Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  As I waited in vain for my shoulder to heal, I continued to go to Top Team every day to sit and watch for two or three hours, trying to educate my eyes, trying to understand what was happening. Slowly, I managed to make the internal adjustment that I wasn’t going to be able to train for a while, if at all; but it was bitterly disappointing. Such an opportunity lost, one that would never come again. However, I had to find the positive side; that is an aspect of jiu-jitsu. Look at Helio, one of the founders; he was considered too small and weak, so he was forced to turn from power to technique and became one of the major champions of the art.

  Jean Jacques Machado is a famous black belt in jiu-jitsu who has a birth defect; one of his hands is badly deformed, so he can’t make the gi grips like the other black belts. Despite this, he became one of the greatest technical grapplers of all time. He was forced to use his hand as a hook and grab not the cloth so much as the body and limbs of his opponent; as a result, in the no-gi, he was way ahead of everyone else. It turned out to be an advantage. There is a Brazilian word, malandro, that conveys something of the essence of a crook but also of someone who turns a disadvantage, a potential setback, into an advantage. Maybe I could do the same, learn by being forced to watch and study. So I watched every day, until my eyes glazed over.

  It’s been said that the main obstacle to jiu-jitsu ever becoming an Olympic sport is that it is impossible to watch without at least some experience. To the uninitiated, it is a total mystery. Even after a little familiarity, I knew I was not seeing half of what was happening. I was failing to appreciate the skill and cleverness on display. The strength of boxing and muay Thai is that even the unschooled eye can appreciate the fights to some degree. You could say that at any pro boxing match there are maybe ten people in the whole stadium who really understand what is going on, but everyone in there can appreciate a war. With ground fighting, with or without the gi, that isn’t the case. To the uninformed observer it looks strange, slow, and, as a friend put it, “oddly intimate.”

  One day I took an afternoon off from watching Top Team to meet with a famous capoeirista on the edge of Lagoa, in a park. Spring was ending in Brazil, and the clouds hung low over the bowl of mountains, muddy and threatening. Capoeira is the only martial art native to Brazil, and, although I don’t trust it as a strictly fighting art, it provides terrific strength and agility training, and the good practitioners are strong and graceful. The mestre I met with was João José da Silva; probably in his late forties or early fifties, he is known as João do Pulo, the Jump Man. He was an aging, slight black man with a handsome, clear-eyed face and a neat mustache. His hair was still dark and curly, and he generated goodwill and warmth. He was born in Bahia, but came to Rio with his parents, who were small farmers, when he was eleven years old and began to play capoeira.

  He fought vale tudo when he was sixteen, or at least fought other capoeiristas, and became famous for entering it so young. He laughed and said that he had been knocked out a few times and gone home with his face covered in blood.

  We hunkered in the rain in the park in some dingy concrete pavilions that smelled vaguely of piss, and out of the corner of my eye I watched the lightning crown and wreathe the mountains around the city and the slow spread of water across the concrete floor. There was supposed to be a session that afternoon, and maybe thirty students would show up if the weather was good. However, rain depresses the Cariocas, and they probably wouldn’t come, at least not in numbers.

  The legend goes that capoeira was developed by slaves, who hid it from their masters by turning it into a dance whenever a white man drew near, and there are antecedents in Angolan foot fighting. Capoeiragem was a very violent street game in Rio at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the police tried to crack down on it. Today, capoeira is highly popular in Rio, although as a purely fighting art, it doesn’t seem to do particularly well in the ring. There is some capoeira that has a ground game, but the stand-up is a little too stylized to compete directly with boxing and muay Thai. A lot of fighters at Top Team had done some capoeira; it is a social activity, fun, and terrific for power and timing. In Rio, the girls do it like they do tae bo or cardio kickboxing in the United States; it’s a little trendy.

  João had had some horrible accidents. He’d fallen off a horse working at a jockey club; he had destroyed his knee in two places in ’89 during a samba school dance; and he’d been in a terrible car crash in ’94, which had kept him from capoeira for long periods. He said that destiny (and doctors) tried to keep him from capoeira, but he fought back every time. Now he had a disease, I couldn’t understand what it was, but the veins on his arms were swollen and black and hugely heavy, and when I touched them, they fluttered tentatively. I could feel the blood underneath the tissue-thin skin pulsing, vibrating like a bird’s heart in an endless, delicate shudder. It was killing him, and capoeira may have been accelerating the process, but his need was great. When he played, he forgot all his problems, and he had to forcibly remind himself that he couldn’t jump like he used to. There was no drinking or drugs; capoeira was his only solace.

  I asked him about fighting and other arts. He gave me a look—he knew that many fighters felt that capoeira was a dance and not a fighting art. João had studied some boxing and muay Thai and other things, but he said, “If the snake doesn’t bite me, I will kill it”—it’s not the technique or school that is important, but the action of the fighter.

  There was something about him that reminded me of Apidej. Something in the gentleness, the knowingness, the completeness he wore around him. As the rain increased, he and the dozen students who showed up decided they would just play instruments and sing, as the music is as important to capoeira as the actions, and one’s rank inside the system is as much about skill with the instruments as it is about physical ability. When they started to sing a slower song, in the Angolan style, I could hear the sounds of Africa, and for the first time since coming to Brazil, I really felt the weight of a foreign place.

  I had noticed that many jiu-jitsu players had some kind of special relationship to pit bulls, to fighting dogs. They would often have tattoos of a favorite dog, and many gyms and gis had a cartoon of a pit bull on them; it was the old symbol for Gracie jiu-jitsu. I asked Scotty about it one day, and he put me onto a friend of his, Escorrega.

  A small, slender Gracie Barra black belt with excellent English, Escorrega had been Scotty’s original connection in Brazil. He had spent a lot of time in the United States and was working on his “extraordinary person” visa. He was also an expert on cockfighting and dogfighting.

  Escorrega’s family was from Minas, a farm town to the south, and for five generations they had been breeding cocks; Escorrega himself had been in dogs for ten years. There are two basic types of cocks, just as there are two types of dogs (although there are endless bloodlines and families): One hits harder and tires more quickly; the other has endless stamina but doesn’t strike as hard. Escorrega, in dogs and cocks, always preferred the ones that hit harder.

  Escorrega’s real love is not the cocks but dogfighting, and he educated me for hours, his English fluent and filled with “dudes.” He got angry with how fighting dogs are demonized: “Fighting dogs are not dangerous to humans, dude.” When a dog fights, he explained, there are usually three people in the pit, the two trainers and the referee; and if the dog wants to bite a person, it will leave itself open to the other dog and get killed, or the handler will kill it. Fighting dogs who bite people are not bred on. Of course, there are always assholes and drug dealers who get good fighting dogs and torture them and teach them bad habits, but that’s not a true fighting dog, and those dogs don’t fight well. “Anything in a bad person’s hands can be a weapon,” he said. But the trainers, the real ones, are good people, and have regular lives and kids in college and baseball practice and church.

  The international centers for dogfighting are in North America, in the southern United States and in Mexico. Escorrega was careful about using real names, but
he told me that he lived with one of the greatest dog breeders in the world in the United States. The dogs are bred in attempts to find that perfect balance of hard biting and stamina—but the most important trait for a fighting dog, a trait that can breed true, is gameness.

  Gameness is a critical term to dogfighters, jiu-jitsu players, and fighters. It can be described as heart, as willingness to fight—a love of the fight stronger than a love of life. Some dogs don’t last for ten minutes in a fight before they want to quit, and some dogs will die before they quit. I mentioned an acquaintance whose family in Louisiana had been in fighting dogs when he was a boy. This person said that he was always looking for a dog that would fight past forty-five minutes.

  Escorrega nodded enthusiastically. “Not only heart, not just big lungs—what your friend was trying to say. People think we force the dogs to fight, but that’s not true. The dogs are not created in laboratories—they are bred from dogs who love to fight. They train and run and swim in a pool, work on a treadmill, bite rawhide pull toys to develop the neck and bite and shoulders. They have a good diet, good carbohydrates, good fats, protein, creatine, vitamins, massage.”

  He smiled knowingly. “What your friend was talking about? All this care, you must love the animal, and if the animal loves you back, you will get a dog that fights past forty-five minutes, an animal with gameness. If there is love, the dog will fight to the death. Like everything, dude. Without it, the dog will not show heart. That’s why the crazy assholes, the bastards that mistreat their dogs, don’t have good fighting dogs. They have no love for their animals and no mercy for what they do. If you are fighting for something, you have to fight for what you love. If he doesn’t love you, he’s gonna quit. No one, no dog in the world, will fight for more than forty-five minutes without love and heart.”

  That’s the secret: It’s about love.

  Olavo Abreu was the black belt who ran the gi classes at Top Team, although there were five or ten black belts who regularly showed up. He was a well-built man in his late thirties with unbelievably bad ears—the worst cauliflower of anyone I’ve seen. They looked like they came off the set of a Spielberg film. He was handsome and black-haired with a little gray creeping in, and swaggering and tough and spoke perfect English, peppered with profanities. It’s funny how the gi makes you swagger a little, like a samurai in a Kurosawa film.

  Olavo became my fountain of information, somewhat against his will, because I just kept coming in. Even though I couldn’t train, I sat on the mats next to him, watching and asking questions: Who’s going for what? What hold is that? Is that guy winning or losing that position? Olavo was a dedicated lifelong player, but he was not the best black belt around; in fact, there were a few blue and purple belts that gave him fits. He’d been teaching since he was a purple belt and had always liked it.

  “I am not so good, man, there are a lot of guys better than me, but I understand jiu-jitsu, how to teach it,” he said. He was dedicated—he was a brown belt for nine years before he got his black, and a great taskmaster, which is perhaps more important for this team. The Cario-cas would sit around on the mats and chat for hours without him there to harangue them. The morning gi classes at Top Team were for those who compete in the gi and were hard core; they were all really good, even the lower belts. Strong and fierce and always attacking, on the move. They usually just needed a motivator, someone to yell at them to get back to training, and Olavo excelled at that.

  The classes started with a warm-up, and then broke into groups, usually along belt lines, and went over a few different positions, perhaps a new sweep or a defense; and then quickly it became a sparring session. Everyone paired up, all belts with all belts, and went at it for five-minute rounds, sparring for forty-five minutes, an hour. Sweating, spinning, flipping, faces calm and unflappable, sometimes with eyes closed. Gripping and sweeping, an endless battle to control the hands through the sleeves, to grip and break the grip on the collar. Because there is no punching, just wrestling and submissions, a lot of fighters “pull guard” because they prefer to work from the bottom. You get points like in wrestling (two points for a sweep—reversing someone or taking him onto his back). When I was able to train, the trick was getting everyone to show me how they had just killed me, show me the defense, instead of just getting tapped every thirty seconds without trying to learn something.

  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 grap-plers—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 unde-stroyed. 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 superi
or 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.