Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  “Let us link the start of vale tudo with the entertainment industry typical of the early industrialized world, in contexts such as Victorian London or the Belle Époque of Paris. In all these venues there were for decades challenging activities, but all that gave place to purely theatrical fights, while in Brazil real fights were practiced for all of the twentieth century, with the accompanying development of technical sophistication,” says Carlos Loddo (who is writing his own book on the history of vale tudo), addressing this early phenomenon.

  We have all heard of those old circuses that would travel around and invite local farm boys to fight the veteran strongman (who would know all the tricks and work them over): It’s the same atmosphere in which John L. Sullivan would travel to a new town, walk into a bar, and announce, “I can lick any man in the place.” In the rest of the world, these exhibitions split into prizefighting (boxing) and professional wrestling (meaning “worked,” or fixed, fights). In Brazil, that never happened.

  Mitsuyo Maeda, a Japanese fighter and ambassador for judo, came to New York in 1904 and lectured under his master, Tomita, at West Point; he had some success and continued to travel and put on exhibitions. Eventually Maeda turned to professional wrestling, “muscular theater,” in which the outcome was rarely in doubt, for money. He wrestled all over the world, in London, Belgium, Scotland, and Spain. He wrestled in Cuba and in 1909 in the bullfighting rings in Mexico City. Finally, he ended up in Brazil, with its large Japanese immigrant population, and it was there that he met the Gracie family and began teaching the young Carlos Gracie jujitsu.

  Maeda taught Carlos for about five years, then left him to his own devices. That was for the best, for Carlos had grasped the ideas behind Maeda’s technique, and after being left alone, without the rigid Japanese structure, he and his brothers started to create. Carlos brought in his younger brother Helio, who was small and skinny (Carlos at first thought him too frail to train). Helio was forced to turn away from power and look for other ways to win—by attacking an opponent’s arm with his whole body, instead of pitting arm against arm. With his drive he became the chief innovator of the family. Together Carlos and Helio began Gracie jiu-jitsu, a martial art in its own right. Carlos also became interested in the connection between food and well-being, and nutrition was a pillar of his family’s success.

  Ironically, it was Helio who became the big fighter out of their school, and he began achieving notoriety as he fought Americans, Japanese, and other Brazilians all through the thirties. In 1948, Helio and Carlos started their famous school in Rio, on the Avenida Rio Branca. Rio’s richest playboys trained there, and Helio’s celebrity continued to flourish. In 1950 he challenged Joe Louis to fight for a million cruzeiros, but Joe never accepted. Helio continued to fight, and in 1951 he fought a Japanese fighter in Maracana Stadium, the largest soccer stadium in the world. The Gracie school consisted of lawyers, judges, and the crème de la crème of Brazilian society. The Gracies were also fiercely protective of their sphere. Loddo writes that “anyone who would teach fighting in Rio, if claiming too loud that such practice was an efficient method for self-defense purposes . . . would end up, sooner or later, having to put the practice to test against the Gracies’ jiu-jitsu.”

  Brazilian Top Team was born under Carlson Gracie, a famous fighter and teacher, and became arguably the most successful MMA team in history.

  I had decided to go to Brazil to learn jiu-jitsu and meet the greatest ground fighters in the world. It was a logical step; the biggest influence on MMA in the States was without a doubt Brazilian jiu-jitsu and vale tudo. I would try to fill the gaping hole in my fighting; I had a little tiny bit, a glimpse of the ground game, but I needed more.

  When I thought back to my cage fight, it seemed ridiculous that I had gone in there without a ground game at all. Just stupid. If I had had any kind of confidence in my ground game, I could have tried to take my opponent down when the stand-up was going all his way. It’s what Pat would have done; if you’re getting shelled standing, put him on the ground. I had gone into that fight without knowing a single takedown. Now, my stand-up was okay, good enough to spar with decent people and not come out too badly, but it wasn’t anywhere near good enough to be my only thing. I needed options; it was just foolishness not to have a complete game. If I went to Brazil, the home of jiu-jitsu, and I stayed and trained for four months at Top Team, I would force myself to have at least the basis for a ground game.

  I also needed a way to finance it, so I somehow sold a proposal for the book you are reading. This had the added benefit of access: Now that I was a writer, I had an in with the fighters.

  Brazilians fight in vale tudo, but the big time for them is Pride in Japan. Pride fighting, a promotion like the UFC, is big money and giant stadiums with ninety thousand people.The fighters get the respect and treatment that top professional athletes in the United States receive. Bob Sapp, an American ex-NFL lineman who fought in the K-1 (a huge kickboxing event that has branched out into MMA) and who also has competed in MMA, made millions a year and appeared on the cover of Time’s Asian edition and in countless Japanese advertisements. He was not a technical fighter but a monster at something like 355 pounds and 10 percent body fat—a black Godzilla—and the Japanese love him. Japan is one of the only places where MMA fighters can make serious money. The UFC, by far the dominant promotion in the United States, takes care of the top guys, but the undercard payment is brutally low.

  I knew the fighters of Brazil Top Team from watching Pride fights; they were legendary, bigger than life. Zé Mario Sperry, perhaps one of the greatest ground fighters ever, led the team out from under Carlson Gracie after Carlson left Rio to come to the United States. Sperry and Murilo Bustamante, the other team leader, are among the living legends of the sport.

  I was particularly interested in Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, or “Minotauro,” as they call him, a Pride fighter who had pulled off submissions on people I had thought couldn’t be submitted. I wanted to see the modern MMA world at its apogee. I decided I would see if I could follow Rodrigo into his training and through a fight in Japan.

  While training in Iowa, I had met a grappler named Danny Ives, and we had talked a little about Brazil, where he visited often. “Just come on down and I’ll hook you up,” he said. He told me about a guy named Scotty Nelson, who ran a Web site, OntheMat.com, and I called Scotty one day around three in the afternoon and woke him up.

  “Yeah, man, just come on down and we’ll work it out,” he grumbled at me. So I flew down a few days later. A lesser man might have questioned the wisdom of going to Brazil to train with the greatest ground fighters in the world with a “healing fracture” on his floating rib. But not me, genius that I am.

  Scott Nelson is a blond, blue-eyed California gringo who looked like a surfer kid with badly cauliflowered ears. He was thirty-five but seemed twenty-five, with a hint of the weariness and seen-it-all attitude of the seasoned expatriate, a Graham Greene character in the MTV “Jackass” tradition. He’d been in Rio for about three years, running Onthe Mat.com, the definitive site on jiu-jitsu in Brazil and in the States, and his Internet business supported his gringo lifestyle. He competed, as well, and had a whole bucketload of medals and honors from various competitions: gold in the 2001 Brazilian Team Championships, first in United Gracie in San Francisco (Team), third at the World Grappling Games, second at the U.S. National. He was not a top, world-class jiu-jitsu practitioner but a dedicated lifelong enthusiast, and he’d practiced, or “rolled,” with some of the best people in the world for seven years, in both the States and Brazil.

  Scotty is incredibly generous and open to both foreigners and locals. He invited me to stay at his house, where there are always fighters in transition or foreigners in from the States, for a few weeks of training. When I arrived, a bunch of jiu-jitsu guys from Boulder, Colorado, were just finishing their stay, partying and chasing girls and eating like kings; they were training at Gracie Barra, the local branch of the Gracie Academy. They
had nicknames like “White Rabbit” and “Green Giant.”

  Scotty said I could train anywhere I wanted, as a gringo (and a beginner); but don’t talk about it, and try not to let them catch you training at competing schools. Even for foreigners, training at several different schools can be problematic. If you go from one gym to another, it is viewed as a betrayal, a stab in the back. At first this seems silly, archaic, and juvenile, but the deeper I went into the fight game, the more I came to understand and sympathize with it. The fight game consists of relationships, of reputations: between fighter and trainer, trainer and manager, manager and promoter. They all have to trust one another to some degree, and because the fight game is often involved with the shadowy edges of society, that trust is sometimes abused. There isn’t much money to go around. Reputation is life for a trainer, manager, promoter, fighter: Can you deliver the goods? If the word on the street is that you can’t, your career is in trouble. Your reputation is your livelihood and in some sense what you fight for, in all facets of the game. 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 mos
t 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.