watching Pride fights; they were legendary, bigger than life. Zé Mario Sperry, perhaps one of the greatest ground fighters ever, led the team out from under Carlson Gracie after Carlson left Rio to come to the United States. Sperry and Murilo Bustamante, the other team leader, are among the living legends of the sport.
I was particularly interested in Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, or “Minotauro,” as they call him, a Pride fighter who had pulled off submissions on people I had thought couldn’t be submitted. I wanted to see the modern MMA world at its apogee. I decided I would see if I could follow Rodrigo into his training and through a fight in Japan.
While training in Iowa, I had met a grappler named Danny Ives, and we had talked a little about Brazil, where he visited often. “Just come on down and I’ll hook you up,” he said. He told me about a guy named Scotty Nelson, who ran a Web site, OntheMat.com, and I called Scotty one day around three in the afternoon and woke him up.
“Yeah, man, just come on down and we’ll work it out,” he grumbled at me. So I flew down a few days later. A lesser man might have questioned the wisdom of going to Brazil to train with the greatest ground fighters in the world with a “healing fracture” on his floating rib. But not me, genius that I am.
Scott Nelson is a blond, blue-eyed California gringo who looked like a surfer kid with badly cauliflowered ears. He was thirty-five but seemed twenty-five, with a hint of the weariness and seen-it-all attitude of the seasoned expatriate, a Graham Greene character in the MTV “Jackass” tradition. He’d been in Rio for about three years, running OntheMat.com, the definitive site on jiu-jitsu in Brazil and in the States, and his Internet business supported his gringo lifestyle. He competed, as well, and had a whole bucketload of medals and honors from various competitions: gold in the 2001 Brazilian Team Championships, first in United Gracie in San Francisco (Team), third at the World Grappling Games, second at the U.S. National. He was not a top, world-class jiu-jitsu practitioner but a dedicated lifelong enthusiast, and he’d practiced, or “rolled,” with some of the best people in the world for seven years, in both the States and Brazil.
Scotty is incredibly generous and open to both foreigners and locals. He invited me to stay at his house, where there are always fighters in transition or foreigners in from the States, for a few weeks of training. When I arrived, a bunch of jiu-jitsu guys from Boulder, Colorado, were just finishing their stay, partying and chasing girls and eating like kings; they were training at Gracie Barra, the local branch of the Gracie Academy. They had nicknames like “White Rabbit” and “Green Giant.”
Scotty said I could train anywhere I wanted, as a gringo (and a beginner); but don’t talk about it, and try not to let them catch you training at competing schools. Even for foreigners, training at several different schools can be problematic. If you go from one gym to another, it is viewed as a betrayal, a stab in the back. At first this seems silly, archaic, and juvenile, but the deeper I went into the fight game, the more I came to understand and sympathize with it. The fight game consists of relationships, of reputations: between fighter and trainer, trainer and manager, manager and promoter. They all have to trust one another to some degree, and because the fight game is often involved with the shadowy edges of society, that trust is sometimes abused. There isn’t much money to go around. Reputation is life for a trainer, manager, promoter, fighter: Can you deliver the goods? If the word on the street is that you can’t, your career is in trouble. Your reputation is your livelihood and in some sense what you fight for, in all facets of the game.
And, of course, it’s all tough guys, and no one is as sensitive to perceived slights as tough guys.
I moved into Scotty’s back room when the other guys moved out, and I hung out with him and did core training for my ribs. I figured I’d spend a few weeks there, getting my bearings and taking Portuguese lessons, then make the transition to Top Team and get my own place. Scotty had mats on his balcony, and we would sometimes train out there. He was a big help to me because he would go lightly on my ribs.
I wanted to fight, or at least compete in some grappling tournaments after I’d been there for a while, so I was running and skipping rope and not drinking, while Scotty was basically partying, smoking weed, and hanging out. It was thanks to him that I became aware of the subculture ties between surfing and jiu-jitsu. Most fighters also surf, some professionally. Renzo Gracie (another world-famous Gracie, who now runs a school in Manhattan) was a pro surfer, and at Top Team a big-wave rider with the world’s biggest wave under his belt, Rodrigo “the Monster” Resende, sometimes showed up. The weed smoking is another part of it. There is a whole contingent of jiu-jitsu players all over the world who self-medicate with THC.
Even training on Scotty’s balcony, I was struck by the democracy of ground fighting. The people teaching ground fighting aren’t untouchable professors; they are other fighters, older and more experienced, but because you “train” with them, they teach on a very friendly, face-to-face level. “Training” in Brazil means more or less full-speed and strength-submission grappling, with gi or without. A gi, or kimono, as the Brazilians call it, is the thick white judo uniform that stands in for clothing you might wear in a street fight. Though early fighters perfected their ground games with a gi, now most vale tudo fighters practice without it, as most MMA fights will not allow it.
Grappling is a discussion, it’s an open forum. The way you train is with a bunch of friends sitting around watching two guys grappling, and trying various things at half speed, and then going for it nearly full speed. At Scotty’s house, out on the balcony, various gringos and Brazilians would smoke weed and roll. It was there I met a somewhat famous fighter named Tony DeSouza, who was ranked pretty high in the world, had fought in the UFC three times, and was living in Brazil and Peru.
Tony was thirty, a Peruvian citizen who had grown up in the United States as an illegal alien. His parents had come to Southern California when he was ten years old to make a better life and to get away from the violence in Peru. He had gone to high school in San Marino and attended Cal State Bakersfield on a wrestling scholarship, all as an illegal alien. “I hate lying, and I had to lie all the time,” Tony said. When I met him, he looked like an indío, a bushman with a thick head of curly hair and a giant bushy beard, with flat, dark brown eyes and a battered nose.
Tony was a wrestling standout and did very well as a freshman and sophomore in the Division I Pac-10 (he was voted most outstanding) and was rated in the top twelve in the country, but his interest started to flag and he butted heads with his coaches, who were overtraining him. He failed to qualify for Division I his senior year, even though he beat several Division I all-Americans. Anger filled him up: “I just went out there to hurt guys,” he said. “My last fight I had the guy crying. I lost by fifteen points.” He did a lot of street fighting. “Bouncers,” he said to me, and then rolled his eyes as though that said everything. And in a way it did. Tony’s not a big guy, maybe five-nine and 170 pounds, and he is not physically intimidating despite his battered visage and gnarled ears.
He drifted and worked in Vegas, and got into jiu-jitsu almost by accident. Within a few weeks he was living in the gym, and within six months he had his first MMA fight. Soon after, he was in the UFC. He fought three times in the UFC (he went 2–1) and in a few other places, before moving back to Peru and starting his own gym.
Tony had come to Rio via the Amazon; he’d spent a month on the river. He’d left Peru with about a hundred dollars U.S. and had pretty much bummed his way down, sleeping outside. When I met him, he had just fought Luiz Azeredo in Meca, the big Brazilian vale tudo event, and beaten him. Luiz was arguably the best Brazilian in his weight class. Tony had him in a finishing move, “the Twister,” but it was so technical that the referee didn’t recognize it and stopped the fight and restarted them standing. Tony shook it off like it was nothing.
During the fight the crowd starting chanting “Mendigo,” meaning “the bum,” at Tony, because he resembled a famous homeless TV character. He did look like a wild man, and he was sleeping on the mats at his gym in Centro with about six other penniless jiu-jitsu fighters when I met him. He was an extreme example of the new breed of fighter, taking the ground game to higher and more rarefied air, traveling like an old journeyman boxer, seeking out new teachers and opportunities to fight.
One night, Scotty and I went to see Darryl Gholar, an American wrestler who had changed the face of vale tudo. We drove through the warmth and glow of Rio, past street kids congregated on mattresses in the center of the tunnels, right in the exhaust an