her 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.
There were some old friends there to fight; Jens Pulver was there with Jeremy Horn, and also Monte Cox, the promoter who screwed me in Iowa. I don’t hold a grudge—Monte’s a promoter. I can’t blame him for following his nature.
Jens has been fighting pro boxing (on ESPN2, no less) and winning. He was very confident coming into his fight with Gomi, who was considered one of the best in the world, as was Jens. For little guys, theirs was a marquee fight, coming near the end of the night. As Danillo remarked, Gomi was much bigger; he came down to 160 from 180, and Jens had come up; he’d been boxing at 142. Just the fact that he’d been boxing pro and had won his last four fights made me think that he was going to kill Gomi, whom I’d never seen do anything besides land a lucky knee in a few seconds to a shooting Ralph Gracie.
Fighting, especially in America, is always about heavyweights, and the money is a reflection of that. Lighter weights are usually better fights, because of the speed and the lightening of punching power. Heavyweights have to be so conservative, as any punch can be a KO, while the lightweight fighters can th