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 sma
ll 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.
The formative event of his young life happened when he was eleven. He was behind a truck on the farm when it suddenly backed over him. It ruptured internal organs and shattered ribs, and should have killed him. His brother tried to pull him out but couldn’t; trapped beneath the truck, Rodrigo was sure he was going to die. Yet somehow he didn’t; instead, he spent eleven months in a hospital bed and couldn’t walk for about a year and a half. He had a lot of complications in the hospital—staph infections, lung infections. It’s hard to know how the darkness affected him, the stillness, the endless hours of self-contemplation for a boy who wasn’t self-contemplative. “I prayed a lot,” he said simply. He came to know his body extremely well, and essentially he showed he was too tough to die. He wasn’t a talker, especially about himself; he was a jock and a larger-than-life athlete, but I think that ordeal strengthened him, mentally—as I said, in jiu-jitsu a setback can be turned to an advantage.
His recovery was complete, however, and the wild boy didn’t slow down much. The best Rodrigo story I heard happened when he was about sixteen. At a Halloween party, he and his brother stole a university skeleton that had been placed on the lawn as a joke. During the course of the night, the skeleton got lost, and neither brother could remember where. When an irate professor called the next day, demanding the return of his skeleton and threatening police involvement, Rodrigo begged for a little time, as he and his brother had had enough problems with the police already. At boarding school, Rodrigo had a maid whose boyfriend worked in a cemetery, and she said she could get him a skeleton.
Well, from one of the caves for the anonymous dead she got him a partially decomposed body, maggots and all, and Rodrigo took the body back home on the bus. The smell was so horrible the bus had all the windows down, even though it was winter. Somehow Rodrigo got the body home without being detected. From a doctor friend the brothers learned that they should leave the bones out, covered with chlorine, to bleach the skeleton; and so thinking they were finally in the clear, they placed the body on the roof of their family’s house to bleach for a week while they returned to boarding school. Unfortunately, across the street was a police station. Curious about the decomposing body on the roof, the police stormed his father’s house. Rodrigo got a call from his furious father and had to explain everything. Like I said, Marquez and Tarantino, and maybe a little Monty Python.
What made Rodrigo so dangerous in the ring was that he believed in jiu-jitsu; he trusted it. When a fighter goes for a submission and tries to win a fight, he often sacrifices superior position, because if the opponent is knowledgeable, then the submission fails and the fighter ends up on the bottom, or worse. Rodrigo attempted submissions all the time, and most of them failed; that’s the way it is in modern MMA, where every fighter is highly skilled and schooled in submission fighting. Most fighters play it safe and work the ground only for position and to punch, without risking themselves. Rodrigo was a notable exception. He took huge risks and gave up position without a second thought because he believed in himself—in his jiu-jitsu—and it is precisely that belief that made him so dangerous. He did catch people all the time; fighters who had been avoiding submissions for fifteen years got caught by him.
Jiu-jitsu looks sort of simple, and there are only a certain number of submissions—arm-bar, rear naked choke, triangle, for example—that one can do, but there are infinite variations, because it is all about how you get those things done: whether you can set them up right, whether you can get them done against tough opponents who are strong. I can put a triangle on somebody who doesn’t know what it is and get it to work, but it takes an extraordinary player, like Rodrigo, to sink one on a Mark Coleman, who has been pounding people at the top level for ten years. Submitting Mark Coleman is like acing Andre Agassi—it can be done, but it has to be so strong fundamentally and so well set up technically that it becomes unavoidable. Submitting someone like Fedor is even harder, as he is a sambo (a Russian derivative of judo, jiu-jitsu, and wrestling) specialist and an athlete at the apogee of the sport. It’s like dunking on Shaq: You have to be extraordinary and having the best day of your life.
One night, after his muay Thai workout, I found Zé after the sun had long set and the red evening was darkening to monochrome. He unwrapped his hands, moving slowly, explaining to me some of his philosophy, the importance of the team.
Fighting is the most solitary form of competition; you are all alone out there. But what I hear again and again is how important the team is, and not just from the Brazilians, but from other MMA fighters as well. The team is what gets you there. Team members train and spar and cajole you, push you through the rigors and hellish boredom of training, and they support you and protect you from nerves in the days and hours leading up to a fight. Fighting is, strangely enough, a team sport. Zé said, “These guys, they are all studying jiu-jitsu ten years or more. They are strong, their bodies are very developed. Now we must develop their minds and spirits. The brotherhood protects you and makes you better; the most important thing is respect and honor and friendship. Union and respect and family sense are what are going to make you strong in the ring.”
I ask: What’s the most important aspect of the ground game? What’s the key to ground fighting? What should I focus on? The answer, when it comes from Zé or Murilo, is enlightening: humility. Always assume that your opponent is better than you, that he knows more—you have to work harder in training and learn more. You know only 5 percent of what there is to know. Fight your own pride and ego and be open-minded and always learning new techniques, new things from anyone.
It was very revealing to me that these Brazilians, the greatest ground fighters in the world, should say that the most important thing, the biggest technical secret they can disclose, is for a fighter to remain humble.
As I walked home in the deepening dusk, I was convinced of one thing: that the ground game, in the gi and out, is almost infinitely deep. There are layers within layers—the places where Tony DeSouza and Teta and Margarida and other young innovators go, the levels of complexity, are deep and, to me, nearly unfathomable. One needs years and years to comprehend. That, however, is the pure ground game, pure grappling. MMA is a far looser, faster game; being able to punch and kick alters things radically, and many great ground fighters have been stymied by good strikers who could avoid their game. I wondered if this time Nogueira would be able to catch Fedor in something. Would he be able to lure Fedor into his realm? It was going to be the biggest fight of Nogueira’s life, in Tokyo on New Year’s Eve. I wanted to go. I pitched it to Rolling Stone as Lost in Translation but with Brazilian fighters instead of Scarlett Johansson, and they bought it.
* * *
I was ready for Tokyo to be cold, imposing, impersonal, and maddeningly foreign, but it was more complex and alive than that. I found it strangely friendly, despite the walls of neon. It was clean, cozy, and small. The streets were narrow, with alleys winding and twisting from any angle, and there were little coffee shops and bars and noodle shops tucked away in every cranny and corner.
Everywhere had about 30 percent more people than New York; there was a constant, somewhat uncomfortable press, all around, nearly all the time. The language barrier, while formidable, was not so isolating that I felt confined to my hotel. There was a wall of non-meaning in everything, every sign and every muttered conversation overheard, but as I was coming from Brazil, it didn’t seem so strange. It was hor-rifically expensive, but that was avoidable: I used the subway, I ate in little
noodle shops by choosing from pictures on the menu, and nobody seemed too put out by the tall gaijin.
Pride Fighting Championship was begun in 1997, aping the Ultimate Fighting Championship in the United States and for ostensibly the same reasons: to provide an “anything goes” format to decide which fighter and style are the strongest. The early Prides were a mess of mismatches and boring fights, as wrestlers fought boxers and savagery triumphed over all. There were some good fights, some diamonds in the rough, but also a lot of bad ones (and perhaps “worked” ones; in Japan, the barrier between pro wrestling and MMA is porous). Since then, Pride has evolved to the point where there are often many great fights on a single card. This is mostly because of money; Pride is far and away where fighters can earn the most. As Zé said, “If there is something else, tell me about it, because I’d love to know.” Essentially, there isn’t anything else with Pride money out there, except for a competing Japanese production, K-1, which started as a kickboxing event and has branched out into MMA. The UFC in the United States doesn’t come close to matching Pride in terms of purse, at least not for the undercard. Fighters around the world, with the exception of the few top guys the UFC takes care of, go to Pride if they can.
After I arrived, I found Zé, Rodrigo, and Rogerio, along with the rest of the retinue (Amaury Bitetti; Rodrigo’s two coaches; Danillo, the training partner; and Marco, the Italian), as they were blearily nodding over their noodles, just off the plane. I followed them up to their rooms.
I was a little nervous about the sleeping arrangements, but I managed to tag along and force my way into the gang, and Zé shuffled me off with the boxing coach, Luis Dórea, and the muay Thai coach, Luis Alvez. They had no idea who I was and seemed particularly nonplussed when I shouldered my way into their room with my bag and started camping out by the window, unrolling my sleeping bag and pulling a cushion off the chair for a pillow. I don’t think they ever quite bought the idea that I was really a writer, but they didn’t care too much—it was a Brazilian kind of scene; there’s always somebody tagging along.
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