by Doug Merlino
“I’m sorry,” he said, giving a sheepish smile. She stormed away.
Monson went into his small dressing room. Gavoni taped his hands, and the two warmed up.
(Doug Merlino)
Monson was so late there was not the usual pre-fight waiting around. We moved to the entrance of the arena. Monson emerged to an old song by a Russian rock group lamenting the invasion of Afghanistan. Ten thousand people rose to their feet. He took off his shirt. The new tattoo glimmered on his back.
Aleksander came next. They touched gloves in the center of the ring—in Russia and Japan, mixed martial arts fights take place in rings, not cages—and waited for the bell.
Monson started by diving for a takedown. Aleksander stepped back to avoid it. They circled. Aleksander, with several inches of height and reach advantage, jabbed Monson in the face.
Monson lunged, throwing the left hook he had practiced with Gavoni. It came up short and Monson, carried by his own momentum, toppled to the mat.
He rolled over to his back to defend himself. Aleksander, with no desire to grapple, motioned him to get up.
Monson fought with no sign of anger or animating rage. He pressed forward like a man making his way through a storm, bowing his head and taking the punishment he needed in order to get home.
Aleksander peppered his face with jabs. Monson’s nose started to bleed. He again dived in vain at Emelianenko’s legs.
“Move forward, cut him off!” Gavoni yelled.
Aleksander connected with a left jab and a straight right. Monson used the opening to get inside, grab the Russian, and pull him to the ground.
He flipped Aleksander so that he gained top position and began to work his body around the Russian to position for his signature North-South choke. The bell sounded before he could get it.
Monson returned to his corner. Gavoni knelt in front of him. “You’re waiting,” he said. “You’ve got to penetrate and back him up, alright?”
The second round started with Aleksander landing a hard right to Monson’s face.
“You can’t back up!” Gavoni yelled. “Hands up and back him up, Jeff! Hands up! He’s going to hit you with the jab!”
Emelianenko attempted a left leg kick. Monson grabbed his leg and dragged the Russian back down to the mat. Aleksander, clearly out of shape, was heaving for breath. He struggled to gain his feet, but Monson held him fast.
Everyone knew what was coming next. Again, Monson worked his body around so he was perpendicular to the Russian, his head on Aleksander’s chest. He draped his arm over the Russian’s neck and pressed down, cutting off his supply of oxygen. The Russian tapped out.
Monson rolled off, settled on his knees, and held his hands above his head. He climbed to his feet and staggered to his corner.
He was flying out in a few hours, headed to Krakow, Poland, to compete in the world grappling championships.
From there, he was heading to Korea for an MMA fight the next weekend.
The week after that, he was due to fight in Novi Sad, Serbia.
Part Four
Roots
Participants in these events are frightening, but less so than the paying customers. They include slack-jawed children whose parents must be cretins, and raving adults whose ferocity away from the arena probably does not rise above muttering epithets at meter maids.
—Syndicated columnist George Will on the UFC, 1995
Ricardo Liborio
(Beowulf Sheehan)
An Uncanny Eastern Rite
On March 30, 1913, several hundred people gathered on the roof of the old Madison Square Garden at Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street in New York City to watch a purported grudge match between Johannes Josefsson, a wrestler from Iceland, and a Japanese jiu jitsu master known only as Otagawa. Both were performers in the Barnum & Bailey Circus, then appearing in the arena under their feet.
Dandies in silk top hats, ex-pat Japanese, reporters, and members of the circus freak show mingled as they awaited the action. Josefsson was burly, blond, and a master of glima, a Scandinavian wrestling style said to have been developed by the Vikings. He had wrestled in the 1908 London Olympics, where he’d taken fourth in the middleweight division. Otagawa was short and thick, his long hair gathered up in a topknot.
The circus promoted the event by claiming that each of the men burned to prove that his style of combat was superior. It was also free publicity.
Otagawa insisted they wrestle in jiu jitsu jackets and belts; Josefsson suggested they fight first with jackets, and then bare chested. The two engaged in what was reported as “fine tussling,” during which Josefsson threw his Japanese opponent twice. The Icelander took a break to attend to his two-year-old daughter, Hekla, who was crying. Upon his return, he insisted Otagawa remove his jacket. The Japanese refused, and Josefsson claimed victory.
At the time, there was great curiosity about which style of martial arts was superior. Beginning in the 1870s, catch wrestling, which allowed the use of submission holds—the origin of the term was “catch as catch can”—became popular in America and Europe. Wrestlers traveled with carnivals, taking on challengers from the audience who tried to earn a cash prize by pinning or submitting them. It created a market for men such as Otagawa and Josefsson, who toured the world on a circuit that included competitors from places ranging from India to Japan to Ireland to Bulgaria, using various fighting styles deriving from their name countries.
The most influential of these was jujutsu, a collection of hand-to-hand combat techniques developed in Japan by the samurai over hundreds of years.
In 1877, a university student in Tokyo, Jigoro Kano, started jujutsu lessons. He took what he learned and codified it into a system he called judo. In 1882, he opened his own school, the Kodokan. Kano, who had studied education, believed judo should serve a higher purpose than simply teaching people to win fights. He saw it as a way of life that could lead to improved health, morality, and discipline.
As the school grew, Kano’s students traveled overseas to spread the art. In the United States, jiu jitsu, as it came to be commonly spelled (the term, at the time, was used interchangeably with judo) was something of an early 1900s version of yoga, an exotic physical practice from the Far East that offered mastery over the body and spirit. Jiu jitsu training was credited with giving Japanese soldiers superhuman marching endurance and was presented as part of a healthy lifestyle that included deep-breathing exercises and a diet of rice, vegetables, and fish. A 1905 article in the New York Times described it as “an uncanny Eastern rite” that enabled “little people” to defeat larger opponents by a “cunning” knowledge of “human weak spots.”
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt hired one of Kano’s students as his private teacher. Roosevelt—who also trained in boxing and wrestling while in the White House, making him the first and only U.S. president with an MMA skillset—went at it hard. “My right ankle and left wrist and one thumb and both great toes are swollen sufficiently to more or less impair their usefulness,” he wrote of his training in a letter, “and I am well mottled with bruises elsewhere.”
Mitsuyo Maeda, another Kodokan student, arrived in the United States the same year at the age of twenty-six. A soft-spoken man who stood five foot six and weighted just 150 pounds, he would become the spiritual grandfather of MMA.
Maeda taught jiu jitsu in New York City and gave demonstrations at places such as West Point and Princeton, but he earned most of his money by accepting “challenge” matches on the catch wrestling circuit. He soon took to the road, barnstorming though the American South before moving on to Cuba, England, Belgium, Spain, Mexico, and Central America, earning the nickname the “Count of Combat” along the way.
Maeda arrived in Brazil in 1914, where he toured the country as part of the “Four Kings,” a group of Japanese jiu jitsu experts that gave exhibitions and then accepted challenges from any boxers, capoeira fighters, or wrestlers in the crowd. In 1917, Maeda performed in Belém, Brazil, a northern city
enjoying an economic boom from rubber production. The audience included fourteen-year-old Carlos Gracie, the son of a local businessman. Carlos, the descendant of Scottish immigrants to Brazil, decided he wanted to learn jiu jitsu and convinced his father to hire Maeda as a private instructor.
Jiu jitsu included both standing and ground techniques, though it seems Maeda instructed Carlos in mainly the latter. It’s unclear how long the lessons lasted, though they were over by 1921, when the Gracie family moved to Rio de Janeiro. By then, Carlos had started to teach his four younger brothers what he’d learned. In 1925, he opened his own jiu jitsu school in Rio.
While Carlos Gracie was robust, his younger brother Helio was small and sickly. For a time, Helio watched as his brothers practiced. When Helio finally joined in, he shocked his brothers, defeating them with adaptations he’d invented to overcome his size and strength disadvantage. These—along with the fact that the jiu jitsu developed by the Gracies focused primarily on ground, not standing, technique—became the core differences between the “Brazilian” style of jiu jitsu the Gracies practiced and its Japanese ancestor. In the following decades, they diverged even further as judo became an international sport and rules changes resulted in it being practiced primarily on the feet.
In Brazil, the Gracies expanded their jiu jitsu academies. To prove the worth of their art, they continued Maeda’s practice of fighting challenge matches, with the physically unimposing Helio Gracie taking any and all comers: Part of the pitch was that Gracie Jiu Jitsu allowed smaller men to take on and defeat much larger foes. Jiu jitsu also became popularized through its use in vale tudo—literally “anything goes”—fights, held at fairgrounds in which fighters competed for cash using any techniques they wished until one participant quit, was submitted, or was knocked out.
Helio Gracie lost only two fights in his career. In 1951, he took on Masahiko Kimura, a Japanese judo master, in a Rio stadium front of twenty thousand people, including the president of Brazil. Thirteen minutes into the match Kimura caught Gracie in an arm lock. Gracie refused to submit; Kimura snapped his limb. Helio’s brother, Carlos, threw in the towel. (In honor of the Japanese fighter, the hold was thenceforth named the Kimura.)
In 1955, Helio faced Valdemar Santana, who had been his top student before the pair had a falling out; after nearly four hours, Santana defeated his mentor by knocking him out with a kick to the head.
To restore the family honor, the Gracies called on Carlos’s son, the twenty-three-year-old Carlson, to take on Santana. Their first fight was a draw; in the rematch, fought before forty thousand people, Carlson dominated Santana, forcing his corner to throw in the towel. The fights made a national celebrity out of Carlson, who in coming years would tack away from the rest of the Gracie clan in the ways he chose to promote the family art, which Carlson believed had to evolve if it was to remain competitive.
He was developing a style based on his athleticism, speed, and aggressiveness—he’d even walked the beaches of Rio and taken on challengers in fights with the idea that he could learn new techniques from his opponents. His Uncle Helio stressed that the art should stay with the techniques he had originally developed. Even more alarming to the family, Carlson had shown himself willing to teach outsiders all aspects of the family jiu jitsu instead of just core moves.
The seeds of American Top Team were sown at Carlson’s gym in Rio’s Copacabana neighborhood. Conan Silveira, later to be a cofounder, started there in the early 1980s and took Carlson as his mentor. As a teenager, Marcos da Matta, who now coaches jiu jitsu at ATT, played soccer on the beach nearly every day after school. Carlson, always looking for talent, complimented Da Matta for his athleticism and encouraged him to try jiu jitsu. Once he started, he never stopped.
Carlson’s star student, however, was Ricardo Liborio, born in Rio in the summer of 1967. His father loved sports and started his son in judo at age four and swimming soon after; Liborio won his first judo competition at five and a state swimming championship at six. In the coming years, he also took up wrestling, surfing, tae kwon do, and boxing.
At fourteen, Liborio was of average height but thickset, with an innate sense of balance and leverage. His girlfriend’s father, a black belt in jiu jitsu, encouraged Liborio to give it a try.
He only needed one visit to Carlson Gracie’s gym. From the first time he rolled on the mats, it felt as if jiu jitsu had been made for him—for his body, his temperament, his intellect. Within two months, Liborio won a tournament. It would be several years before he would suffer a loss.
. . .
Jiu jitsu was still a niche sport in Brazil in the 1980s, the domain mainly of the wealthier classes. Not only was membership in a gym expensive, but every student needed to buy a gi, the combination of jacket and pants, which was out of the question for many of the country’s poor. A competitor style, luta livre—which translates as “free fighting”—had been created by a Brazilian named Euclydes “Tatu” Hatem, and it combined catch wrestling with some judo moves he’d picked up. He eschewed the gi.
Hatem began his own school and developed luta livre over the decades. The styles were similar, but because practitioners could not grab an opponent’s gi for control, luta livre relied more on strength and attack rather than on Helio Gracie’s gradations of leverage. Luta livre stalwarts scoffed that no one wore a gi in a real fight; jiu jitsu adherents charged that most people did not take off their shirts to brawl.
In the early 1980s, the rivalry spilled into the streets, the nightclubs, and the beach, where luta livre and jiu jitsu partisans battled when they ran into each other. In the most famous fight, in 1988, Rickson Gracie, Helio’s son and Carlson’s cousin, battled luta livre fighter Hugo Duarte on the beach. It ended with Gracie astride Duarte, pummeling him. The Gracie camp filmed the fight and later included part of it in videos sold to promote jiu jitsu. Luta livre devotees claimed it had been edited to show only the parts where Gracie was in control.
The conflict between the camps became so nasty that they finally agreed to settle it by meeting in a televised showdown in 1991, pitting three of the best fighters from each camp against each other in vale tudo fights. The jiu jitsu practitioners, who included two trained by Carlson Gracie, swept the contest. Luta livre never recovered.
. . .
By the early 1990s, Liborio had his life down to a nice routine: He’d finished university and he was living in an apartment in Copacabana, training with Carlson Gracie, and working at the Bank of Brazil. He didn’t like the banking job, but it was safe and paid well. In 1995, he convinced the bank to give him a couple months off to train for the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu world championships. In exchange, he’d wear the bank’s logo on his gi during the competition.
The event was held in Rio, and Liborio, though of average size, competed in the super-heavyweight division, facing off for the title against Remco Pardoel, a six-foot-five, 290-pound Dutchman. Liborio submitted him in four minutes. The publicity from the victory, which was televised and covered in newspapers across Brazil, elated Liborio’s bosses. He cut a deal with them to become a roving ambassador, giving jiu jitsu demonstrations at high schools while promoting a prepaid debit card the bank was marketing at students and their parents.
But after a management change, Liborio was ordered back to his desk. He agonized over what to do. He was scared to leave, but the thought of returning made him sick. Finally, a friend asked him what he was worried about. “There are billions of people in the world that live their lives without working in a bank,” he said. “Why do you think you’re going to be a failure if you leave?”
Liborio quit and started coaching with Carlson Gracie. At the same time—eighty years after Johannes Josefsson had faced Otagawa on the roof of Madison Square Garden—jiu jitsu was finally becoming a worldwide phenomenon.
There Are No Rules
In 1978, Helio Gracie’s twenty-six-year-old son, Rorion, moved to Los Angeles. He’d graduated from university in Brazil with a law degree, but what he rea
lly wanted to do was bring his father’s style of jiu jitsu to the United States. In Brazil, he felt, there was no way he could ever step out of his father’s shadow, but America was wide open. Though American men were physically bigger and stronger than their Brazilian counterparts, Rorion felt that the culture had gone soft and was crying for a dose of Gracie-style machismo.
He arrived in Los Angeles with two thousand dollars in his pocket and worked as a house cleaner. Tall, charming, and good-looking, he soon landed roles as a walk-on in movies and television shows such as Starsky & Hutch. He rented a house and spread mats in the garage, where he taught jiu jitsu, enticing people he met on Hollywood sets with offers of a free trial lesson. His younger brother Royce soon moved from Brazil to join him.
In the mid-1980s, Rorion met film director Richard Donner, showed him some jiu jitsu, and ended up choreographing the climactic fight between Mel Gibson and Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon, the first time Brazilian jiu jitsu techniques were seen in an American action movie. He gave lessons to Chuck Norris. He produced a documentary called Gracies in Action, a low-production-value film that told the family story.
Rorion Gracie, however, was hawking a product in a crowded marketplace. Bruce Lee had ignited the martial arts craze in the early 1970s, and American strip malls were littered with dojos offering kung fu, tae kwon do, judo, aikido, and karate. Each style had its particular techniques and students of each were encouraged to think of the martial art they practiced as superior.
Here, perhaps even more than in Brazil, which martial art was the most effective was a hot issue. Bruce Lee had explored the question himself, keeping notebooks in which he recorded his studies of kung fu, judo, jiu jitsu, and boxing. His aim was to synthesize the martial arts, honing the techniques that were valuable in each and discarding the rest, into a style he called Jeet Kun Do. He warned against “blind devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing routines or stunts that lead nowhere.”
