A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (14 page)

And, of course, it’s all tough guys, and no one is as sensitive to perceived slights as tough guys.

I moved into Scotty’s back room when the other guys moved out, and I hung out with him and did core training for my ribs. I figured I’d spend a few weeks there, getting my bearings and taking Portuguese lessons, then make the transition to Top Team and get my own place. Scotty had mats on his balcony, and we would sometimes train out there. He was a big help to me because he would go lightly on my ribs.

I wanted to fight, or at least compete in some grappling tournaments after I’d been there for a while, so I was running and skipping rope and not drinking, while Scotty was basically partying, smoking weed, and hanging out. It was thanks to him that I became aware of the subculture ties between surfing and jiu-jitsu. Most fighters also surf, some professionally. Renzo Gracie (another world-famous Gracie, who now runs a school in Manhattan) was a pro surfer, and at Top Team a big-wave rider with the world’s biggest wave under his belt, Rodrigo “the Monster” Resende, sometimes showed up. The weed smoking is another part of it. There is a whole contingent of jiu-jitsu players all over the world who self-medicate with THC.

Even training on Scotty’s balcony, I was struck by the democracy of ground fighting. The people teaching ground fighting aren’t untouchable professors; they are other fighters, older and more experienced, but because you “train” with them, they teach on a very friendly, face-to-face level. “Training” in Brazil means more or less full-speed and strength-submission grappling, with
gi
or without. A
gi,
or kimono, as the Brazilians call it, is the thick white judo uniform that stands in for clothing you might wear in a street fight. Though early fighters perfected their ground games with a
gi,
now most
vale tudo
fighters practice without it, as most MMA fights will not allow it.

Grappling is a discussion, it’s an open forum. The way you train is with a bunch of friends sitting around watching two guys grappling, and trying various things at half speed, and then going for it nearly full speed. At Scotty’s house, out on the balcony, various gringos and Brazilians would smoke weed and roll. It was there I met a somewhat famous fighter named Tony DeSouza, who was ranked pretty high in the world, had fought in the UFC three times, and was living in Brazil and Peru.

Tony was thirty, a Peruvian citizen who had grown up in the United States as an illegal alien. His parents had come to Southern California when he was ten years old to make a better life and to get away from the violence in Peru. He had gone to high school in San Marino and attended Cal State Bakersfield on a wrestling scholarship, all as an illegal alien. “I hate lying, and I had to lie all the time,” Tony said. When I met him, he looked like an
indío,
a bushman with a thick head of curly hair and a giant bushy beard, with flat, dark brown eyes and a battered nose.

Tony was a wrestling standout and did very well as a freshman and sophomore in the Division I Pac-10 (he was voted most outstanding) and was rated in the top twelve in the country, but his interest started to flag and he butted heads with his coaches, who were overtraining him. He failed to qualify for Division I his senior year, even though he beat several Division I all-Americans. Anger filled him up: “I just went out there to hurt guys,” he said. “My last fight I had the guy crying. I lost by fifteen points.” He did a lot of street fighting. “Bouncers,” he said to me, and then rolled his eyes as though that said everything. And in a way it did. Tony’s not a big guy, maybe five-nine and 170 pounds, and he is not physically intimidating despite his battered visage and gnarled ears.

He drifted and worked in Vegas, and got into jiu-jitsu almost by accident. Within a few weeks he was living in the gym, and within six months he had his first MMA fight. Soon after, he was in the UFC. He fought three times in the UFC (he went 2–1) and in a few other places, before moving back to Peru and starting his own gym.

Tony had come to Rio via the Amazon; he’d spent a month on the river. He’d left Peru with about a hundred dollars U.S. and had pretty much bummed his way down, sleeping outside. When I met him, he had just fought Luiz Azeredo in Meca, the big Brazilian
vale tudo
event, and beaten him. Luiz was arguably the best Brazilian in his weight class. Tony had him in a finishing move, “the Twister,” but it was so technical that the referee didn’t recognize it and stopped the fight and restarted them standing. Tony shook it off like it was nothing.

During the fight the crowd starting chanting “
Mendigo,
” meaning “the bum,” at Tony, because he resembled a famous homeless TV character. He did look like a wild man, and he was sleeping on the mats at his gym in Centro with about six other penniless jiu-jitsu fighters when I met him. He was an extreme example of the new breed of fighter, taking the ground game to higher and more rarefied air, traveling like an old journeyman boxer, seeking out new teachers and opportunities to fight.

One night, Scotty and I went to see Darryl Gholar, an American wrestler who had changed the face of
vale tudo.
We drove through the warmth and glow of Rio, past street kids congregated on mattresses in the center of the tunnels, right in the exhaust and in the eyes of the thousands of cars streaming by. It was so strange, to see these kids in the middle of the tunnel, but then you realize that for them it is safe. The constant stream of cars and headlights doesn’t concern them, although it flows by only a few feet away; they are deep in the cave and safe. Nobody is going to walk the thousand feet either way in darkness, in that narrow hell, to get to them.

Darryl Gholar had come to Brazil to teach takedowns. The wrestling takedown is an essential ingredient of the ground game because it is a way to control the fight and end up on the ground in a better position, on top. A main reason American wrestlers have been so good at
vale tudo
is their powerful takedown ability, learned from a young age.

Darryl Gholar loved Brazil and had been there for several years. He was in his early forties, a world-class freestyle wrestler who at his peak had beaten people like Randy Couture at wrestling. Darryl had suffered a brain aneurysm, and Scotty had pretty much been the only one who had gone to see him in the hospital, bringing him food and comfort, as well as dealing with some con artists who told Darryl’s mom that she needed to wire seven grand for an operation. Scotty asked around and found out that that was horseshit. He had passed the hat on his Web site and raised two thousand dollars for Darryl, money to buy him a ticket back to the States.

Darryl had recently been led astray by Wallid Ismail, a famous fighter who began on the same team as Zé Mario and Murilo Bustamante, under Carlson Gracie. Darryl had been Top Team’s wrestling coach, and Wallid had promised him a lot more money to leave and come to the team he was starting. When Darryl showed up with his bridges burned at Top Team, Wallid had no money and no team. Wallid had done this to some other famous fighters, as well. Now the wrestling coach at Top Team is a Brazilian, Jefferson Teixeira, a three-time national champ and former collegiate coach, a diminutive figure with perfect form. They do two hard wrestling workouts a week at Top Team, because the takedown (and its defense) is one of the most important aspects of the ground game. (Since my trip, Darryl has gone back to Top Team and is coaching again—and the Top Team fighters are taking everyone down at will.)

Darryl’s dad came in to help him, for although Darryl seemed healthy, he still moved gingerly, and there was a sense of tension and fragility about him. His father had been a pro boxer, and we talked about Thailand. He’d lived there in 1962 and ’63 in the service and had loved it. He was trying to tell his son how it compared to Brazil. There was something of a similar feel, hot-country jungle and third world. They were interested in my book and wanted to talk about it. “Do you ever watch animals, horses and cows and birds?” asked Darryl’s father, a tall, thick, distinguished man with an open, handsome face and gray hair. He made the motions of jostling his elbows for space, for position. “It’s natural, everything fights.”

Copacabana is a bustling, dense city, hovering between third world and first: street kids and homeless alongside professionals and couples walking with grocery bags and briefcases, shadowed by obvious criminal types, skeletally thin and strung out, giving you the hairy eyeball, kids begging and sniffing glue from rags, every big fancy building secure behind glass and steel curtains and doormen.

Scott, Lincoln, Nick, and I piled into a jeep one afternoon and blasted through a dense, heavy, overcast city to the north, to see some
vale tudo.
Nick, the “Green Giant,” was a large, gentle guy from Colorado, where he worked as a barista and took his jiu-jitsu very seriously. He was about as gringo as they come, lily-white and red-blond. Lincoln was a skinny punk with tattoos and wild red hair and a slightly goofy air, who had worked in carnivals and freak shows (I think he wrestled midgets at Lollapalooza), and was down here for some months, grappling at Gracie Barra. He made the joke “I’m like Jason—they keep killing me and I keep coming back.” I liked him because he wore a T-shirt that said, “The Clash is the only band that matters,” and you can’t really say it better than that.

We flew through the twisting canyons of Rio, past the famous slum City of God, and over a huge bridge spanning an endless bay with the pride of Brazil’s navy loitering around the base, and cranes and oil rigs like dinosaurs or monster robots in a science fiction set. It’s the longest bridge in the world, or in Brazil, depending on whom you’re in the car with. We lanced out into the deepening gloom and the jungle, seeing occasional fires along the road.

It took a little doing, but we found the venue at a fairground, complete with stalls of prize Brahman cows, some fancy new tractors, food and beer, and a huge soundstage set up for a concert. The fights had been scheduled to begin at around eight p.m., which is when we got there, but a light drizzle began and there was no crowd, so they put them off for two hours.

The fighters—instantly recognizable by their bulk, the
pite-boys
(from “pit bull,” pronounced “pitchey-boys”) with heavily snarled cauliflower ears, battered noses and eyebrows, and thick heavy shoulders and hands—and their respective teams were milling around. One guy was absolutely immense and dark black, with arms like separate people attached to his shoulders, a steroid wonder, with bloodshot eyes in a handsome, chiseled face. A lot of black and olive skin, skullcaps, eyes searching one another out. Being with Scott and the other gringos, it was as if I didn’t exist because I was so obviously not a fighter, or at least not one to be concerned about.

They call them
pite-boys,
somewhat like the motorcycle guys are called moto boys. It’s almost a fashion thing, but the
pite-boys
are a little more extreme. They often show up to a club or party and if they aren’t let in will kick everyone’s ass in the line, or pull the tent down on the party. They are essentially social terrorists. There are stories about how poor street kids will sometimes take rocks and mash up their own ears, in order to look tough, like
pite-boys.

“Once you get pretty good at jiu-jitsu, beating up someone who doesn’t know any jiu-jitsu is pretty fucking easy. So you get this whole power trip,” was Scott’s explanation for the phenomenon.
Pite-boys
were notorious throughout Rio. “They’ve got a gun and you don’t; and these guys abuse the power.” Most
pite-boys
were upper class, with the freedom from legal persecution that privilege affords in Brazil.

While shaved heads, tats, and cauliflower ears are the uniform, some of the most notorious
pite-boys
don’t quite fit that stereotype, like Ryan Gracie and Georginio. And it’s usually not the best fighters who are the bad
pite-boys;
for instance, Murilo and Zé Mario aren’t out in clubs beating people up.

There were some particularly infamous incidents, such as one battle between Ryan Gracie and Macoco that destroyed an entire sushi restaurant in São Paolo. Now just as every dog bite becomes a pit-bull attack, every public fight is blamed on
pite-boys.

Luta livre
just means “wrestling,” but it has come to stand for a different tradition from Gracie jiu-jitsu, a competitor. It was “no-
gi
” from the beginning, as the students were too poor to afford the uniform. The essential difference is class,
luta livre
being the no-
gi
wrestling of the poor in the
favelas,
and jiu-jitsu being the art of the rich and powerful of Rio.
Luta livre
became its own style of submission wrestling.

The two styles clashed, somewhat inevitably (this is South America and machismo is the rule), in Rio in the early eighties, probably on the beach, where so much Carioca life happens, and evolved into a Hatfield and McCoy–style enmity. There was an attempt to end the rivalry by a series of
vale tudo
matches. In the first series, Eugenio Tadeu and the other kickboxing guys did surprisingly well (they had just started learning
luta livre
), but their leader, Flavio Molina, an excellent kickboxer, was destroyed.

In the early nineties, representatives of the two traditions fought again. This time the Gracie jiu-jitsu people were better organized and included two of Carlson’s students, Murilo Bustamente and Wallid Ismail, and they won all their fights. There was talk that the Gracies had their students do all their fighting for them, but the focus of the Gracie family at that time was on the United States, where they were starting the UFC.