A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting

d in the eyes of the thousands of cars streaming by. It was so strange, to see these kids in the middle of the tunnel, but then you realize that for them it is safe. The constant stream of cars and headlights doesn’t concern them, although it flows by only a few feet away; they are deep in the cave and safe. Nobody is going to walk the thousand feet either way in darkness, in that narrow hell, to get to them.

 

Darryl Gholar had come to Brazil to teach takedowns. The wrestling takedown is an essential ingredient of the ground game because it is a way to control the fight and end up on the ground in a better position, on top. A main reason American wrestlers have been so good at vale tudo is their powerful takedown ability, learned from a young age.

 

Darryl Gholar loved Brazil and had been there for several years. He was in his early forties, a world-class freestyle wrestler who at his peak had beaten people like Randy Couture at wrestling. Darryl had suffered a brain aneurysm, and Scotty had pretty much been the only one who had gone to see him in the hospital, bringing him food and comfort, as well as dealing with some con artists who told Darryl’s mom that she needed to wire seven grand for an operation. Scotty asked around and found out that that was horseshit. He had passed the hat on his Web site and raised two thousand dollars for Darryl, money to buy him a ticket back to the States.

 

Darryl had recently been led astray by Wallid Ismail, a famous fighter who began on the same team as Zé Mario and Murilo Bustamante, under Carlson Gracie. Darryl had been Top Team’s wrestling coach, and Wallid had promised him a lot more money to leave and come to the team he was starting. When Darryl showed up with his bridges burned at Top Team, Wallid had no money and no team. Wallid had done this to some other famous fighters, as well. Now the wrestling coach at Top Team is a Brazilian, Jefferson Teixeira, a three-time national champ and former collegiate coach, a diminutive figure with perfect form. They do two hard wrestling workouts a week at Top Team, because the takedown (and its defense) is one of the most important aspects of the ground game. (Since my trip, Darryl has gone back to Top Team and is coaching again—and the Top Team fighters are taking everyone down at will.)

 

Darryl’s dad came in to help him, for although Darryl seemed healthy, he still moved gingerly, and there was a sense of tension and fragility about him. His father had been a pro boxer, and we talked about Thailand. He’d lived there in 1962 and ’63 in the service and had loved it. He was trying to tell his son how it compared to Brazil. There was something of a similar feel, hot-country jungle and third world. They were interested in my book and wanted to talk about it. “Do you ever watch animals, horses and cows and birds?” asked Darryl’s father, a tall, thick, distinguished man with an open, handsome face and gray hair. He made the motions of jostling his elbows for space, for position. “It’s natural, everything fights.”

 

Copacabana is a bustling, dense city, hovering between third world and first: street kids and homeless alongside professionals and couples walking with grocery bags and briefcases, shadowed by obvious criminal types, skeletally thin and strung out, giving you the hairy eyeball, kids begging and sniffing glue from rags, every big fancy building secure behind glass and steel curtains and doormen.

 

 

 

 

 

Scott, Lincoln, Nick, and I piled into a jeep one afternoon and blasted through a dense, heavy, overcast city to the north, to see some vale tudo. Nick, the “Green Giant,” was a large, gentle guy from Colorado, where he worked as a barista and took his jiu-jitsu very seriously. He was about as gringo as they come, lily-white and red-blond. Lincoln was a skinny punk with tattoos and wild red hair and a slightly goofy air, who had worked in carnivals and freak shows (I think he wrestled midgets at Lollapalooza), and was down here for some months, grappling at Gracie Barra. He made the joke “I’m like Jason—they keep killing me and I keep coming back.” I liked him because he wore a T-shirt that said, “The Clash is the only band that matters,” and you can’t really say it better than that.

 

We flew through the twisting canyons of Rio, past the famous slum City of God, and over a huge bridge spanning an endless bay with the pride of Brazil’s navy loitering around the base, and cranes and oil rigs like dinosaurs or monster robots in a science fiction set. It’s the longest bridge in the world, or in Brazil, depending on whom you’re in the car with. We lanced out into the deepening gloom and the jungle, seeing occasional fires along the road.

 

It took a little doing, but we found the venue at a fairground, complete with stalls of prize Brahman cows, some fancy new tractors, food and beer, and a huge soundstage set up for a concert. The fights had been scheduled to begin at around eight p.m., which is when we got there, but a light drizzle began and there was no crowd, so they put them off for two hours.

 

The fighters—instantly recognizable by their bulk, the pite-boys (from “pit bull,” pronounced “pitchey-boys”) with heavily snarled cauliflower ears, battered noses and eyebrows, and thick heavy shoulders and hands—and their respective teams were milling around. One guy was absolutely immense and dark black, with arms like separate people attached to his shoulders, a steroid wonder, with bloodshot eyes in a handsome, chiseled face. A lot of black and olive skin, skullcaps, eyes searching one another out. Being with Scott and the other gringos, it was as if I didn’t exist because I was so obviously not a fighter, or at least not one to be concerned about.

 

They call them pite-boys, somewhat like the motorcycle guys are called moto boys. It’s almost a fashion thing, but the pite-boys are a little more extreme. They often show up to a club or party and if they aren’t let in will kick everyone’s ass in the line, or pull the tent down on the party. They are essentially social terrorists. There are stories about how poor street kids will sometimes take rocks and mash up their own ears, in order to look tough, like pite-boys.

 

“Once you get pretty good at jiu-jitsu, beating up someone who doesn’t know any jiu-jitsu is pretty fucking easy. So you get this whole power trip,” was Scott’s explanation for the phenomenon. Pite-boys were notorious throughout Rio. “They’ve got a gun and you don’t; and these guys abuse the power.” Most pite-boys were upper class, with the freedom from legal persecution that privilege affords in Brazil.

 

While shaved heads, tats, and cauliflower ears are the uniform, some of the most notorious pite-boys don’t quite fit that stereotype, like Ryan Gracie and Georginio. And it’s usually not the best fighters who are the bad pite-boys; for instance, Murilo and Zé Mario aren’t out in clubs beating people up.

 

There were some particularly infamous incidents, such as one battle between Ryan Gracie and Macoco that destroyed an entire sushi restaurant in S?o Paolo. Now just as every dog bite becomes a pit-bull attack, every public fight is blamed on pite-boys.

 

Luta livre just means “wrestling,” but it has come to stand for a different tradition from Gracie jiu-jitsu, a competitor. It was “no-gi” from the beginning, as the students were too poor to afford the uniform. The essential difference is class, luta livre being the no-gi wrestling of the poor in the favelas, and jiu-jitsu being the art of the rich and powerful of Rio. Luta livre became its own style of submission wrestling.

 

The two styles clashed, somewhat inevitably (this is South America and machismo is the rule), in Rio in the early eighties, probably on the beach, where so much Carioca life happens, and evolved into a Hatfield and McCoy–style enmity. There was an attempt to end the rivalry by a series of vale tudo matches. In the first series, Eugenio Tadeu and the other kickboxing guys did surprisingly well (they had just started learning luta livre), but their leader, Flavio Molina, an excellent kickboxer, was destroyed.

 

In the early nineties, representatives of the two traditions fought again. This time the Gracie jiu-jitsu people were better organized and included two of Carlson’s students, Murilo Bustamente and Wallid Ismail, and they won all their fights. There was talk that the Gracies had their students do all their fighting for them, but the focus of the Gracie family at that time was on the United States, where they were starting the UFC.

 

We found our seats in the increasing drizzle as the fights finally got under way. The intensity of the clashes was ferocious and intoxicating. It seemed suddenly incongruous that there were about five hundred human beings and two of them were locked in the ultimate effort, while the rest were at rest.

 

The crowd and the venue were far more upscale than I would have thought, with a real ring and remote-controlled light show, although some poor bastard had to go up and crawl around on the frame and cover the fancy lights with trash bags as the rain increased. There were little kids around, sitting on their parents’ laps and dancing to the violent, profanity-f

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