the other iconic figure at Top Team, the longest practicing and most thoughtful; he was also thirty-eight and had been a black belt since twenty-one. As one of the greatest technical jiu-jitsu players of all time and a yoga practitioner, he was truly a spiritual fighter and in great demand. He was nearly always on the road, to Sweden, Russia, Japan, and the United States, giving seminars and cornering fighters, so I didn’t see him around the gym much.
One day at the gym, I got lucky, however, and we had a discussion about steroids and how they had changed the fight game. In Brazil, protein and creatine were expensive, while a cycle of steroids was easily available and cost maybe fifteen dollars U.S. Murilo lamented that it had changed not only the fighters but also the game itself; it was much more about power and aggression now, as the steroids affected the mind and temperament as much as the body. It was obvious who was using and who was not; the bulk and size of certain fighters were like flags flying in the wind—fighters who went from sixty-five kilos to more than a hundred in a few years. Just compare “all-natural” bodybuilders to those who aren’t; your eyes are the best test for who is on steroids.
Murilo was a Carlson Gracie black belt who fought in the old vale tudo matches, and I imagine it had been hard for him to leave Carlson. He’d spent two years trying to heal the rift between Zé and Carlson and change Carlson’s mind before he ended up following Zé to Top Team.
And then there was Rodrigo. Like the first time I saw Zé or Murilo, I was slightly starstruck when I met Rodrigo Nogueira, Top Team’s biggest fighter, a hero in Japan and Brazil. I had watched his fights in Pride, and you can learn so much about a person by watching him fight that you feel you know him. Zé once told me, “It’s why everyone is an expert; because you identify so strongly with the fighter. You think it’s you up there.” A. J. Liebling wrote about taking a friend to the fights who had never been, and within two bouts the friend was an expert, talking about what the loser should have done. That’s an interesting side of masculinity, the way male fight fans and writers always know what a fighter should do, how he could win—expertise derived from watching fights on TV. Or a fan will say, “He’s got no heart,” about a fighter who has forty pro fights. I always think, What the fuck do you know about heart?
Rodrigo was twenty-eight years old and the youngest dominant fighter on Top Team. There was a triumvirate of him, Zé, and Murilo. Zé and Murilo were kind of the older brothers, the wise and experienced warriors, but Rodrigo was at the height of his powers. There were other famed BTT fighters, Ricardo Arona and Vitor Belfort, who trained elsewhere, in S?o Paolo or the United States.
After a morning training session, I rode with Rodrigo up to his house in a big, gleaming silver Land Rover with several other fighters and trainers, part of the champ’s retinue. Rodrigo, coming up later than Zé and Murilo, had made big money. He was the fighter all the hungry young kids wanted to emulate. We bombed through the streets of Rio listening to the White Stripes and the Strokes.
Rodrigo’s house was the nicest I came across in Rio, a giant place with high ceilings and dark wood interiors set on a massive cliff between S?o Conrado and Barra, right over the ocean. The day was an absolute sparkler, and I could see for thirty miles, the shipping coming into Rio, the little islands off the coast. Below us, the heavy swell surged on the rocks. Rodrigo leapt into his pool and called one of his dogs, a massive white mastiff, over to him, and then pulled the dog in, laughing.
Rodrigo was big at maybe 230 pounds and strong, but not muscle bound; indeed, for the Pride heavyweights, he was slender and normal-looking. His face was a handsome but battered mass, with a heavy square jaw, slightly uneven eyes, all angles and planes. He was famous for shaking off huge blows, weathering killer punches, but the evidence was on his face. He had become something of a sex symbol in Japan, ever since a top Japanese model said that she thought he was very handsome. And he was, in a rough-and-tumble way; he’d had his cheek and face broken several times by both Fedor Emelianenko and Bob Sapp. His ears were a mess, the left in particular a fleshy nub that looked like something out of Star Wars. Rodrigo was most appealing when he smiled or laughed, because his face was totally transformed. His smile was huge, and his eyes were squeezed to slits, and you could feel the good nature radiating off him like heat.
Rodrigo and his twin brother, Rogerio, who fought at around 205, were from a small town in the northeast, Vitória da Conquista, and their childhood sounds like a cross between García Marquez and Quentin Tarantino. Their father was an accountant and their mother a physical trainer, and they owned a coffee plantation as a kind of hobby, a place to go to out of the city. Rodrigo had a very active childhood. He would ride horses and bulls, and once he rode a horse all day long until the horse finally fainted dead away. You got the sense that Rodrigo’s strength and stamina were on a slightly different plane from everyone else’s.
The formative event of his young life happened when he was eleven. He was behind a truck on the farm when it suddenly backed over him. It ruptured internal organs and shattered ribs, and should have killed him. His brother tried to pull him out but couldn’t; trapped beneath the truck, Rodrigo was sure he was going to die. Yet somehow he didn’t; instead, he spent eleven months in a hospital bed and couldn’t walk for about a year and a half. He had a lot of complications in the hospital—staph infections, lung infections. It’s hard to know how the darkness affected him, the stillness, the endless hours of self-contemplation for a boy who wasn’t self-contemplative. “I prayed a lot,” he said simply. He came to know his body extremely well, and essentially he showed he was too tough to die. He wasn’t a talker, especially about himself; he was a jock and a larger-than-life athlete, but I think that ordeal strengthened him, mentally—as I said, in jiu-jitsu a setback can be turned to an advantage.
His recovery was complete, however, and the wild boy didn’t slow down much. The best Rodrigo story I heard happened when he was about sixteen. At a Halloween party, he and his brother stole a university skeleton that had been placed on the lawn as a joke. During the course of the night, the skeleton got lost, and neither brother could remember where. When an irate professor called the next day, demanding the return of his skeleton and threatening police involvement, Rodrigo begged for a little time, as he and his brother had had enough problems with the police already. At boarding school, Rodrigo had a maid whose boyfriend worked in a cemetery, and she said she could get him a skeleton.
Well, from one of the caves for the anonymous dead she got him a partially decomposed body, maggots and all, and Rodrigo took the body back home on the bus. The smell was so horrible the bus had all the windows down, even though it was winter. Somehow Rodrigo got the body home without being detected. From a doctor friend the brothers learned that they should leave the bones out, covered with chlorine, to bleach the skeleton; and so thinking they were finally in the clear, they placed the body on the roof of their family’s house to bleach for a week while they returned to boarding school. Unfortunately, across the street was a police station. Curious about the decomposing body on the roof, the police stormed his father’s house. Rodrigo got a call from his furious father and had to explain everything. Like I said, Marquez and Tarantino, and maybe a little Monty Python.
What made Rodrigo so dangerous in the ring was that he believed in jiu-jitsu; he trusted it. When a fighter goes for a submission and tries to win a fight, he often sacrifices superior position, because if the opponent is knowledgeable, then the submission fails and the fighter ends up on the bottom, or worse. Rodrigo attempted submissions all the time, and most of them failed; that’s the way it is in modern MMA, where every fighter is highly skilled and schooled in submission fighting. Most fighters play it safe and work the ground only for position and to punch, without risking themselves. Rodrigo was a notable exception. He took huge risks and gave up position without a second thought because he believed in himself—in his jiu-jitsu—and it is precisely that belief that made him so dangerous. He did catch people all the time; fighters who had been avoiding submissions for fifteen years got caught by him.
Jiu-jitsu looks sort of simple, and there are only a certain number of submissions—arm-bar, rear naked choke, triangle, for example—that one can do, but there are infinite variations, because it is all about how you get those things done: whether you can set them up right, whether you can get them done against tough opponents who are strong. I can put a triangle on somebody who doesn’t know what it is and get it to work, but it takes an extraordinary player, l