Fighter's Mind, A (24 page)

 

When I met Josh in New York he reminded me of Caravaggio’s painting of Dionysus. He’s a good-looking, normal guy, medium height and thick, with the jiu-jitsu body, rounded and grounded. He had an amiable face, broad nose, and thick curly black hair, like an Italian farmboy. He laughed easily, things amused him, and he was intensely curious about the world. He didn’t come across as an asshole—he was a relaxed dude with a friendly intensity.

We laughed and talked and had coffee, and he was very complimentary about my book, and I about his. We both meant it.

Through it all, though, you could feel him watching you with those soft brown eyes—he didn’t look like a chess genius, he looked like a Mediterranean peasant. But in his eyes you could feel it—suddenly it made sense, the serious intellect behind there watching you, evaluating you, and cataloging weakness and strength, patterns. Listening intently, watching carefully without self-consciousness. “Tell me,” he’d say intently about something, an MMA fighter I knew, some detail from the book, and I’d try and be precise. He was watching for later use, gathering information. Here’s a kid who’s been playing serious competitive chess since he was six—of course he’s watching you like that, that’s how he grew up. Not all the time, but flashes, here and there.

 

At the end of his chess career, Josh was sort of off-balance from the pressures of fame, combined with a chess instructor who tried to lead him down a path away from his natural inclinations. Josh also talks about his emotions. “Now I don’t block them, I use them . . . I was brittle, locked-up, and now I can channel what I need to. It’s liberating and far more resilient.” He’s an incredibly emotional, heart-on-his-sleeve guy, something he freely admits, and which fuels him and his writing. But he learned to use his emotions, let his opponents read him, and then apply tiny emotional changes to mislead. He learned to channel his emotions into useful pathways, to ride them, in control and with understanding. Part of that process was the intensive study of tai chi.

Josh is aware of how tai chi and push-hands aren’t taken very seriously in the United States. “It’s about ten percent real dudes and ninety percent people with mystical delusions. But that ninety percent gives the rest of it a bad name,” Josh said ruefully over sake and sushi. “At least six times I’ve had guys tell me they can’t spar me because their chi is so strong they’d kill me.”

He shakes his head and laughs. “They brainwash students. The better the student, the farther the master sends them flying with a bump of the wrist. I watched this one guy send his top students bouncing off the walls. He even knocked his prize student around without touching her, but when I asked to spar it was ‘I’m sorry, I’d kill you.’

“In Asia, there are real athletes training hard, like real martial artists. It’s so different.”

Toward the end of his tai chi career Josh became aware of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He studied jiu-jitsu in the
gi,
and he was a brown belt when I met him—he’d already come a long way. He was highly motivated, trained every day, and loved it. “A lot of guys would have come in and tried to jam tai chi ideas to jiu-jitsu right away,” he said. “I knew that would be a mistake. I was out in L.A. and I went to John Machado’s school. I had done all these push-hands competitions, so in the stand-up I could handle them, but on the ground I was getting tapped every ten seconds. John knew about me and about chess, too.”

Josh studied with John Machado in 2005, for nine months, twice a day, and then back in New York with Marcos Santos, eventually getting his brown belt from Marcos and Rigan Machado. I asked him about learning jiu-jitsu.

“The biggest error I see in any discipline is people taking on too much, too fast. Depth over breadth, man. I believe in diving deeply into a small pool of information. For instance when you learn a new move in jiu-jitsu. Learn something on one side of the body, learn it very deeply, then learn it on the other side when you’ve developed that deep feel.”

Josh is no superman, gifted with extraordinary speed and strength, but he’s no shrinking violet either. He’s not a skinny chess nerd with the glasses taped together; he’s an athlete. But he was also without illusion. He was aware that he had a big advantage in the psychological game, because that is such a major part of chess. He’d been evaluating and psyching out opponents his whole life.

It was clear that his true strengths are in his intensity and his focus on learning, his “art of learning.” From his books you come to understand his drive, his commitment to incredibly hard work. He put in the time. As a child playing chess, he put in the time studying endgames, mastering them, and it gave him the confidence to survive the killer openings that other children memorized. He puts in the time not only in chess but in tai chi and in jiu-jitsu. He blazes for his “ten thousand hours” with pure gameness. Sure, he’s gifted, but he’s immensely driven underneath his sunny exterior. There’s a subtle difference to, say, Gable’s intensity, which feels joyless, from a deep relentless place. Josh’s intensity is easier, colored with excitement. It’s playful. Of course, I’m not sitting across the board or rolling with him.

 

Josh had a funny story, well polished but useful, about observation. We had been talking about “tells,” when an opponent does something that subconsciously reveals his inner state. The classic use is in poker, when someone is bluffing and they always act a certain way, maybe tap their fingers; they have a tell. When you pick it up, then they try to trick you with it.

In chess, an opponent might lay a trap and hope you fall into it, pretending to have made a bad move. When Josh was a kid he remembers acting, slapping his head, but as he got older and his needs more subtle, just a change of breathing, a slightly tense expression, might suffice.

“Guys were very aware of their tells at the high level. So they’d use them to mislead you, but off the board they weren’t as aware. So I got good at reading people off the board.

“In Bermuda every year there was a two-week tournament where a dozen world-class chess players would live in this resort together and play chess all day. So everyone is walking on the beach, swimming, and studying each other. And some of these guys are truly brilliant people, but watch them get caught in the rain. There are these squalls that rip through Bermuda, and I would sit on a cliff and watch other players get caught in the rain. Some guys would stand there, breathe it in, and get wet. They’d look out at the ocean. Other guys would put their hands over their head and run desperately for cover. When you observe that kind of moment, when people are caught off guard, you can start to see how they are as humans and competitors.

“If they put their hands up and run, they’re controllers. So, over the chessboard, you take a critical moment and make it chaotic, out-of-control. Make it so they have to embrace the unknown to perform.

“But if they stand and just get wet and enjoy the rain, then maybe they embrace chaos—that was the kind of player I was. So for them you create a position where it takes painstaking, mind-numbing calculation to succeed.

“Of course you can’t always control the board to that extent, but often you can give them a choice, where the correct decision is to go a certain way and the incorrect decision is to go to their own style, and often they’ll take the disadvantage. They’ll shy away, and give you a slightly better position.”

It may sound odd to nonchessplayers to hear talk of the “correct decision” when chess seems so open and free-form. That is one of the big surprises about chess, when you start to study it—there is almost always a correct move, a “best” move. To the beginner the chessboard seems a vast, mysterious place where an infinite variety of things could happen. But as you learn more you start to see how the game plays, and where the best move is. At the very high level there is sometimes uncertainty between a few best moves. Most of the time there is a right decision, though, and one best move.

There is an interesting correlation with MMA, where I’ve observed “better” strikers getting outstruck by tough grapplers. The reason is slightly insidious. It’s not that the grappler had better striking; it’s that the striker was so terrified of the takedown, so concerned about being outclassed on the ground, that he constricts his striking game; the grappler, unconcerned with being taken down, can let it all hang out and swing for the fences.

Josh has refined these psychological manipulations in chess, has used them in tai chi, and is starting to apply them to jiu-jitsu. As you focus on the opponent, his emotions and yours come into play. Josh talks of “shared illusions.”

He remembers playing in the under-eighteen world chess championship tournament, in an important round against the Vietnamese national champ. They were deep in a very positional game when his opponent “hung a rook.” Basically, his opponent made a beginner’s blunder; he gave Josh a piece on an error. The error that was so weirdly obvious, so big, that it was almost impossible for Josh to see. When you read the game now, it’s simply mystifying. They were both embroiled in computations of this deep position, getting deeper and deeper, and missing the obvious, but feeding on each other. Josh sat there calculating for fifteen minutes and then moved, missing the blunder that would have handily won him the game. Eventually his opponent saw the mistake he’d made but Josh never did. “One of the U.S. coaches almost had a heart attack,” he confessed ruefully. “I ended up winning, but I could have taken his rook,” Josh muses. “It’s astonishing at that level.” He sighs.

Now although I am far, far below that level, I have been in similar situations in chess many times, where I am so focused and calculating I miss an obvious change that the opponent’s new move has created (or a position has gotten so complicated that I remove a base without realizing it’s supporting my whole house).

It’s not just that; it’s that
both
of us missed it, and we feel each other. I’ve made a move and sat there waiting and watching and suddenly realized I made a huge mistake. But if I don’t react, if I successfully conceal my emotions, sometimes he won’t see it either. But usually, just me noticing it, the change in tension, will give it away. Josh talked about shared illusions in jiu-jitsu—“once you beat somebody once, they sometimes get convinced that you’re just better than them, and now you’re tapping them every fifteen seconds, when in the beginning there was a real struggle.” You see it in MMA fights all the time—one fighter avoids the takedown a few times, and both fighters become convinced that the guy can’t be taken down.

 

Josh talks about variations on the psychic connection between two opponents. “You might prepare these openings, and have a thousand variations thought out, but there is one problem that is haunting you, one off-beat line you haven’t prepared. It’s a needle in a haystack so you play the opening hoping your opponent won’t find the hole—but he will if he’s a grandmaster. It’s like he smells it.” At the high levels, the minds connect.

It reminds me a little of my friend Javier Calderon, a filmmaker who is also a professional boxer. Javier has been a sparring partner in camps with some of the best fighters in the world, and he is a regular at the Wild Card Boxing Club. He recalls he was sparring a young kid, who was a better boxer, who moved well. But Javier was stalking him for three, four, five rounds, chasing him around the ring. Javier said, “Because he can’t hurt me, I’m stronger, and
he knows I know it,
or even
he knows I know he knows it
. . .” The level of connection went deep.

When Josh was competing in the push-hands in Taiwan, he ran into an opponent who could read his intentions so well that Josh was sure the guy could read his mind. No tricks could fool him. Here was an opponent whose skill was so great, and perception so powerful, that he was inside Josh’s head with him. But Josh beat this wizard—by turning that very sensitivity against him. He started to just
think
about feints, instead of feinting. He used his intentions to mislead.
You’re gonna read my mind? Okay, well, I’ll use that against you, I’ll think about the wrong thing
. Another man’s sword is your sword.

“People are usually too aware of tells. You’re looking for them but they know it, and they’re going to be illusory. They’ll be manipulating you with their own tells. So I plant ‘minipatterns’ on an opponent, in tai chi and jiu-jitsu. I give them dogma, a false construct. I convince them that A leads to B, A leads to B, and then suddenly when A doesn’t lead to B anymore they’re fucked. False assumptions.”

He laughed, but that was exactly what striking is often about. How do you open somebody up to a punch or a kick? You lull them with something else, convince them they’re out of range, or the jab is coming, and then you walk them into a head kick. How did George Foreman beat Michael Moorer? He gave Michael a false construct: you can stand there, I can’t hit that hard, my jab is pawing and weak, the right is nothing to fear. You can handle my punch.

“You have to control your side of the board before you start messing with his,” is a chess truism, meaning maintain control of your own emotions, tells, and psychology before you begin the head games. A bit like the poker saw, “If you can’t spot the sucker at the table in ten minutes then you’re the sucker.”

In his book, Josh talks about pondering Wu Yu-hsiang in a “typically abstract Chinese instructional conundrum”:

Josh had a hard time with that. How could you move first at his slightest move? But he eventually came to grips with it as being about “reading and ultimately controlling intention.” He programs reactions into an opponent, he convinces them of things, and then he sets them up for the knockout. It plays to his ideas of tension.

“My vision of martial arts, of fighting, is that it relates to dual currents, the psychological reality and the technical reality—the position as it actually is. Very often in chess you’ll have a moment when one person will have a superior position, but the other person has a greater clarity of mind. The one can transcend the other. The Gracies’ always talk about jiu-jitsu and using breathing, yours to control his. If you’re breathing slower, your clarity is better.