by Doug Merlino
Shortly thereafter, Liborio went to compete in the 2000 Abu Dhabi grappling tournament. Carlson Gracie hadn’t been around to train the team as they prepared for the tournament, so several members decided they weren’t going to pay the 30 percent. Afterward, Liborio flew to Japan to corner Murilo Bustamante. While there, he learned that Gracie had kicked out most of the top fighters and coaches in the gym, including him.
Liborio and Bustamante returned to Brazil and urged Gracie to reconsider. Gracie insisted the decision was final. As a result, the leaders of the gym—Liborio, Bustamante, Mario Sperry, and Luis Roberto Duarte—left and created Brazilian Top Team in Rio. As they had been the main coaches of Gracie’s gym, most of the rest of the team followed, including many of the country’s top fighters.
Liborio, working at his computer, created the Brazilian Top Team logo, a silhouette of a man raising his arms in victory. It happened to be taken from a photograph of Ricardo Arona celebrating after beating Jeff Monson in the 2000 Abu Dhabi tournament.
Liborio felt he had to learn English. Mario Sperry, the only BTT leader to speak the language proficiently, made extra money managing fighters since he was able to negotiate contracts outside of Brazil. Liborio’s initial plan was to learn English in Japan, where he had just arranged a deal with an investor to open a BTT satellite. Then he met Dan Lambert in Las Vegas.
Lambert knew Liborio’s reputation and offered to pay the Brazilian to go to Florida for a few months. Liborio took him up and found he liked it. Liborio had lobbied his partners at Brazilian Top Team to open a series of “Top Team” gyms around the world, each taking the name of the country in which it operated, but they insisted they should concentrate on the team they had. So Liborio spoke to Lambert and Silveira about building a fight team in Florida. They were interested. He sold his ownership stake in Brazilian Top Team, and they founded American Top Team, keeping the same logo. A flood of jiu jitsu practitioners and fighters from Brazil followed.
At the time, there were few other examples of large professional MMA fight gyms. Ken Shamrock had run the legendarily brutal Lion’s Den in California, and Pat Miletich had his gym in Bettendorf, Iowa, which attracted prospects from around the Midwest. As Lambert bluntly recalled, “We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing.”
Jeff Monson met Dan Lambert at a grappling tournament in 2001, leading to an invitation to train in Florida, which turned into an offer to coach wrestling at ATT. He was one of the first Americans to join the team.
It was rough around the edges in the early days. Sparring often consisted of a guy who had a fight coming up getting called to stand in the middle of a circle, surrounded by others with boxing gloves on. Conan Silveira called out names, and guys proceeded to hammer the fighter in the middle, who was only allowed to defend himself by taking them down. There came a point, Monson remembered, when you got so tired that it just felt better to take the beating than to keep struggling.
The move catapulted Monson from one life to another: The ability to train full time and the higher level of instruction made his career possible. His wife, though, did not like Florida.
After a few years, she moved back to Washington State with the kids.
. . .
It’s accepted wisdom in the business that running a gym dependent on fighters is a guaranteed way to lose money. Most gyms take a slice of a fighter’s pay from a bout—usually 20 percent—which is hardly ever enough to cover coaches and training facilities. As a result, most fight gyms are subsidized in one of two ways: through the generosity of a wealthy benefactor or by selling memberships to the general public.
Dan Lambert had been successful in business and did not see American Top Team as a money-making enterprise. The travel industry paid his bills, and the fight business was for fun. He was fine with that as long as his outlay remained manageable. In the early days he paid for everything—housing, salaries, even trips to fights on private jets.
Liborio was happy to have a generous partner, but he wanted the gym to last for the long term and fought to control spending. He pushed Lambert to open up to general membership and started the gym’s martial arts classes for kids, followed by an after-school day care program, a lucrative enterprise run by his wife, Misti.
He also developed a martial arts curriculum, licensing it and the American Top Team name and logo to people who wanted to start satellite gyms. This not only brought in income, but provided former fighters with a way to make a living. More than seventy such gyms had opened in Florida and states across the country.
Liborio had to regularly visit these subsidiaries, where he gave classes and presided over ceremonies in which belts were awarded. He was essential to the operation, the bloodline back not only to Carlson Gracie, but to Carlson’s father and uncle, Carlos and Helio, and, beyond them, to Mitsuyo Maeda and Jigoro Kano.
As mixed martial arts grew around the world in the early 2000s, with especially huge fights in Japan, American Top Team moved into bigger and bigger spaces. Liborio and Conan Silveira used their ties to Brazil to recruit new fighters.
Within a few years, the gym added more Americans, such as Mike Brown and Rich Attonito, my trainer, who each moved down from the Northeast after careers as college wrestlers. The addition of Kami Barzini to the coaching staff helped to attract even more wrestlers. Other fighters came from all parts of Europe and Latin America.
From American Top Team, they flew out to fight everywhere, not much different from their fighting ancestors, Johannes Josefsson and Otagawa, plying their skills across the world, wherever there was a crowd that wanted to watch and a promoter willing to pay.
Part Five
Rising Up and Coming Down
It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ’n’ roll.
—AC/DC
Mirsad Bektic with fans
(Doug Merlino)
Heroes and Villains
In the spring of 2013, on the night before his second fight, Steve Mocco perused the buffet at a Golden Corral restaurant in Bettendorf, Iowa, loading his plate with steak and pasta.
His brother Joey had flown into the small airport in neighboring Moline, Illinois, that morning. I’d landed in Milwaukee and driven three and a half hours from there, through silo-dotted farmland, gray and flat, the odor of manure sticky in the air.
The Quad Cities—Bettendorf and Davenport, in Iowa, and Rock Island and Moline, in Illinois, all arrayed along the Mississippi River—was a hard-nosed area, the commercial center of all the surrounding agriculture, home of John Deere and the Rock Island Arsenal. If one were to make an MMA pilgrimage, the Quad Cities would also be an essential stop, in the same category as rock fans going to Memphis to see Sun Studios.
In the mid-1990s, Pat Miletich, a former wrestler who had started cage fighting on the early no-holds-barred circuit, rented a racquetball court in Bettendorf and began to train other aspiring fighters. Miletich—along with Matt Hume, Jeff Monson’s early coach—was one of the first trainers to make a careful study of boxing, wrestling, and jiu jitsu and think about how to best combine them into a new martial art.
He became one of the UFC’s early champions, and he soon attracted a stable of rough Midwestern fighters that were, like their surroundings, gritty and resilient. By the mid-2000s, as the team collected an array of UFC belts, Miletich’s gym drew more aspirants from around the region, who drove in for the infamous weeklong tryout, in which they were subjected to round after round of sparring. Few remained for a second week.
The program fell apart soon after. Miletich’s champions aged. The desired destinations of would-be fighters changed to Greg Jackson’s gym in Albuquerque, American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose, and American Top Team. Miletich sold the gym and, besides engaging in the occasional Twitter war with Jeff Monson, now made a living as a television commentator for various MMA promotions.
Though we’d driven by the site of Miletich’s former gym earlier in the day, we were not there for historical tourism. The promotion that Mocco
had signed with, the Resurrection Fighting Alliance, had been having a hard time getting him a fight. Quality heavyweight fighters were rare at the lower levels of the sport, and few were clamoring to face someone with Mocco’s wrestling background. In response, Dan Lambert had arranged this bout in Iowa through a promoter he knew.
Mocco had his own history in the state, of course, starting at the University of Iowa. After he transferred to arch-rival Oklahoma State, he’d been enthusiastically jeered when he’d returned to compete in wrestling matches.
Mocco still had a profile here. The local newspaper had just run a feature on his transition to MMA. The promotion wanted him to go on drive-time radio the next morning at eight thirty. Mocco, not usually excited about interviews, was especially unenthused about getting up early on fight day to go to a radio station. Joey dealt with it, coming to an agreement that Steve would do it by phone.
Given that Mocco had already riled up people in Iowa, I asked if he ever felt tempted, in the style of a professional wrestler, to play the villain.
It was not a serious question, but Mocco considered it and gave a thoughtful reply. He mentioned Chael Sonnen, a UFC star who had boosted his career by making a heel turn. “People only play the villain when they can’t be the best,” he said. “They settle for being the villain. Everyone’s first choice would be to be Michael Jordan.”
That measuring of self against the competition and seeing how you stacked up was Mocco’s ideal: He was indifferent to publicity and seemed to care about money only insofar as it provided his family with a home and food on the table. MMA for him was, as he once told me, a “romantic” pursuit, a chance to see what he was made of. It would not be the end of the world if he failed. The point was in the quest. He did not have an edge of desperation.
It was, I thought, both an advantage in life and a potential liability in the sport.
. . .
The next day, as Mocco rested before the fight, was a marathon of bad television—rednecks fishing for catfish with their hands and explorations of the love lives of people living in a trailer park. Mocco had kept his phone off in the morning and skipped the interview: After conferring with Joey, they had ultimately deemed it a needless distraction.
Roger Krahl and Ricardo Liborio had just arrived, Krahl from Florida, and Liborio direct from the Middle East. He’d spent a week in Abu Dhabi, training with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the founder of the Abu Dhabi grappling tournament that had launched Jeff Monson’s career. The sheikh routinely imported the world’s best grappling and jiu jitsu practitioners to work out with him in his private gym.
At a little after six P.M., Pulp Fiction played on the TV. Samuel L. Jackson roared Ezekiel 25:17, thundering on about great vengeance and furious anger.
“Let’s go to work, boys,” Liborio said.
The room was on an upper floor of the Isle Casino Hotel, part of the complex where the fight would be held. Mocco grabbed his gear and was followed out by his brother and the two coaches.
They rode the elevator down to the skywalk on the third floor. A right turn led to the casino, a white riverboat trimmed in pastel pink and blue docked on the bank of the Mississippi River (a man checking IDs at the door greeted gamblers, many using walkers, with a hearty “Welcome aboard!”).
Mocco went left, passing posters advertising a coming visit by Rick Springfield (Get ready to rock to all-time favorites like “Jessie’s Girl”). Outside, rain drizzled, the Mississippi churned cloudy and dark, and train tracks led to a collection of grain silos next to the water.
We rode down an escalator, walked past a beer stand, and entered the ballroom of the Quad-Cities Waterfront Convention Center. A cage had been erected in the center of the room, ringed by banquet tables and chairs.
The rules meeting was under way. A man from the Iowa Athletic Commission—middle-aged, heavyset, goateed—stood in front of a loading dock and laid out his expectations to twenty fighters and their corners:
– No one should be back here who’s not a fighter or a corner. Moms, girlfriends, wives, children have no business back here.
– Don’t talk to the officials.
– Wear fight attire. No swimsuits. No matter what I say, every time we have one of these, someone shows up in a swimsuit.
– Clean up after yourself. Don’t leave bloody gauze and tape lying around. That’s disgusting.
– Corners, don’t stand up and yell for your fighter to “Eff him up.” That only gives ammunition to the people who still want to call this human cockfighting. It also blocks the view of paying customers.
– Get taped on time. We’re in a casino environment tonight. There’s some desire to get these shows done and get people into the casino. Don’t hold things up.
The fighters and their corners jammed into two small dressing rooms. In the ballroom, a DJ spun the usual MMA medley of Slipknot, Pantera, and Metallica sprinkled with touches of hip-hop and country.
The fights got under way. In the cage, two amateurs faced off. Both were overweight, one more than the other, his belly jiggling over the waistband of his shorts. As soon as the bell rang, his opponent tackled him football-style, mounted him, and relentlessly smashed his face. The ref ended it after forty-one seconds.
It set the tone for the rest of the night, a parade of stoppages and submissions brought about by matching up fighters of vastly different skill levels and physical conditions. The several hundred spectators didn’t seem to mind: The lack of technique was more than compensated for by carnage.
Backstage, Liborio looked for a place to warm up Mocco. He settled for a hallway leading to the kitchen. Mocco jogged up and down, past empty stainless-steel food racks and crates of glassware, before grappling with Liborio. Krahl held mitts, which Mocco punched as unperturbed kitchen workers in white chef’s jackets slipped by on their way to smoke breaks.
(Doug Merlino)
The fat kid from the first fight wandered by. The left side of his face was eggplant purple, the eye closed to a slit. “I guess I can say I fell down some stairs,” he joked to an older woman who was following him. They both laughed uproariously.
Mocco sat in a chair and stared at the floor. The crowd yelled as the previous fight ended with a choke. Rashad Brooks, Mocco’s opponent, emerged from his dressing room. A wild puncher with a 5-11 record, he made his way inside.
The announcer called Mocco’s name as the DJ cued up Ozzy Osborne’s “Crazy Train.” Mocco made the short walk to the cage and climbed inside, trailed by a ring girl with a shaved head and elaborate tattooing.
At the bell, Mocco advanced, throwing a straight right that whizzed past Brooks’s face. Brooks countered with a left and a right that both missed, and then circled out to his right.
Mocco stalked Brooks, caught him, and the two stood and traded a flurry of punches, none of which did any damage.
Brooks backed out. Mocco pursued, threw a right, missed, and rolled just as Brooks threw a high left kick that glanced over the top of his head.
Mocco took his opponent down, flattened him on his back, and shifted his hips away to position for a North-South choke. Before Mocco could even set it up, Brooks pounded him on the back to tap out.
Mocco ambled back to his corner. Behind him, Brooks climbed to his knees and slammed the canvas. Mocco, almost as an afterthought, raised his arms in the air.
It had lasted a minute.
Mocco left the cage, followed by Liborio, his brother, and Krahl. They huddled backstage near a cinder-block wall and a stack of banquet tables.
“You’ve been training less than a year,” Liborio told Mocco, upset by the leg kick that had narrowly missed his head. “If you’re fighting a striker, you use your wrestling or grappling. If you’re fighting a grappler, you use your striking.”
Liborio knew that Mocco wanted to show he had good hands, but preferred him to practice in the gym. Mocco knew that many MMA fans found fighters who relied on wrestling to be boring. And striking was novel for him, a new ch
allenge. He’d spent his life wrestling; now he wanted to punch people.
Liborio thought that was a good way to get knocked out.
Believe
Mirsad Bektic, in sweatpants and a thick hooded sweatshirt, pedaled an exercise bike in the workout room of a Westin hotel in a Denver suburb. It was March 2013, four months since his fight against Doug Jenkins in Nebraska. Bektic was in the middle of his weight cut. A Jay Z song blared from his iPhone.
The fight was to be another incremental step for Bektic. His opponent, Nick Macias, had a record of 6-2. At thirty, he was eight years older, a brown belt in jiu jitsu who had never been finished. Living in Denver, he also had the advantage of training at altitude as well as the support of a hometown crowd. Bektic expected a tough fight.
Kami Barzini, watching the time, told Bektic to get off the bike. Sirwan Kakai spread several of the hotel’s terry-cloth towels on the floor. Bektic lay down, and Kakai swaddled him like a mummy, leaving only his face poking out. After several minutes, Barzini told Bektic to get up. They pulled the towels from the floor, revealing a puddle of sweat.
They moved to the locker room. Bektic stripped, dumped his sweatshirt, sweatpants, T-shirt, and underwear in a heap, and entered the sauna. Barzini collected the clothes and placed them neatly on a bench. Bektic came out minutes later and stood on the scale.
One hundred fifty-five pounds.