re not.

  When I apply a squeeze in the rear-naked choke, it isn’t instantaneous—people fight it for a while. I haven’t developed my squeeze enough. In the rear-naked choke, you apply pressure to the carotid arteries, but finding the right angle and the right kind of pressure is the trick. Practice can make the choke nearly instantaneous as opposed to painful and slow. Another interesting thing about jiu-jitsu is that it’s a game of centimeters. It’s made up of tiny adjustments, little things that can mean the difference between success and failure in a move. If I’m sweeping someone I may be doing everything right, yet missing one small but essential step—my foot is an inch off or I forget to put a little push, just a pound of pressure, on the knee—and the position won’t work. It’s about getting all the little things right.

  One thing Marcelo does do, when he rolls with blue belts or white belts, is try for perfection. “The reason I like to train with lower belts is to practice for myself, and look for the perfect positions, to get to places with more facility. To really try and make a perfect position.” Marcelo cherishes the notion of perfection. “I can really improve my holds, and practice new things. You can train exactly the position you want to train.”

  There is an Abu Dhabi championship every two years, and in ’05 Marcelo still felt he had a lot to prove. No one th
ought he could repeat his success. He had to prove it wasn’t a fluke. And he did, winning his division again and placing third in the Absolute.

  Then in ’07, Marcelo said he started to feel the pressure, that he had to win, and he was very focused on winning the Absolute. He won his weight division again, one of the toughest brackets in the tournament. He even won through the Absolute, where he lost the final to Robert Drysdale (99 kg), by submission. Even though Drysdale outweighed Marcelo by forty pounds, that win made him a superstar.

  Marcelo was grinning when he talked about it, though. “I improved my game. In my other matches I submitted everyone, which I had never done before. So I had eight submissions, including mine, which was good,” and then we both started laughing. His amusement was deep and genuine.

  After that, Marcelo decided to make the switch to MMA. He was having trouble staying motivated in his training, and he had something to prove. “It makes me mad. I feel bad, people think I can’t do it. I want to prove I can.”

  Marcelo reminds me a little of Rulon Gardner, the Olympic heavyweight wrestler who fought one MMA fight in Pride. Rulon, a huge man, three hundred pounds of muscle and quickness, had wondered if he could defend himself, feeling a bit slighted by people who punch. I had an odd experience talking to wrestlers on Tom Brands’s University of Iowa team. They would say, “Oh MMA, that’s serious stuff.” I would think, Everybody here would do fine in MMA.