It was cold and getting colder when we climbed into the bus, and the snow had been picking up all day. I’m not quite sure how snow can be Japanese, but this snow had a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, falling like a heavy, quiet haiku. The roads were slippery and slow with traffic and accidents; the bus fishtailed once and the Brazilians oohed. The windows fogged up and cocooned us in a white silence, strange buildings looming in the fog and vanishing.
When we arrived, there was a tangible excitement in everyone, and you realized that that was why these guys get addicted to this; not just the fighters, but everyone around them—it’s a way to feel something. Inside the arena it was cold and concrete and brightly lit.
We found our room and began to soldier in for the long wait, running reconnaissance missions, wandering the halls—trying to stay calm. We arrived at around three in the afternoon, and we would be there all night. Rodrigo was not yet there; he was fighting last, so he planned on coming a few hours later.
We went up and found the ring, wandering like kids in a new playground. The ring seemed tiny in the cavernous stadium, and I watched Jens bounce and weave on it, his footsteps surprising both of us with their thuds. The floor had a little compression in it, and the canvas was fairly soft. Jens was out warming up in a baseball hat and overlarge T-shirt, and he slashed the air in the corner with his fists, fixed and flickering.
Another fighter (who shall remain nameless) was also warming up, and the steroids had thoroughly ravaged him—his face was like thick, rubbery leather. The chemicals, all that raging and fighting, had just worn him down like old shoes. He was still bullet-headed and enormous, absolutely exploding in all directions with muscle.
I was told that there was drug testing, and Rodrigo did piss into an open Dixie cup that a kid in a Pride staff shirt took away.
The show was about to start, and the Pride event staff needed Rodrigo to be up on the massive stage that was built for the introduction. Problem was, Rodrigo still wasn’t there. Without a second thought, they got his twin brother, Rogerio, to do it. He did it with a little trepidation, his hat pulled down and his hood up, and I don’t think anyone caught on. You see what you expect to see.
Rodrigo was having his own troubles. The snow had shut the highways down right after we had come through, and although he had tried to get on the road at three-thirty, it was impossible; by taxi on a normal road it was going to take three hours. So they went to the train station to catch the bullet train. But the bullet train wasn’t running, because of the storm, so they went to catch the normal train, and that wasn’t running either. Rod ended up spending two hours in a cold train station trying to get to the arena.
Danillo, Murilo, and I escorted Rogerio-pretending-to-be-Rodrigo out through the halls, with the cameras turning and twisting and snaking with us, a crew of three or four Japanese staff around us, scuttling and scurrying. I was trying not to laugh, trying to look fierce. Danillo was doing a better job, and of course Murilo was unflappable. He should really play poker.
After we dropped Rogerio off, Danillo and I walked around the main arena, out in the darkness and the presence of the crowd. The cheapest bleacher seat was $150, and everyone there was in a festive mood. Many of the women, especially around ringside, wore shimmery party gowns, ready to ring in the new year.
Danillo was leaping and shouting as the show began, a low hum of anticipatory music, and then bursts of Japanese narration. The drums began with Pride’s signature dum-dum-dumdum repeated and growing, and a whole carefully orchestrated series of traditional drummers, drumming hard and theatrically, and a massive electronic display. The crowd was so excited, the tension filled the arena with a crackling electrical energy, and this translated to the fighters. When their time came to fight, they could barely control themselves.
The drummers kept moving and changing it up during the introductions, with the announcer Lenne Hardte shrieking and calling, her madwoman voice shimmering and wailing and playing the crowd, a different clarion call for each fighter. Danillo and I whistled and cheered as they called Rodrigo, laughing because it was Rogerio hiding under his hood and hat. It was completely electrifying,
Danillo and I stayed for the first fight, a quick finish of a good-looking Dutch kickboxer, Leko, by a tough Japanese fighter named Minowa (he won the “Quick” award, an extra ten grand for finishing the fastest). Minowa chased him around, rushed him, went after his legs, and caught him with a heel hook on the ground like wow. Danillo rolled back his sleeves to show me his goosebumps.
Anderson Silva, a fellow Brazilian who shared the locker room with us, lost his fight early on the card and had a smile of relief on in the ring—at least it was all over—and that gradually shifted to a thousand-yard stare in the dressing room watching the rest of the fights, a glazed wetness. We all studiously avoided eye contact. We had to focus on Rodrigo anyway, to turn and give our energies to him, to pour our attention in the form of strength into his vessel.
A Pride staff member came by with a series of envelopes; fighters here are always paid directly in cash. I don’t know how much Anderson stood to make, but Rodrigo would be carrying around two hundred grand in cash at the end of the night. In his early days, he used to get twenty-grand bonuses for submitting an opponent.
Rodrigo was sitting up watching the fights when we came in, but he quickly lay down on the tatami mats and rested his head on a muay Thai pad and covered his eyes with a rag, trying to get some rest. We all sat quietly and watched the fights, which became the constant background for the rest of the night, a TV going in every room and hallway.
Eventually, Rodrigo got up and started walking around, shaking out and rolling his shoulders for a few minutes in front of the mirror, then sitting back down. This is always the bad time, I think, the building slide of events. I was desperately glad it wasn’t me—I could just relax and enjoy the show—but at the same time I was envious of that pure excitement Rodrigo was living in.
He would stand and blow out his nostrils, exhaling hard to clear them, and slap his legs and arms a little, and power stretch, bouncing. There was tension in everyone except Anderson. Anderson was calm, resigned, and depressed, but okay—he was still a pro. He was lost in his own world, in an endless replay of what had gone wrong, the grief of losing beginning to set in.
The Rulon Gardner fight started with the national anthems for both parties, full of unbridled nationalism, flags and gold medals on all the TV screens. Watching the fight was a little like watching a bullfight; there was a sense of the restrictions of both parties. The two Olympic ground fighters stood and struck because they were unwilling or unable to go to the ground, which made for a very awkward stand-up fight. Even a mediocre heavyweight boxer would have destroyed either of those guys; but if either of them had been fighting a straight boxer, they would have had him on his back in about two seconds and torn him to shreds. It was because they both were so good on the ground that they were forced into a standing fight, which was the weak spot for both of them; it just favored Rulon a little more than Yoshida.
It was interesting to watch Rulon learn as the fight went on—he realized what was happening, what he could and couldn’t do. He relaxed, his confidence grew, his face got shinier with understanding. He had a straight hard jab that worked well on the smaller man. He won a decision by essentially taking Yoshida out of his game, and although it was in no way a demonstration of wrestling versus judo, Rulon did win the fight. It was a little slow, like watching soccer players play basketball.
The next fight was Pulver-Gomi, and it was a stand-up war, to my surprise; Gomi, looking much bigger, knocked Jens out in the second round. I had had no idea that Gomi could do something like that. I was flabbergasted, but Jens, true to his word, went down swinging.
The night progressed, slowly, ineluctably, and Rod got dressed. He got taped and they were putting his gloves on and no one had inspected the tape, and I was thinking to myself, Jesus, no one looks at the tape? Are you kidding me? You could turn your fists into casts, you could even add weight—but then two slim young Japanese employees in clean white polo shirts came in and pulled the gloves off and inspected the tape and signed it, so that was okay. In the room, just before we left, we all huddled tightly together, our arms around one another, and prayed “Our Father” in Portuguese.
Then it was time to get moving. Events were pulling us along now willy-nilly, a race for the end of the night, the approach of the new year, and the smiling, rotund, rubicon face of Fedor was waiting for us.
Energy was flowing and crackling off Rodrigo, and he would stop every few minutes and blast through a few hard combinations with Dórea. He was separate from us, the one going into the ring, isolated and alone, the guy he had the most in common with that night across the arena somewhere, preparing himself to step into the same ring. In the first dressing room, Rodrigo knelt in a deep prayer for a few long minutes, and Zé held the door closed with his foot.
As we ke