A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (19 page)

Zé, Rodrigo, and Rogerio were whisked away to meet with a Yakuza boss who was a longtime fan and friend for dinner in secret, and I walked home in the dark with Amaury and Marco (another friend and trainer) and thought about the Yakuza guy I’d fought years ago, whether he was here and whether he ever thought of me.

The Brazilians came to Japan earlier than anyone else; we were still two weeks out from the fight. They came in order to have time to acclimate, to adjust to the cold and the time of a different hemisphere.

Rodrigo and I had plenty of time to chat in the idle hours, wandering the streets, dawdling on the way to and from meals, and I kept after him, pestering him about the past and the present.

When he first fought Fedor, he had had back trouble for a long time and two hernias from surfing that had never been properly dealt with. For a while, he had been barely able to walk, but through extensive rehab overseas he began to get better—and then he beat a Japanese fighter named Kikuta and returned to Rio. While he was in Rio, the Pride organization asked him to fight Bob Sapp. When Rodrigo told them his back was a mess and tried to decline the fight, Pride threatened to strip him of the heavyweight title. In desperation, he called his rehab doctor in Holland, who laughed and said, “Well, it’s going to be a big test for you.”

Rodrigo still had trouble walking and couldn’t sit or stand for more than ten minutes or so without pain, and so had to keep alternating, which made flying interesting. Bob Sapp was the former NFL lineman who weighed 355 pounds. Zé assured Rodrigo that he could beat Sapp, that he had a strategy, and Rodrigo allowed himself to be convinced. Then, when he actually got in the ring with Sapp and looked up at the size of him, he couldn’t believe that he’d taken the fight. His strategy went out the window, and he shot right away for Sapp’s legs (“shooting for shoelaces,” as a wrestler might say). Sapp grabbed him and bounced him on his head. Rodrigo came to with Bob Sapp on top of him, punching him in the face, breaking his cheek and eyebrow. That fight was one of the classic MMA fights of all time: Rodrigo hung on and found a way to submit Sapp.

Rodrigo’s back still wasn’t healed when it was time to fight Fedor. “For like two months I was not walking well. I was coming down in my shape, and he was in the best shape he’s ever been in” was Rodrigo’s take on their first fight. I’d seen the fight on DVD, and Rodrigo got pounded pretty thoroughly, and the camera kept showing pretty Japanese girls crying on the sidelines.

The second time they fought, Rodrigo’s back was better, and he felt that Fedor was not in such good shape. The fight was stopped after a huge gash was opened on Fedor’s head by a head butt ruled “accidental,” and the fight was declared a “no contest.”

In the months leading up to this next fight, Rodrigo trained twice a week with people at the gym who were supposed to act like Fedor, and Danillo supposedly fell into that category. As far as I could see, he didn’t grapple like Fedor at all; he would pull guard. Murilo was more technical, his game was similar to Rodrigo’s, and he was the calm spiritual
mestre.
Zé pushed Rodrigo hard and was always there, working and yelling. When they came to fight, Zé never relaxed.

As for my unwilling roommates, Luis Dórea and Luis Alvez: I watched Dórea work with Rod and he was good, a real pro, and Rod’s boxing was smooth and hard. Rod said that Dórea was a good boxer; he just knew a lot about fighting, and was an excellent corner. He could manage the fight.

“And he always plays me up, makes me feel good, tells me about how I am better than my opponent all the time,” Rodrigo said. Dórea had been brought in to raise Rodrigo’s boxing, to build him up; and part of that is mental. Dórea had to convince Rodrigo that he was faster than Fedor.

Luis Alves was an old-school muay Thai trainer who didn’t do much but seemed to be there because he’d been with Rodrigo for a long time. Rodrigo knew him and trusted him.

With a week to go, we entered a time of boredom. That was actually the hidden test of fighting: the deadly waiting. Everything, our common will and strength, was bent to the purpose of getting Rodrigo to the fight—in the purest, strongest, readiest state—and prepared to peak at ten forty-five p.m. on New Year’s Eve. He had been training hard, and we were also focused on getting him rested, allowing his body to heal, allowing his stamina to recover while maintaining the knife’s edge of strength.

W. C. Heinz wrote a classic novel about boxing called
The Professional,
and in it he describes the task of bringing a fighter to his apogee: “It is one of the most difficult of scientific endeavors, this struggle to bring an athlete up the mountains of his efforts to the peak of his performance at the precise moment when he must perform. That peak place is no bigger than the head of a pin, shrouded in the clouded mysteries of a living being, and so, although all try, most fail, for it requires not only the most diligent of climbers but the greatest of guides.”

On Christmas Eve, determined not to lose to the Dragon Lady, I took one of the last of the free breakfast passes down the streets of Shinjuku to a Kinko’s copy shop and made color copies on special, thick colored paper and meticulously cut them out—and kept everyone in breakfasts. The forgeries weren’t perfect, but nobody was looking for them. I also had to carefully conceal my presence from the maids who cleaned the room or they’d start charging us for the extra person.

Luiz Alvez started calling me gringo
traquina,
for a TV commercial with a naughty kid who was always doing the wrong thing, and Zé liked it. They gave me grief, but took the passes when they needed them. They had accepted me as a member of the motley crew.

One day, for a break, we took a bunch of cabs to Meiji-jingu, the major Shinto shrine in Harajuku. Zé sat beside me in the cab, eyes bloodshot, grumbling and muttering. He wanted to be home in Rio, in the sun. He had an e-mail from a friend that said the surf was big. These guys didn’t really want to be here; the magic was gone, and they were just here for one thing: to get Rodrigo through, to deliver him to that one day, that one moment, in as close to perfect shape and mental condition as possible. It is hard to miss the holidays, hard to be away from family.

We wandered down leafy boulevards beneath the shrine’s massive gates, clowned a little, and took photos. As with any group of male professional athletes, there was a lot of farting and general hilarity.

It was cold, and the sun filtered weakly through the winter sky. Danillo made fun of the Japanese until Rodrigo gave him just a hint of a remonstrative look; and when we entered the shrine proper, Rodrigo quietly put a finger to his lips, enough to hush us all.

The shrine was extensive, and the grounds seemed to cover hundreds of acres; the architecture was classically Japanese: so utterly balanced that it calmed the soul.

The days crawled by, and then suddenly other fighters were glimpsed here and there, some old friends, some old rivals, as the big night approached. More and more fans stopped Rodrigo and Rogerio and Zé in the streets, asking for autographs. Fighters in Japan are revered. I would watch as salarymen in suits would get autographs and run off literally skipping with joy.

One morning, in the sauna, I asked Zé why he thought Rodrigo had had such success, and he ruminated in the heat for a few moments, sweat running in streams down his face. “He learns very, very fast. When he came to Top Team, he was okay but big and strong and fearless and he feels very little pain; and he got very good very fast.” Rodrigo at one point even went to Cuba to train with its Olympic boxing team for three months. He learned like a sponge, soaking everything up. Zé, nostalgic for his own youth, wished he could have gone with him.

“Rodrigo is a good friend with a good heart,” Zé told me, “and he’s psychologically very strong because of that. Physically he’s ready. now we just have to keep him believing in the strategy that we have been training. Move, box—Rod is faster—explode, get a good position, and let him make mistakes.”

Zé paused, and shrugged elaborately. “I’m not arrogant,” he said. “We could be wrong.”

Rulon Gardner is an American wrestling legend. He won gold in Olympics past and bronze recently at heavyweight, and he famously retired by leaving his shoes on the mat. Somehow he was here to fight Yoshida, a Japanese Olympic legend in judo. The gimmick was gold medal in judo versus gold medal in wrestling. I’d seen Yoshida fight; he’d fought several times in Pride, and he was a tough guy. I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell Rulon was doing, and if he was ready for the
gi.
Yoshida was one of only a few who still fought in a
gi,
and I was sensitive to the nightmare of the
gi
for the uninitiated.

I caught up with Rulon in the hotel and asked him, basically, why? And why start here, at Pride? Why not start a little smaller, in front of fewer people?

I found out that Rulon was here with Team Quest, an American MMA team with some terrific fighters who were extremely experienced at taking wrestlers and turning them into MMA fighters, as they were all former wrestlers. Dan Henderson, who was on the U.S. National Wrestling Team with Rulon, was a longtime Pride fighter who was on the same card as the Rulon-Yoshida fight; and Randy Couture, another member of Team Quest, was one of the most amazing stories in modern MMA, a man who had won and retained the UFC light heavyweight crown (205 pounds) at the age of forty-one. Couture was probably the smartest fighter I’d ever seen, and he made a habit of giant-slaying people who were supposed to cream him. When I realized that Rulon was here with those guys, I relaxed. They would have him ready. But the questioned remained: Why?

The answer was funny, when it finally came: Rulon was tired of being a victim. He had been wrestling all over the world for sixteen years, and he’d received numerous threats; people have wanted to fight him, hurt him, even kill him. “I wondered if I could defend myself.…I knew I could wrestle, but I was apprehensive about the goal of hurting somebody.” He looked me in the eye and said, “It’s like women learning self-defense and becoming more confident in self-defense situations.” Which is a little absurd; Rulon is 295 pounds of power and muscle, fueled by Olympic-caliber speed and skill. Yet here he was, telling me he was wondering whether he could physically defend himself.

The other interesting facet was his strategy. Rulon had a nice-guy image; he was not one of those angry wrestlers who wanted to punish people. “As a wrestler, it’s about respect—you’re not actually trying to hurt somebody…. I’m here for the test.” Of course, this was at odds with the strategy he confided to me, a secret I could not divulge before the fight: Rulon was going to try to knock Yoshida out standing. He had been working on his hands for a few months and was confident. He was not going to play Yoshida’s game on the ground and risk getting sucked into the
gi.
He had a beatific smile on his face when he told me, “Striking is your friend; if it’s not your friend, you have no ally on your feet. I am going to hurt him a little bit.”

There were still plenty of lulls, and I stayed in Rodrigo’s ear. I wanted to know what he was thinking about Fedor.

“I can tell you right now, he’s stronger, but I am technically superior. I have to move. When you fight at that level, anything can happen, but I can box him, and I want to play with him on the ground.” Rodrigo actually sort of liked Fedor, and he knew that there was the need for a fighter to have big opponents. Ali had Liston, Frazier, Foreman; and Roy Jones Jr., in his prime, had nobody. A great opponent raises you up. “He pushes me—I’m much better than I was two years ago,” Rodrigo said. “Before I had him, I felt like, I am going to train for what?”

Rodrigo had some theories about his strange popularity with the Japanese. First of all, there was the hype—they were excited about this fight. Second, Rodrigo thought it had to do with the purity of his technique; he’s not a big muscle head, yet he beats the big guys. In a way, he’d brought technique back into style. The Japanese loved him because he was something of an everyman.

“I show how a small guy can win. I make good fights.” He briefly digressed into the different kinds of fighters, those who are in it for money and those who are in it for the heart. Because MMA has so much more to it than boxing, fighters need to love martial arts from an early age. He pointed to Bob Sapp as an example, “Bob is just in it for money. He just picked up fighting and MMA recently—he will never be as good because his heart is not in it.”

Girls approached shyly, heads bobbing, and asked for Rodrigo’s autograph and to take pictures with him; he agreed, in return for phone numbers. He had sacrificed so much during his life to be a fighter—you give up your young adulthood, going out and drinking and having fun. He whispered to me, “I make a lot of sacrifice, but the only thing I cannot stop is girls.” Then he burst out laughing.

Rodrigo genuinely enjoyed Japan, and not just for the adulation and the money. He appreciated the respect shown to fighters there. He told stories of an ancient woman who sold noodles accosting him to tell him how beautiful his jiu-jitsu was, how strong his
juji gatame
(arm-bar) was, and of a ninety-six-year-old man who told Rodrigo that he was samurai. They appreciated the purity of his technique. “In America and Brazil, they like you because you are on TV, or are making money, but here they respect your fighting spirit.” He laughed, because his first MMA fights were in the United States, and people thought he was a Mexican and would scream, “Kill that Mexican!” to his opponents; in Japan they scream things like “Go forward!” and “Be brave!”

Modern Japanese culture seems strange to Westerners. On the plane I sat next to a Japanese woman who had published a book of short stories, and she told me that the trains were often late now, from the suicides leaping onto the tracks. There are suicide pacts, endemically forming on the Internet between strangers and adolescents. There is a word in Japanese,
otaku,
for rampant faddism, like the anime craze. Pride and MMA are part of this; they are popular in part simply because they are popular. As Hikari, a friend who was born in America but had spent the last six years in Tokyo, mentioned to me, there is the exoticism of the foreigners, the alien and extraordinary bodies of the fighters, from the freakishly big like Bob Sapp and Giant Silva to the bodybuilder-muscular like Kevin Randleman. There is a peculiar dynamic of envy and disgust, of avarice and disdain, that the Japanese feel toward foreigners, toward the Western body.