Fighter's Mind, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  “Marcelo doesn’t talk in shades of grey. Everything is black and white.” Josh was with him at ADCC in 2007, and when he lost to Drysdale, Josh had talked to him about why. Was it that he needed more training against the darce (the choke Drysdale used, now much in vogue) or was it that he needed a game plan for long-armed opponents? Had Marcelo gotten too predictable with the single-leg takedown? “I need to be faster,” Marcelo said with a smile.

  “I’m more of a grey-type of guy, so it can be frustrating, because at times he seems overly simple. But it’s incredibly powerful for him. In the chess world, there were plenty of guys like him who I envied, guys with pure clarity and no existential dilemmas, without angst.” Josh laughs. “I was all angst. I was a tortured soul, until I started to really learn to use my emotions, to channel and get them to work for me.

  “People talk about Marcelo as if he thinks ten moves ahead, but I don’t think he does. People have the same misconception about strong chess players, that they see ten moves ahead. They don’t, but they know where to look. They think two or three moves ahead but in the right direction. The computer has to look at every legal move. So if there are forty legal moves, and then each of those moves has forty moves following, quickly the play goes into the trillions, right? The strong chess player only looks at two or three moves but because of his intuitive understanding, his pattern recognition, when he analyzes just those two or three moves he gains insight into the position. He thinks thematically. In chess, you don’t need to think of everything, just the right two or three moves, and you’re golden.

  “Same with Marcelo. I don’t think he’s thinking that far ahead, but he’s a few moves ahead in the right direction. I’ve studied him closely, both his DVDs and as a human being, as a teacher and a training partner and a friend.

  “That thing about how he gets the back from everywhere, that seat belt thing?” Josh is talking about Marcelo’s uncanny ability to “get the back” on opponents, to take a great position on their back. A universal experience of opponents rolling with Marcelo is they think they’re safe, and somehow he gets their back from a seemingly odd position. He does it with a grip he calls the “seat belt.” He reaches around you and starts cinching himself onto your back.

  “It starts his squeeze. You think you’re passing his guard, but you give him a little angle, and he starts that seat belt thing and BAM he’s chest to back on you.

  “His squeeze is deadly. But it’s not the pressure, it’s more the commitment, it’s always getting tighter. He even says ‘once it starts in, it never comes out.’ He tightens millimeter by millimeter, inching it in. You’re defending and think you’re okay but it’s never backing off, it’s just getting tighter all the time.

  “He commits to the idea of never going backward, in terms of chokes. That seat belt squeeze that precedes the choke is trippy. It comes from all different places and starts and then pretty soon he’s got your back and he’s going to choke you without hooks in.

  “But he’s always letting people out in practice, especially guys under him. He plays in transition. It’s very important. His whole life is spent in transitions. He’s a ball, but when you roll with Marcelo sometimes it feels like you’re very close to getting a position, and then he rolls out and you’re not quite there. He’s the purest tai chi I’ve ever seen, deflection, letting attacks roll off. Everything tai chi is supposed to be, that’s what Marcelo is doing.”

  Before meeting Josh, I thought about what happens to a fifteen-year-old kid who has had a movie made about his life. It could easily destroy someone. Josh writes that he had at first enjoyed the attention, especially from girls, but then it had gradually derailed his chess career. He’d play tournaments and the organizers would pull out a life-size poster of the movie and stand it next to him. Grandmasters would come after him with long knives. Lesser fame than that has ruined lives; the narcissism that celebrity seems to generate can cripple people.

  I had noticed a similar thing at Harvard, on a smaller scale. Kids finish high school, seventeen or eighteen, and right at that moment of learning their place in the world they get into Harvard and their inflated sense of self-worth (that most teenagers have) is validated. I am that great. A friend of mine married a movie star who was on the cover of Time magazine when she was eighteen. Miraculously, she recovered, a testament to her intelligence and wisdom. And also grit—there’s an essence of grit to fight through something like that. You have to get down and dirty and battle with yourself. I am just like everyone else. My work can be great but I’m nothing special. If you don’t win that one, you’re finished as an artist, a student, a fighter. Josh won that battle, maybe his most important fight.

  Josh is no asshole. He had fantastic parenting or his own internal compass saved him (or maybe both) because he walked away from chess when it started to make him miserable and dove into tai chi—and he rode that out until he won a few world championships in Taiwan. He came up for air, wrote a book, looked around, and saw Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and that took him back to square one. He really is that kid from the movie: he’s managed to dodge bullets of fame and celebrity. And that is a testament to his intelligence as much, or more, than any annotated chess game or book. He genuinely wants to help people see and learn what he’s learned.

  Josh and I got along smoothly, each cloaked in honesty. Both of us, to a certain degree, hide in plain sight. He’s a good dude, mellow and friendly, although intensely competitive and driven beyond belief in his chosen areas. He’s got a lot of gameness, as a little kid on the beach his sister would set him to cracking coconuts and he’d be at it, doggedly, for hours, while she sunbathed.

  We talked about innate ability, how a six-year-old gets drawn to chess, and he said, “There are a lot of people who could do it . . . maybe not everybody, but you’d be surprised—a lot of different minds, if taught in a way that used the natural strength of that mind, could be great at chess.”

  With goals like that in mind, Josh writes and thinks and clarifies his world, and he wants to make it a better place.

  Once a simple inhalation can trigger a state of tremendous alertness, our moment-to-moment awareness becomes blissful, like that of someone half-blind who puts on glasses for the first time. We see more as we walk down the street. The everyday becomes exquisitely beautiful. The notion of boredom becomes alien and absurd as we naturally soak in the lovely subtleties of “banal.” All experiences become richly intertwined by our new vision, and then the new connections begin to emerge. Rainwater streaming on city pavement will teach a pianist to flow. A leaf gliding easily with the wind will teach a controller how to let go. A house cat will teach me how to move. All moments become each moment. This book is about learning and performance, but it is also about my life. Presence has taught me how to live.

  That’s where Josh ended up. He’s doing something right.

  CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DESERT FOX

  A shadowy figure lurks at the edge of the known MMA world. A coach, a trainer, a quiet unassuming man with a bald head, a thin blade of a face, a beard, and assassin’s eyes. I started seeing him everywhere, in every other corner, at big events, walking behind this contender or that champion, with no clear connection between the fighters except the man. His name started to circulate. Greg Jackson. Who was the dude? He had no MMA record at all. He wasn’t a former champ like Pat Miletich or a world-class jiu-jitsu player like Ricardo Liborio.

  Jackson claims ten world champions (and, as of this writing, two UFC titleholders), and his grapplers have won all kinds of competitions. He is the first MMA trainer famous only for his product. His fight team has the “highest winning percentage,” so rated by some of the MMA Web sites, and his stable of fighters has fought on all the big shows—Pride, the UFC, and all the new upstarts. Fighters as disparate as George St. Pierre, Joey Villasenor, Rashad Evans, and Keith Jardine—fighters with no stylistic or otherwise observable connection—all train at his camp.

  I knew Greg’s wrestling coach was Mike Va
n Arsdale, a superstar at Iowa State who’d been an Olympic alternate a few times and a formidable top level MMA fighter (Mike has since moved, for love, to Arizona). I’d heard about Michael Winkeljohn, his kickboxing guy who was an old-school ISKA standout, a multiple former champion. But Greg was a mystery.

  Strange stories were cropping up about his gym in New Mexico, tales of fighters being made to run in the mountains carrying each other. It suddenly seemed like the major new crop of talent in the UFC all subscribed to Jackson with enigmatic devotion. All these rising superstars would gush about him. But Greg? He said very little.

  He wrote a scholarly article for FIGHT! magazine that compared the quest of the modern fighter to the tactics of General Sherman—stressing the need for a “two-pronged” attack. What kind of trainer was this, who exhaustively and publicly mined military theory? It only deepened the mystery.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a big flat city in the true southwest desert, on the edge of stark hills. I’d been there, years before, on a bender as a hotshot firefighter. We’d driven the five hours from our base in the Gila National Forest to go to the only punk bar in New Mexico. The night had not ended well; Albuquerque is a rough town. A law enforcement friend once said to me, “The cops in Albuquerque fire their weapons more times in their first year than most cops do in a lifetime.”

  I landed at the airport in the morning, and already the temperature was in the triple digits. Jackson’s gym is just a few miles from the airport, down a side street in a semi-industrial part of town. The sun was an incandescent weight in the sky by ten o’clock. Walking into the unfamiliar gym, it had the same old feel—the smells, the watchful glances, the sizing up.

  I found Greg Jackson in his back room, and he shook my hand with some wariness. He wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but he was interested. I spent a moment in that adjustment period when you meet someone you’ve seen many times on TV and silently catalog the differences. His beard and shiny bald head make him seem much older than he really is—he’s only thirty-four—and up close in person, you can see his youth.

  We sat in his “office,” his private sanctum strewn with coaches and toys and even a bunk bed, a place where he could get out of the eye of the gym. We chatted with his assistant and family friend, Julie Kedzie (a good-looking young fighter with incredible mental toughness and an appetite for pain—it was her scrap with Gina Carano on prime-time TV that put women’s MMA on the map); the gym manager, Van Arsdale; and a few others in a constant parade. I sat down into a wash of banter, a barrage of jokes and comedy routines that people who spend a lot of time together develop. Over the next week I sat in there every day for hours and listened and learned. Greg and I talked when he had quiet moments, and sometimes we did formal interviews with the tape recorder going. But other times we just bullshitted and came to recognize we were un poco simpatico.

  I had nowhere to begin, so I started with the basic questions. I wanted to draw some kind of picture . . . where was Greg from? Every hero needs an origin story.

  Greg was raised in Albuquerque, “the only white kid in the poorest part of the poorest state.” His parents were hippies and practicing Quakers. “It’s Christianity, but without preachers,” he said. “In church it’s just chairs in a circle, and you sit and talk to God directly, without help. My parents converted in Albuquerque.”

  The Quaker tradition had one huge problem for Greg: pacifism. “Pacifism taken to extreme is ridiculous. In the circumstances I found myself in, even in kindergarten, it just wouldn’t fly. If the British had the resolve to wipe out Gandhi, then all the pacifism in the world wouldn’t have kept them from mowing him down. A big part of my young life was coming to grips with the ideology I was taught, and the reality I had to face.

  “It was a huge deal, when you’re taught one thing and it doesn’t work as a little kid. My parents kept telling me ‘this is how you deal with the world,’ but it didn’t work. It was as if I went to school in one language and spoke another at home and no one would admit it. One set of values didn’t hold in the other environment. I’d get in a fight at school and come home and feel terrible, and then sometimes I needed to fight and I wouldn’t, and I’d feel just as bad.

  “My parents would tell me to defend myself, but fighting isn’t only about hitting or getting hit. It’s about standing up to bullies, for yourself or others. Once they bully you once, they’ll do it every time. In middle school it got harder, the consequences and the fights got more extreme—and the disparity between what I was told was the right thing and what was right got harder to reconcile.”

  Greg shook his head demurely. “That was probably the hardest thing in my life to deal with. Anything taken to extremes is insanity. Pacifism at all costs is as bad as saying violence is the answer to everything. But I was a dumb kid. The struggle with pacifism created a rebellion, an opposite swing. I hurt people I shouldn’t have, I did a lot of things.” He sighs.

  “I was especially stupid. For instance, I grew up in a community that spoke Spanish, and I could and should have learned it so many times, but because I was endlessly picked on for being the white kid, I said to myself, Fuck Spanish.”

  He shrugged. “I was constantly in fights, and getting challenged, and then my world would get bigger and new groups would come in and I’d have to do it all over again. I dedicated my life at an early age to combat. But I make up for my sins now. I help-help-help.” He laughed.

  Greg’s family had a strong wrestling background. His father and uncles all wrestled, his little brother was a state champ. Greg grew up wrestling but in his own words he was too busy being a “dumb kid” to wrestle in school. In West Aurora High, there’s a giant picture of his father, who was a wrestling champion and valedictorian. “I’ve always been in his shadow and happily so,” he said quietly. Throughout all this the love and respect—even awe—he has for his parents is very clear.

  “My parents are geniuses, but they didn’t understand my circumstances. They were from the Midwest and didn’t see what I saw. I could have switched schools, but that would have been running away, and I wasn’t gonna do that.”

  He smiles.

  “My folks put me in aikido, which was the worst martial art to fight with, but they liked the philosophy of it.”

  Greg started teaching fighting in 1992, at the tender age of seventeen. It was at Frank Trujillo’s martial arts school, a place that taught kajukenbo—a kind of early form of MMA that drew from karate, judo, and boxing.

  “I never really wanted to run a school, but I got into my share of scraps and scrapes and people wanted to know how I did what I was doing. I wasn’t a big street fighter, but I did what I had to do,” he laughed, “and I was always in wars because I couldn’t KO anybody.” Greg is reflexively self-effacing, and his humility isn’t fake. He’s smart enough to really be humble.

  “My only real strength is that I’m reflective. I learned enough lessons young and thought about them, and that’s why I’m a decent trainer now. Of course, I still make mistakes.”

  He was a self-taught martial artist, particularly on the ground. He’d never studied jiu-jitsu with a Brazilian. That was a surprise. He taught himself from books and competitions. He was paying attention, and when Royce Gracie did his thing at UFC 1, Greg was watching and studying. But he has no belt, and he never trained in the gi. Yet his guys have always done well at no-gi grappling competitions, winning big shows, competing with the best in the world at Abu Dhabi.

  At the same time, he began training with Michael Winkeljohn, a fighter from Albuquerque who had become a serious kickboxing star. Winkeljohn had been at it since 1980, had even boxed professionally, and was winning renown as a striking coach.

  Greg elaborated. “When I started with him I could kick a little, but I had no set-ups, no real understanding of the kickboxing game. He gave me all that. I call him my big brother and he taught me about business, kickboxing . . .” Greg assumes a hammy, hoary voice, filled with false tears, “a little bit about
life.” Winkeljohn was infamous for his grueling desert runs, a tradition Greg carries on. Apparently, in his prime, Winkeljohn would get dropped off on the far side of the mountains and run ten or fifteen miles back to town, through the desert heat. Greg often has his fighters run the mountains on routes Winkeljohn discovered—but Greg sometimes has his fighters carry each other.

  I followed Greg out into the gym and watched him lead a practice. He worked on technique for most of the hour and a half, but at the end he had his fighters doing flutter kicks for grueling five-minute rounds that seemed endless. He kept them in the dark about when it would end. Just when they thought it was all over he’d tack on another round. I was happy I’d decided to just sit and watch this one. We chatted while they suffered in near silence, and then afterward we retreated back to his sanctum. Everything he did was for a reason.

  “Mental toughness is learned. It’s not a skill that everyone has, or is born with. There are people that are born tougher than others mentally, or figure things out earlier in their life. But if you have motivation you can acquire mental toughness, it’s just about what your body gets used to putting up with.

  “Sure, some people are already tougher and some folks just won’t get tough, but those are the novelties, on the statistical fringe. Most people are of average toughness and can get tougher. I saw it all the time as a kid. There were these guys who were supertough growing up. I looked up to them because they could take a crowbar to the face and keep fighting. But as I grew up, they stayed the same level. They were scrappers to the core, don’t get me wrong, but they never got any tougher. It was from their environment and they never worked on it. I could outdo them, outwork them, and they’d tire and break. It was a real revelation to me, that you can train mental toughness and work harder, that it doesn’t have to be born into you.”