A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (17 page)

Olavo was thirty-seven and a two-time Brazilian champ who had won a lot of other awards, but he had also suffered egregious injuries. He had his whole bicep torn off the bone in a bicep slice, a move that is now illegal. The doctor I visited knew him, and when the doctor told me I couldn’t train for a while, I looked so despondent that he laughed and said that when he told Olavo to take two years off to rehab, Olavo cried, tears streaming down his cheeks. Jiu-jitsu was critical to Olavo’s identity, and he took immense pride in his position and skills.

“Jiu-jitsu is like being a Jedi knight…. The knowledge is with you all the time—you dream it when you sleep, you can see it walking, it surrounds you. You go out alone but you are not alone because you have jiu-jitsu.”

Every year, Olavo went to Abu Dhabi to teach jiu-jitsu to a sheik who had become a grappling enthusiast and some of his fighters. He’d spend three months living in a hotel and just training, all the time; the boredom was vicious, but the money was good. When he stayed abroad, away from his family, jiu-jitsu was his company. The name Abu Dhabi had become synonymous with the biggest grappling contest in the world, sponsored by that same sheik, with the best grapplers—and biggest purse.

Olavo started jiu-jitsu when he was eighteen, with Carlson and Murilo, who was a black belt, and Zé Mario, who was a brown belt. Olavo echoed a familiar sentiment: “Everything out of Murilo,” which meant that Murilo Bustamante was the innovator and genius behind Top Team.

Sitting companionably with our backs to the padded wall, sometimes forced to move as a squirming, twisting pair rolled into us (there is no stopping if you roll off the mats; everyone is too intense for that), Olavo and I watched Teta methodically obliterate somebody. Teta was Olavo’s teaching partner, just twenty-three years old but a Liborio black belt and very, very gifted; he had great hips. (Liborio was another founder of Top Team, a jiu-jitsu great who started American Top Team in Florida.) In jiu-jitsu, you work for something and patiently set it up, and the technique can be almost inevitable—not fast, not a reflex, but a slow and steady outthinking of your opponent. (There is a cultural difference in the way the Brazilians go for submissions—slow, steady, inexorable—versus the Japanese style, which is more about catching your opponent off guard, snatching something.) Teta was young and handsome, dark-skinned with fine features, and his ears were undestroyed. He was a professional jiu-jitsu instructor and an avid surfer, and his ex-wife, Gabrielle, was also a fighter who had won Mundials (and was my best friend in Brazil). Olavo was not disgruntled by his young partner; he respected him. Teta was part of the new evolution in jiu-jitsu.

“In the past, twenty-three years old was always a blue belt,” Olavo said, referring to Teta, “but he is a black belt. And a good one. Now you can learn from everybody. Now the kids can know everything. Now it’s a big sport.”

Jiu-jitsu is artistic; and it’s as much an expression of style as your clothes. Your personal style of jiu-jitsu reflects not only your teacher and background but also your body type and personality type. Carlson Gracie’s style was more about power and attacking, and he is the stylistic grandfather of Top Team. Gracie Barra, a different gym under Carlinhos Gracie and a deep and bitter rival, is a more technical jiu-jitsu school, more about playing from the half-guard, endless sleeve-and hand-control games, sweeping. Every school and instructor develops their own style. Olavo’s personal style is very Top Team, very much about power, control, almost like wrestling; while Teta, who is younger, stronger, and more talented than Olavo, with better hips, has a more open game. He is willing to work from anywhere, more willing to lose and give up position because he trusts his superior skills and talent to find a way out, to come up on top. Some styles don’t match up, of course—Margarida beats Teta because he is so powerful and so smart about his strength. And so on. Styles make fights.

Olavo muttered in my ear, “You have to learn from everybody, and stay open-minded, learn and watch carefully: Observation is critical. Watch how they grip. Guys who have been to a lot of different schools are very good because they learn so many different techniques. Now there is so much interchange that we have a lot of broad innovation and spreading ideas.”

Being willing to lose is important, to take risks, to find new ways of doing things; I’ve heard this again and again from different fighters. Even back at Pat Miletich’s place there was a guy who was great on the ground but too unwilling to give up position, content to sit in closed guard, and he was criticized for it; you’re never going to learn anything that way. Maybe from one position you do it wrong, or you are too tired, but then you discover a new position. It’s critical to remain open-minded, to let the new position come.

Olavo was also adamant about competition. “You can be good, but without fighting you cannot be a real fighter. You have to fight to learn—you have to feel the power in a tournament, when everyone is watching and the guy is trying to kill you.”

I was starting to see things, to see what people were giving up, to see where a guy should go in a position, but I had no faith in my ability to remember without actually training. Toward the end of my stay, I did feel better, and I started to train a little bit, only to promptly reaggravate my poor, wussy shoulder. So I was back on the wall for good.

Olavo made an interesting point about jiu-jitsu players: “When they put on the
gi
and step onto the mat, the social differences disappear, and Rio is a land of great social differences. A judge and a street cleaner can be friends…. For me everybody is the same. Everybody has respect. Policeman, ex-criminal, everyone. One guy is rich, one guy is walking the street with no shoes; on the mat they are the same. The black guy over there was a thief—to me it’s nothing. I don’t care.”

The best way to think about jiu-jitsu in Rio is to compare it to pickup basketball games in the United States, in the fanciest white-collar gyms or the most informal parking lots. Everyone, regardless of skill level, plays a little. You have bankers and lawyers alongside high school kids and blue-collar workers, and they all go after one another. Like street basketball, you go to the same gym and roll with the same guys for years. It’s as much for the camaraderie as for the workout. There is tremendous respect; when you enter and leave the mats, you bow and shake hands with everyone there, even if it’s thirty guys.

Of course, Top Team was something else entirely. Those guys didn’t do anything but train and condition. It’s like playing pickup basketball with the ’95 Chicago Bulls.

Zé Mario Sperry was in the thick of it, his heavy, powerful body roiling and sweaty, upending and controlling his partner with devastating power. Sperry was thirty-eight years old, a founding member of Top Team, and a driving force behind its success. He trained and worked out obsessively, compulsively, almost manically. His suicidal work ethic was at odds with his conversational ease and laid-back manner. “Every day I have to go home and rest at night, take care of myself and rest, because tomorrow, I swear to God, I swear on the soul of my unborn baby, that I have to come to the gym and try to kill a lion,” he said, and then broke into a laugh, mostly at himself.

Lion killing is a familiar theme; there is a basic choke called the
mate leão,
the lion killer, for its power and deadliness.

Zé (short for José) reminded me several times that he had a degree in economics, as did Murilo Bustamante. They could easily have been doing other things—they were connected and from good families in Rio—but there was nothing out there for them as rewarding as fighting. They both had been training full-time for at least twenty years. “After training for five months, and you are finally in the ring, facing a great opponent, you have been preparing and living for this moment…sometimes you can feel the presence of God. Your soul comes out. It’s a very addictive feeling.”

Zé’s father was an officer in the air force, and he grew up in Leblon, one of the nicest areas in Rio. He started martial arts when he was ten years old, on a doctor’s recommendation for his excess energy, and eventually became attached to Carlson Gracie’s school. Murilo was already a blue belt, and they ended up being the prime movers on Carlson’s famous
vale tudo
team, a team that was made up of legends.

Zé had always been a dominant fighter, right from the beginning, and he submitted most of his opponents in jiu-jitsu tournaments in the
gi,
instead of winning on points. He started fighting
vale tudo
when he was twenty-five, and his immense strength and berserk work ethic proved a winning combination, leading him to Japan in 2000. He had fought in Pride several times since. Eventually, in the nineties, Carlson went to teach in the United States, and the team, left behind, began to go its own way, eventually leading to a complete split from the Gracie family. For a while, they were “Carlson Gracie’s ex-students,” until Murilo spontaneously came out with “Brazilian Top Team” at a Pride press conference; now there are copycat “Top Teams” all over the globe.

Murilo Bustamante is the other iconic figure at Top Team, the longest practicing and most thoughtful; he was also thirty-eight and had been a black belt since twenty-one. As one of the greatest technical jiu-jitsu players of all time and a yoga practitioner, he was truly a spiritual fighter and in great demand. He was nearly always on the road, to Sweden, Russia, Japan, and the United States, giving seminars and cornering fighters, so I didn’t see him around the gym much.

One day at the gym, I got lucky, however, and we had a discussion about steroids and how they had changed the fight game. In Brazil, protein and creatine were expensive, while a cycle of steroids was easily available and cost maybe fifteen dollars U.S. Murilo lamented that it had changed not only the fighters but also the game itself; it was much more about power and aggression now, as the steroids affected the mind and temperament as much as the body. It was obvious who was using and who was not; the bulk and size of certain fighters were like flags flying in the wind—fighters who went from sixty-five kilos to more than a hundred in a few years. Just compare “all-natural” bodybuilders to those who aren’t; your eyes are the best test for who is on steroids.

Murilo was a Carlson Gracie black belt who fought in the old
vale tudo
matches, and I imagine it had been hard for him to leave Carlson. He’d spent two years trying to heal the rift between Zé and Carlson and change Carlson’s mind before he ended up following Zé to Top Team.

And then there was Rodrigo. Like the first time I saw Zé or Murilo, I was slightly starstruck when I met Rodrigo Nogueira, Top Team’s biggest fighter, a hero in Japan and Brazil. I had watched his fights in Pride, and you can learn so much about a person by watching him fight that you feel you know him. Zé once told me, “It’s why everyone is an expert; because you identify so strongly with the fighter. You think it’s you up there.” A. J. Liebling wrote about taking a friend to the fights who had never been, and within two bouts the friend was an expert, talking about what the loser should have done. That’s an interesting side of masculinity, the way male fight fans and writers always know what a fighter should do, how he could win—expertise derived from watching fights on TV. Or a fan will say, “He’s got no heart,” about a fighter who has forty pro fights. I always think, What the fuck do you know about heart?

Rodrigo was twenty-eight years old and the youngest dominant fighter on Top Team. There was a triumvirate of him, Zé, and Murilo. Zé and Murilo were kind of the older brothers, the wise and experienced warriors, but Rodrigo was at the height of his powers. There were other famed BTT fighters, Ricardo Arona and Vitor Belfort, who trained elsewhere, in São Paolo or the United States.

After a morning training session, I rode with Rodrigo up to his house in a big, gleaming silver Land Rover with several other fighters and trainers, part of the champ’s retinue. Rodrigo, coming up later than Zé and Murilo, had made big money. He was the fighter all the hungry young kids wanted to emulate. We bombed through the streets of Rio listening to the White Stripes and the Strokes.

Rodrigo’s house was the nicest I came across in Rio, a giant place with high ceilings and dark wood interiors set on a massive cliff between São Conrado and Barra, right over the ocean. The day was an absolute sparkler, and I could see for thirty miles, the shipping coming into Rio, the little islands off the coast. Below us, the heavy swell surged on the rocks. Rodrigo leapt into his pool and called one of his dogs, a massive white mastiff, over to him, and then pulled the dog in, laughing.

Rodrigo was big at maybe 230 pounds and strong, but not muscle bound; indeed, for the Pride heavyweights, he was slender and normal-looking. His face was a handsome but battered mass, with a heavy square jaw, slightly uneven eyes, all angles and planes. He was famous for shaking off huge blows, weathering killer punches, but the evidence was on his face. He had become something of a sex symbol in Japan, ever since a top Japanese model said that she thought he was very handsome. And he was, in a rough-and-tumble way; he’d had his cheek and face broken several times by both Fedor Emelianenko and Bob Sapp. His ears were a mess, the left in particular a fleshy nub that looked like something out of
Star Wars.
Rodrigo was most appealing when he smiled or laughed, because his face was totally transformed. His smile was huge, and his eyes were squeezed to slits, and you could feel the good nature radiating off him like heat.

Rodrigo and his twin brother, Rogerio, who fought at around 205, were from a small town in the northeast, Vitória da Conquista, and their childhood sounds like a cross between García Marquez and Quentin Tarantino. Their father was an accountant and their mother a physical trainer, and they owned a coffee plantation as a kind of hobby, a place to go to out of the city. Rodrigo had a very active childhood. He would ride horses and bulls, and once he rode a horse all day long until the horse finally fainted dead away. You got the sense that Rodrigo’s strength and stamina were on a slightly different plane from everyone else’s.