Fighter's Mind, A (9 page)

Marcelo isn’t using some secret ninjutsu technique—he’s just doing things so quickly, so well, and so far in advance of his opponents that he makes them look stupid. He just seems to have more options, as if everybody else has learned only a limited form of what he does.

So I went down to Florida to pick Marcelo’s brain. How does Marcelo Garcia think about jiu-jitsu? He’d recently moved there and was training at American Top Team, under the watchful eye of Ricardo Liborio.

American Top Team (ATT) is probably the biggest MMA gym in the United States at the moment, with the most top-level pros. It’s the brainchild of Ricardo Liborio, who was a member of the mythic Carlson Gracie Team and a founding partner of the groundbreaking Brazilian Top Team. Liborio is also a name in the world of jiu-jitsu; some people say that he has the best game in the world, but his days of competing are long behind him. Now he’s the spark plug and linchpin for ATT.

I’d met Liborio briefly in Brazil. He’d understood what I was doing instantly (more so than most of the Brazilians), and he gave me his number and invited me down to ATT. He’s an extremely pleasant and warm guy. He’d be the perfect foil to my understanding of high-level jiu-jitsu and Marcelo.

 

I flew into Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and rented a car. ATT was in Coconut Creek, a little north of Lauderdale, lost down into the flatlands. I drove through the press of humidity, the flat swelter of the tropics, and the sense of some vast inland mangrove swamp somewhere outside the strip malls. You can’t see much landscape in this part of Florida, it’s so flat; there’s not much except the stormy clouds, epic and tortured mother-of-pearl cumulus over a blazing pastel blue and red sky.

When I walked into American Top Team a vast, cavernous twenty-thousand-square-foot MMA dream gym, the first person I met was “Chainsaw” Charles McCarthy.

Charles was a fighter who’d been on the Spike TV reality show
The Ultimate Fighter
(a guarantee of some celebrity) and who fought in the UFC. He was a friend of Mike C, and he had liked my first book, which was cool. If Mike C vouched for him I knew he must be okay and Charles felt the same way about me.

Charles is a square-jawed, black-haired young guy who seems a little short to fight at 185 but he actually has a big cut to get there—he’s a very dense dude, a brown belt in jiu-jitsu and a smooth ground fighter.

Jiu-jitsu players don’t get belts for free. You have to earn them in a very strict sense and be able to do a lot of things to advance, including compete. A black belt may take ten years of study.

And
who
you get your belt from matters—lineage is very important in jiu-jitsu. So teachers are stingy, especially with black belts, because they will be judged by the caliber of their students. A brown belt is a very high level of jiu-jitsu. Charles runs his own school and manages fighters, already at twenty-eight on the backside of things, thinking more about the future.

I told him about the new book and what I was here to do. I asked him to describe Liborio’s game to me. He chuckled. “Rolling with Liborio? You just get flattened. He’s so strong, he’s unstoppable. It’s a methodical flattening. You know it’s coming but you can’t stop it, because he’s more technical
and
much stronger than you.” He laughed again, “It’s like being pancaked by a steamroller. The pavement thinks it’s pretty tough, but as soon as the steamroller comes through it gets flattened. It’s like rolling with your dad when you’re eight years old. He’s a total nightmare, and he’s not even going full speed. It must be kind of awful to be Liborio, because no one can compete with him.” Charles grew wistful. “It has to lose a little something, it has to get pretty boring.”

 

Ricardo Liborio is a burly, powerful man, with no neck and massive rounded shoulders, the classic build for jiu-jitsu. With a distinguished full head of gray hair and a cherubic face with bright eyes, Liborio is always smiling. He’s gleefully welcoming, almost childlike, and he grabs me with a firm hug.

Over the next week we repeatedly went out to lunch or dinner, and he had no qualms about meeting me every day and chatting for hours, even though the demands on his time were immense.

He is sure of his “recipe,” his method of building an MMA team. “You have to be open-minded,” he said, “and understand that everybody is different. But there is a recipe, at the same time. You gotta train hard, bring the right people in and do what it takes to move to the next level. It’s about understanding the game. You can get your ass kicked in one fight, and maybe he’s better or maybe it’s just his day, he’s got the right game on the right day, and he matches up with you. But you can improve your game, take it further and jump to the next level.”

He’d smile at me with tired eyes over his food late at night, or over lunch, and answer the phone and talk to his nanny. He was juggling a gym full of egos, running a business, and caring for a sick infant daughter, and he was wearing a little thin around the edges. But his enthusiasm never flagged, not for a moment.

Liborio told me stories of when he started jiu-jitsu, back in the early 1980s, when he was fifteen. He was a part of the formative years of the sport, when all the icons of today were young and just finding the gym: Murilo Bustamente was a purple belt, Wallid Ismail, Bebel, Zé Mario Sperry, Amáury Bitteti was just a kid. Liborio was incredulous when he said, “Everybody was so young at the time.”

“I had a gift for it, I liked it and I got my blue belt in two months. As I progressed I quickly started teaching, too, and I realized that not everything I do is best for my students. The game varies body to body, and you got to understand that.”

Liborio spoke about Carlson Gracie and his MMA team, probably the most important MMA team of all time. Carlson passed away in 2006, but I had met him in Rio and even gone to cockfights with him. Scotty Nelson, owner of
OntheMat.com
and a lifelong jiu-jitsu enthusiast, had allowed me tag along when he went to private parties with Carlson. “Carlson really was the original fighter who adapted jiu-jitsu for MMA. He had his power game, and he’s said many times ‘never train jiu-jitsu that doesn’t work no-
gi,
make sure it works both ways,’” Scotty said. This is something that Marcelo also does, as when he tore through his first Abu Dhabi he’d been training mostly
gi
.

Scotty, Carlson, and I had been watching a UFC (with a whole family of old-time jiu-jitsu players around us) and Carlson was critical of Pe De Pano’s game, because he was doing things that were
gi-
related, in the UFC, and getting stuffed, while BJ Penn’s game was working beautifully. Carlson felt strongly that training instincts to work only in a sport setting was a mistake; you had to train all the time for the fight, for self-defense. Carlson’s legendary team had split up long ago, scattered to the winds, and Liborio was part of that diaspora.

 

Liborio talks about the cultural differences. In Brazil, there is a lot of training but less instruction. What he means by “training” is synonymous with “rolling” or “sparring,” when the guys just roll hard with each other, looking for a submission. This is a huge part of learning jiu-jitsu, developing those instincts through struggle. Training against real resistance is essential to learning about the intensity and pace of a real fight. This idea, called
randori
in traditional Japanese martial arts and promulgated by Jigoro Kano (the founder of modern judo), is the beating heart of jiu-jitsu. You need to develop a feel for what a fight is like, the intensity of the moves, how desperation fuels the struggle.

For the same reasons it is beneficial, just rolling can be limiting; sometimes you end up in survival mode, doing the same things over and over, sticking to your few bread-and-butter techniques. This trap can be even worse with the pro fighters, who often think they’ve had enough instruction and just want to train. Jiu-jitsu players, probably because of the Brazilian-to-English transition, use “train” like boxers use the word “work”—they use it for everything.

Liborio makes sure that his pro fighters get instruction as well as training every day. “For the good guys, the black belts, it’s just as important—they need the resources.”

We talked at length about “Minotauro,” Rodrigo Nogueira, the Brazilian Top Team fighter with whom I’d gone to Japan for the Pride Fighting Championship four years ago. Rodrigo had just captured the UFC interim heavyweight belt from Tim Sylvia and was the first fighter ever to have had both the UFC and Pride heavyweight belts. Liborio knew him well, had trained him for fights, and had interesting insight into Rodrigo.

“He was born with some kind of slow nerves, man,” Liborio said with his Cheshire cat grin. “He doesn’t get frustrated when he gets beat up. Frustration can take your stamina, your appetite for winning. You get angry at yourself, not the guy beating you. Not Rodrigo. He often gets his ass kicked in the first round and most people would think, ‘What do I have to do different?’ but he just waits calmly for his chances. People say he starts slow, but he starts at the same speed he’s going to run all through the fight. He keeps going at the same level, and by the end he’s going faster than the other guy, who gets tired.”

Liborio develops his point emphatically, jabbing at me with a thick finger. “You have to unnerstan’ you
can
lose. Somebody can beat your ass; but you can overcome, don’t get frustrated. You can’t be a quitter, you have to understand loss, that you
can
lose—it’s not your time, it’s not your day. Just because you lose doesn’t make you a loser. It’s not the same fight every time. One day the guy was so powerful, but maybe he’s not doing everything right and he gives you a chance to be better than him. But you can’t take it, for whatever reason. But next time? Be humble enough to understand it’s not the same fight every time. Most guys will give you a chance if you don’t gas out or emotionally break.”

He paused and looked around and thought about how he was going to convince me of the importance of this idea.

“Everyone is the same for the first two minutes, everyone has a chance to win, but after that you start to separate physically and technically.”

He ponders the point, methodically. “You have to have the fire to develop, to find other ways to win. You can really change your game if you improve in certain ways. You have to keep working hard, withstand the
presion,
unnerstan’? The pressure. If you can resist it, and not get frustrated, you’ll step up eventually. One day you’ll just start beating other guys, some move you could never do, one day you’ll be able to do it.”

Sean Williams, a Renzo Gracie black belt (you see the lineage qualifier? He’s not just a black belt, he’s a
Renzo Gracie
black belt; he trained extensively with the great man) who teaches in Hollywood, California, once told me a story of how when he was a purple belt he’d broken his jaw. It had forced him to the sidelines for two months. “As I was recovering I watched a lot of tape, and when I came back the other purple belts who’d been giving me problems were suddenly easy for me.” It seems to be the consensus—if you keep at it, one day you make a breakthrough.

I asked Liborio what he thought of Marcelo’s game. The “game” in jiu-jitsu is someone’s style, and it’s a reflection of their environment, their teachers, their body type, and their personality. It’s as much an artistic expression as an athletic one.

Marcelo had recently moved down from New York, and Liborio had been watching him train. “Marcelo understands balance well,” Liborio said. “He can get you off balance very easily. He gets you to shift your weight around. The way he moves his hips, I’m telling you, you can put a three-hundred-pound guy on him and he’ll find a way to move his hips. He’s got speed, but it’s not ‘Oh wow’ speed, it’s just the way he moves, and he has a lot of knowledge. He researches the position and there’s no wall for him—that I can’t get there.” Liborio is talking about mental barriers, that Marcelo doesn’t think of certain positions as static, or unwinnable. He has the creativity to look for new ways to “get to” good positions from the bad.

“How does that process happen? How do you get to where you can think three or four moves ahead of everyone?” I asked him. I remembered something Chainsaw Charles had said about rolling with Liborio: he knows what you’re going to do next before YOU even know what you’re going to do next.

Liborio spread his arms wide and smiled. “It’s just knowledge man. It’s the same for everyone. You go over the basics and pretty soon you’re dreaming about it like everyone else. Be honest and humble enough to learn from everybody.”

He thought about it for a while. “With jiu-jitsu, you really don’t know what he’s thinking, but you feel how he’s reacting. I can feel when he wants to change the game and I stop it and change it another way. It’s one of the few fighting sports you can do with your eyes closed, because it’s about feel.

“You have to stop and understand, to listen to the position or you’ll miss an opportunity. Guys don’t listen to teachers they don’t like, or don’t respect, but you gotta be open if you want to be the best. As soon as you close yourself off you start to lose.” That sentiment would be repeated, almost word for word, by every serious jiu-jitsu practitioner I talked to.

Liborio handles all aspects of running American Top Team, and he’s constantly revising his theories on the team and leadership.

“The leader has to be open, too,” he said. “He has to be searching, too, he can’t say ‘Oh, I know what everything is already.’ You have to be honest and humble enough to ask how different things go, and learn from everybody, because if you keep your eyes screwed shut and if you think you know everything you’ll start losing. I believe in hard training, in the recipe. You have to respect your limits but unnerstan’ you’re an athlete and push on them. You WILL get your ass kicked. You WILL get tired, but eventually you’ll be kicking ass.

“I don’t think I was the best fighter, but I can be the best teacher. Because I really care about the guys, all my guys. I care what happens.”