Into the Cage

by Nick Gullo

  THE MASTER: ANDERSON SILVA

  Anderson “The Spider” Silva is the greatest martial artist to ever walk the earth. That’s a bold claim, I know, and it sends the mind reeling, envisioning some mythical Shaolin monk wandering the Asian countryside, brutalizing foes far from royal courtyards, historians, or cameras.

  Ever?

  Yes, ever.

  “Martial arts have advanced more in the last ten years than in the last ten thousand,” Dana White often quips—and he’s right. In the seventeenth century, our mythical Shaolin monk might have mastered rudimentary kung fu, but it’s doubtful he had an inkling of European grappling, jiu-jitsu, or muay Thai.

  Yet Anderson Silva reigns supreme in an age when every technique is just a click away. It’s all there, for free, just search YouTube to learn the nuances of any kick, any punch, any submission. No small coincidence this martial arts advancement mirrors the growth of the virtual hive-mind.

  A dedicated student of every combat discipline, The Spider holds black belts in muay Thai, judo, tae kwon do, and jiu-jitsu. He trains wrestling, boxing—hell, the guy’s even grappled with an indigenous Brazilian tribe. Yeah, he’s suffered four losses during his fifteen years competing in MMA, but again, this ain’t boxing, where trainers and promoters duck tough fights in order to pad records and rake cash—in the Octagon, fighters face all worthy challengers.

  That said, the man hasn’t lost in seven years. Hardly the most brutal or the fastest striker, Anderson brings into the cage a grace and poise rarely seen in competitive fighting. It’s more ballet than combat, and what I mean is, real ballet—where those years of blisters, muscle strains, diet, hysterical tears—yield for us, the audience, a few minutes of onstage beauty that leaves us awed and cheering for more.

  So he’s the greatest. But having spent hours backstage with Anderson—prior to his bouts, prior to other fighters’ bouts, even at other organizations’ bouts—I grew most intrigued with his commitment to mentoring younger fighters. I’ve seen him coach, warm up, even wrap the hands of fighters that train not just at his gym but within his martial arts lineage.

  Lineage. The term is seldom heard in American sports, and it’s the great divide between wrestling and jiu-jitsu. Yeah, “Where’d you wrestle?” is a common question, but it’s more an ice-breaker than anything else. Yet in Brazilian culture, “Who you train under?” seeks information regarding style, social mores, disposition, loyalties, even character. But Silva is different. Silva has transcended that query. Trite as it sounds: no longer is he the student, now he is the master.

  Unlike most camps, Silva runs the show. Assembling trainers and sparring partners to help him prepare for a fight. Running drills. Giving feedback. This includes Steven Seagal, who claimed credit for the KO front kick that Silva unleashed on Vitor Belfort during UFC 126 in February 2011. “People laugh,” said Ed Soares, Silva’s manager, “but I personally watched Seagal drill that kick with Silva at least two hundred times. No, he didn’t teach him the kick, but he definitely helped refine it. Let’s face it, at this point in Anderson’s career, there’s not much he doesn’t know.”

  And like any great master, Silva not only fights but also spends time nurturing his own lineage. “In martial arts, it’s important to give back,” he told me, “to help those younger, just as I was helped. That’s the way to make this world a better place. To give, not just take.”

  Top: Professor Silva.

  Bottom: Silva warming up Paulo Bananada before his fight.

  Anderson Silva walking out with Paulo Bananada.

  THE PHYSICIST: GREG JACKSON

  That shimmering on the horizon, it’s the future, and though we’ll never reach it, you can bet your ass it’s gonna up the game of nearly every endeavor. In MMA, there’s no way to talk camps, strategy, or evolution without touching on trainer Greg Jackson.

  By far, one of the most fascinating articles ever written on MMA appeared not in an industry publication but in Popular Science magazine.

  In summary, “Cage Match: How Science Is Transforming the Sport of MMA Fighting” described how every MMA camp studies an opponent’s prior fights and in turn formulates fight strategy to secure a win. This technique is as old as the antique film projector in your great-grandfather’s attic. But with the rise of technology, not only are fights filmed and archived; now, in real-time, the FightMetric crew logs every punch, kick, takedown, knockdown, and submission attempt. At fights the data is displayed on a monitor near Joe Rogan, so he can call the live action while Mike Goldberg intersperses relevant stats.

  Self-dubbed “the world’s only comprehensive mixed martial arts statistics and analysis system,” FightMetric provides stats for MMA. I’ve sat with the team backstage—each tech geek hunched inches from their screen, tapping away at game controllers as their assigned fighter throws and ducks.

  Later, UFC producers comb these stats for trends—as does Greg Jackson. And that quantitative approach is what separates the legendary trainer from his peers. Like the baseball scouts portrayed in the movie Moneyball, Jackson spurns hunches and theories for empirical data. Tell him an inside leg kick is the best setup for an overhand right, and he’ll say, Show me—and what that means is pull up the spreadsheet and prove it.

  Jackson, however, quantum-leaps mere data crunching—

  In 1928, mathematician John von Neumann proved to the world his “mini-max theorem,” which states that for every finite, zero-sum two-person game (e.g., an MMA fight), there exists a set of optimal choices; and a player can determine these choices via a decision tree or matrix. This framework for analyzing games in which two opponents make decisions to best each other is also called “game theory” or, simply, “Which move should I make next?”

  Typical application involves a tic-tac-toe chart with each quadrant containing outcomes produced by the available choices. Appropriately enough, let’s consider a game of tic-tac-toe: two players, nine squares = eighty-one quadrants representing every outcome. The math entails a bit of calculus, but it’s so useful that psychologists, economists, global warming scientists, and now even MMA trainers use game theory to map the most efficient means of traveling from A to D.

  In a fight, that means charting a path from touching gloves to KO while incurring the least damage. Jackson actually uses a subset of game theory known as extensive form game. Instead of simplistic charts, he maps out complex decision trees so he can answer questions like: “If Jon Jones throws an inside leg kick, what are the moves he can follow with? And which of those moves inflicts the most damage?”

  “It’s an exciting time to be a martial artist,” Greg told me. “We are pushing the edges of fight theory. We have access to data and tools we’ve never had access to before: game theory, fractals. It’s all new. [The theory of] relativity is just one hundred years old. So with combat and fight strategy, smarter men than me have tackled these problems, for thousands of years, but the world is now a smaller place. Everyone says Greece represented the highest form of evolution, but they didn’t have access to systems from Mongolia or Thailand. Today, I can learn anything very quickly: from the Internet, videos, even jump on a plane. So of course our theory should eclipse anything before.”

  Greg Jackson (right) coaching.

  In regards to game theory, how do you map out a fight?

  “First off, there is nothing tic-tac-toe about a dynamic system, it has to remain open-ended. It can’t be planned. It’s like chess. Think of a decision tree—you aren’t trying to get from node-x to victory, you are trying to get to the node before victory. That allows options for failure. So you move along the decision tree to the best position.”

  As in moving toward side control (e.g., jiu-jitsu), where you can drop elbows, attempt an armbar or a Kimura, or move to full mount?

  “Exactly. These optimum positions contain the most options, or clusters. It’s like in chess, how you cluster pieces to shut off your opponent’s choices. It’s the same thing. Get yourself to the node with the most c
lusters, which still allows you to fail and return safely to the position and try something else.”

  When do you formulate strategy for a specific fight?

  “When you’re starting camp, you have to ID the parameters—how do you get to your opponent’s safety zone, how do you mentally break them—because at the end of the day, if they are still conscious, you’ve got to break them. If they pass out before that happens, that’s fine, but you don’t control that. You only control putting yourself in the positions.”

  So there’s a nexus between empirical analysis and breaking the spirit?

  “Think about it. If you hit your opponent in the face, he may go unconscious, he may not—you can’t control that, so you need to look at game theory in light of doing that over and over again—working toward and from a clustered node until the person quits or goes unconscious. That’s why it is so important to fight for clusters, as opposed to specific moves. Forget the armbar—the armbar is just a single option off the node. The cluster is the important thing.”

  So tonight [UFC 159 on April 27, 2013, Jones versus Sonnen], when Jon went right into Chael’s strength, wrestling, was that part of breaking the will?

  “When GSP fought Koscheck the first time, people mapped how the fight was going to play out—but they never accounted for GSP attacking Koscheck’s strength. Attacking an opponent’s strength accelerates the breaking process. Sun Tzu wasn’t always right when he said avoid your enemy’s strengths and attack the weaknesses. He also said know yourself, and know your enemy; and if you can outdo him where he is the strongest, that’s when you break him mentally.”

  Tangled up: John Cofer and Lance Palmer.

  6: DO THE EVOLUTION

  The GOAT: B.J. Penn with his World Jiu-Jitsu medal and Welterweight UFC belt.

  “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

  —CHARLES DARWIN

  EVOLUTION. Forget the unfounded religious arguments, it’s proven: in the face of adversity, cells adapt, animals adapt, systems adapt. Evolve, or wither and perish.

  : The weak are meat the strong eat.

  Nowhere is this Japanese proverb truer than in MMA. No disrespect to Royce Gracie, but teleport that in-prime teen from the inaugural Octagon to now, and facing any modern UFC fighter, it’s doubtful he’d survive two minutes. This isn’t a put-down but praise to the seed he sowed. The seed that sprouted and survived harsh winds and drought, adapting, evolving, so now, two decades later, if that young Royce walked into a modern MMA gym and learned evolved skills from each style, if he trained daily with elite fighters and honed strategy with a revered coach—now that’s an interesting hypothesis. If only we could compare two in-prime MMA fighters from different eras, two fighters shaped by wholly disparate techniques and philosophies. Scientists scour nature for such matched subjects, and instead must mock up experiments in the lab.

  In 1969, to answer the question, Who’s the greatest heavyweight boxing champion of all time? Murry Woroner, an advertising exec, commissioned a vacuum tube computer to calculate, round by round, the likely results of a Rocky Marciano versus Muhammad Ali bout. He then smuggled both fighters into a blacked-out Miami gym, and donning gloves and trunks, they re-enacted the computer simulation for the cameras.

  In the end, the outcome of the famed Super Fight was based not on crunched data but Marciano’s massive ego. After a feigned bloody back-and-forth battle, in the thirteenth round Marciano knocked Ali out. Later, on The Dick Cavett Show, Ali lambasted the simulation: “I’m gonna say right here on nationwide TV, looking right into the cameras, anybody who’s connected with the computer … I thought it was really serious … but it’s really a phony, it’s not real … there’s no such thing as a computer that can take Joe Louis’s record and Jack Dempsey’s … and [forecast] what would’ve happened the night they fought.”

  There it is. So we resign ourselves to barroom arguments, playing out these matchups over pitchers of beer. Yah, so what if Joe Louis fought Mike Tyson? Or Sugar Ray Robinson fought Roy Jones Jr.? No, no, say Floyd Mayweather fought Sugar Ray Leonard…

  But in December 2012, in Seattle, Washington, UFC matchmakers delivered just such a bout. The UFC on Fox 5 card featured not only Benson Henderson and Nate Diaz for the lightweight championship but also, to test our multi-era theory, B.J. Penn versus Rory MacDonald.

  On one side of the cage was B.J. Penn, the jiu-jitsu giant-killer from MMA’s golden era, squaring off against Rory MacDonald, the torchbearer for the new pure breed of MMA. Two prodigious fighters, each armed with the training, strategies, and mindset of their respective generations.

  That’s right—not only did these fighters emerge from different eras, they are both prodigies. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argued that for the very best in any field, whether hockey, computer programming, or rock music, to reach the highest pinnacle of mastery, they must hone those skills over ten thousand hours. In support he offered real-world examples of Wayne Gretzky, Bill Gates, and The Beatles. Forget natural talent, he argues, genius springs from time at the grind. It’s an appealing and appalling theory, depending on your work ethic, and both B.J. and Rory, from a young age, committed their lives to combat.

  B.J. PENN

  The Prodigy. Homegrown in Hilo, Hawaii, B.J. Penn shocked the jiu-jitsu world in 2000 when, as the first non-Brazilian, he stormed through the black-belt division of the Jiu-Jitsu World Championships and captured the gold. There is no way to overstate this feat. After training seriously for just three years he earned his black belt faster than anyone on record … and now this.

  “I was good right off the bat, nobody could pass my guard,” B.J. told me. “I was so flexible, I didn’t know what I was doing, but no one could ever pass my legs.”

  Despite how remarkable this sounds, don’t think for a moment B.J. just wandered into the dojo and mastered the sport. He put in his ten thousand hours, on and off the mat. “There was a time jiu-jitsu haunted me,” he said, “from seventeen to twenty-two [years old] it would never leave my head. I just could not get it out of my mind. Lying in bed, in the shower, or even fucking my girlfriend, I practiced moves day and night.”

  Spend enough time with enough elite UFC fighters and you realize they all share this trait—it might well be the virus that mutates all outliers, as there’s just no other way to accumulate so many hours in such a short span.

  “I remember flying to California,” B.J. said, “I was only seventeen, and I don’t know why, but I told this lady sitting next to me, I said, ‘I think I found what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.’ ”

  B.J. sacrificed everything for this obsession, abandoning the lush jungles of Hilo for the asphalt and grit of Northern California. There, he studied under Ralph Gracie, grandson of Carlos Gracie. Alone. A sheltered teen on foreign soil, he retreated into the dojo, drilling from dawn till dusk, entering tournaments on weekends. And every month or so, to vary his training, he traveled to Las Vegas and worked with John Lewis, a late-1990s MMA fighter and respected black belt.

  Just so happened that John was also teaching Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta jiu-jitsu. B.J. attended a private lesson in what is now the Zuffa headquarters’ private gym. “John brought me to meet Dana and Lorenzo, and before we rolled, John whispered to me, ‘Hey, don’t go too hard on me today, I don’t want these clients to think I’m no good.’ After the session John mentioned that I might fight MMA, and Dana asked about my boxing. I told him I’d worry about boxing after I got my black belt. He told me, ‘No, you should work on your hands now because striking doesn’t come easy’—but I was thinking, I already got hands, buddy.”

  Jump forward a few years, and B.J. is in Brazil, hunched over a meal, hours before his final match of the Jiu-jitsu World Championships. “At lunch, I remember saying to myself, ‘I’ll never be in this situation again. If he gets me in an arm lock or foot lock, I just gotta let it break because I gotta win this match
…”

  Now jump twelve years to the night before the Fox 5 bout: B.J.’s lying on the hotel floor, stretching out and reminiscing. “I will never forget that day,” he says, smiling at the ceiling.

  Like many turn-of-the-millennium MMA fighters, B.J. followed a winding path into the cage: as a kid he obsessed on professional wrestling, practicing the backyard techniques in the grass with his brothers, jumping from trees. “I was always into WWF–type stuff, so we’d do a thing we called ‘moves.’ One guy does a suplex, another body slams, and we’d just keep doing that over and over. That’s how I learned to read—in bed each night I’d flip through WWF magazines, trying to learn as much as I could. I was into martial arts, and that was the next stage for me.”

  At fourteen he started boxing. “My first combat sport was boxing, but you couldn’t really call it boxing because it was just kids from my high school fighting each other. Once in a while I’d stop by the rec center and spar with different guys, but I never took formal training because I thought I could do it myself, I was hard-headed.”

  Top: B.J. Penn, the first non-Brazilian to storm through the black-belt division of the Jiu-Jitsu World Championships and earn gold, watches his finals win.

  Bottom: B.J. trains with Makua Rothman.

  Canadian Psycho: Rory MacDonald.

  B.J. weighs in; B.J. and crew backstage

  B.J. Penn with pro surfer/skater Kalani David in P.M. Tenore’s [RVCA founder and president] office;.

  After winning the Worlds, B.J. returned to California and started wrestling at West Valley Junior College. He also trained at the American Kickboxing Academy, in San Jose, California, under the tutelage of famed kickboxer Javier Mendez. His transition from jiu-jitsu to MMA, in hindsight, seems fated because just a few months following his world jiu-jitsu win, Dana and Lorenzo purchased the UFC.