Fighter's Mind, A (30 page)

When the fight began, Renzo was having some success early on. He even took Eugenio’s back a few times but couldn’t keep him down. Renzo started to look for a little ground-and-pound, as he couldn’t get any submissions going.

“I took him down, and every time I put my head against the fence—to keep him pinned down—they kick me through the fence. Someone cut me with a knife or maybe some keys through the fence, not deep but it was a mess.” Renzo was bleeding from his shoulder.

The
luta livre
guys were swarming outside the cage following the action, scuffling with the cameramen and ringside officials. Whenever Renzo and Eugenio got close to the edge, the sides of the cage pulsed with screams and insults.

“I started seeing the guys outside the cage doing it. One time, when the ref separates us, I see one of them hanging with his body half inside the cage, talking shit. So I’m looking at Eugenio and I move a little and get close, and then I land a straight shot right to the middle of the forehead of the guy outside the cage. He fell down and my brother kicked him in the face. So then the riot starts.”

Renzo laughs.

“It was such a mess. The lights ended up falling into the ring, I started to feel this intense heat, and I looked up to see the big lights have fallen into the cage, and people are screaming to turn the lights off because it’s gonna set the place on fire. As the lights go out they pull out guns, they’re shooting all over the place.” Renzo is bored with this story, “it was a big mess.”

Then, two weeks later, Renzo flew to Japan to fight Akira Shoji in the inaugural Pride show. “I was still purple with bruises and cuts.” It ended as a draw, this being the early days of Pride without clear scoring.

 

I asked Renzo if these were his toughest fights. He declined to answer, in a completely sincere way. I could feel what he was thinking: fights that are in the past aren’t tough anymore. Who cares about those fights?

“Always I think the toughest one is the next one . . . every fight is tough, a surprise box! You never know what’s gonna happen. Victory is certain, and then you have your arm broken with seventeen seconds left! Like the Sakuraba fight! I was thinking that fight was mine, all I need to do is manage the time, and then I lost.”

Renzo fought an epic battle with Kazushi Sakuraba, who was a Japanese fighter and one of the all-time greats. Sakuraba was a natural 185-pounder and much bigger than Renzo and they had one of the standout, fantastic MMA fights in history. The fight ended with Renzo’s arm horrifically dislocated in a kimura, but with Renzo staring calmly, not tapping, hoping to continue.

“And there are fights when everything seemed lost, and I won. The toughest is always the next, because the other ones fade in my memory. I have to watch tapes because I can’t believe I did this, it’s so funny! Even my record, I have to check to see who I beat . . . but the ones I
lost,
those I always remember. I know exactly what happened, that’s the difference.

“With my students, I always tell them that the loss is where you can get better. Once you make a mistake in a fight or a competition, you
never do that again
. It’s burned in your brain. See those mistakes and cover those holes. That’s why you learn more when you lose than when you win. When you win you forget.

“What is a champion but a guy that didn’t quit? I always try to tell them there’s nothing better than a day after another. Life is a continuous experience. You only fail by not learning.

“For jiu-jitsu, the smarter you are, the better you understand the leverage and positions and the
middle
. For instance, my head instructor is John Danaher, and he was a philosophy teacher at Columbia. He’s a smart guy.”

Danaher, or “New Zealand John” as he’s sometimes referred to (being a Kiwi), is the head professor at Renzo’s academy. He has a PhD in philosophy from Columbia and did in fact teach there. Renzo said, “He was one of my first students here, and I was able to bring him out of everything he believed in and get him into jiu-jitsu. It was one of the best things I have ever done.”

I had heard about John, that he was the real genius at Renzo’s—a master of jiu-jitsu, an innovator who never competed, a guy who was quietly changing the game with his private lessons. George St. Pierre and other notables took private lessons with him. Real guys knew what was up—Danaher was an open secret. Renzo said that even now, when he had questions about a move, he’d go talk to John first. Jiu-jitsu is a dialogue.

New Zealand John is a fine-featured man with a pale, narrow face, longish hair, a bald spot like a tonsure, and a muscular build. He has a deformed knee, a result of a childhood surgery gone wrong. He’s so quiet and soft-spoken I practically had to put my ear to his mouth to hear what he was saying, sitting next to him on the mat. He’s articulate in his murmuring Kiwi accent, and you don’t want to miss a word he says.

John had come to the United States at twenty-four years old and gone to Columbia for his graduate degree. To supplement his income he’d worked as a bouncer—he’d been a gym rat and studied muay Thai in New Zealand, although his bum leg had limited his style to the clinch. He’d come to be Renzo’s student the usual way, by word of mouth. He hadn’t been a natural, or taken strongly to jiu-jitsu; with a wry smile John said, “I had an undistinguished entry into the sport.” But when two of Renzo’s top instructors left to form their own schools, he was asked to step up and teach. At that point he began to take it seriously and it took over his life.

When I asked him about his take on the mental game in jiu-jitsu, he turned professorial.

“The two most misused words in the English language are ‘mental’ and ‘spiritual.’ You hear people use the words so sloppily, with such an ill-defined manner, it’s unclear what you mean.”

John had studied and taught epistemology, questions about the nature of knowledge. He was concerned with semantics, specifically “knowledge” as opposed to “belief.” He wasn’t going to let me skate on some vague questions.

I sweated and babbled and eventually John took pity on me and helped me out.

“I see two things that fighters deal with, two emotions that create weakness—fear and anger. And for the first, it’s not fear of injury. The idea of failing in front of a great crowd is massively harmful to us, as such social creatures.” I recalled how David Horton would tell everyone he knew that he was going to run the Appalachian Trail, or Pacific Crest Trail, because that added social pressure helped him continue.

“Anger just makes people inefficient. Their breathing gets shallow, they’re too muscularly tense—they gas faster. Part of what I admire in a fighter like Marcelo Garcia is his ability to control his anger and stay focused. He often gets abused physically. He’s a smaller guy in the open weight competitions, but you never see him distracted. He’s like a laser, focused on finishing. He has one physical, cold goal in mind and nothing distracts him. The abuse is irrelevant.

“Anger can take you away from your goal. You can get caught up in a desire for revenge, which distracts you. Experienced fighters will create this in opponents.”

To John, what sets the top guys apart is the idea of “relaxed poise.”

“The single definitive feature of the überathlete is a sense of effortlessness in a world where most men grunt and strive and scream. It comes easy to the best, and what creates that? I think it’s a sense of play. No fear or anxiety about their performance. Like when the first time you ever drove a car, you came out sweating and exhausted. Now when you drive a car it’s effortless and smooth. Fear and anger are motor inhibitors.”

Danaher reflects on his teacher. “Renzo has no fear of fights. He doesn’t see them as serious events. He can’t get mounted and pounded out. He may lose but he won’t get smashed—there goes the gravity of the situation for him.”

When I ask Renzo about Danaher, he gushes.

“He’s completely unconventional, unpredictable, but he does jiu-jitsu the way I learned it: nothing matters but finishing. Position is just a way to get to the finish. His mind is good, and one of the most important things to teach is your own mind. If I just show you ten moves, you’ll never do them like I do them. But if I show you why I get there, and how I think, then it’s better for you.
And
almost more important, if I teach it the right way, then I have it pure in
my
mind.”

Renzo fell silent, ruminating on that.

“The most important part of jiu-jitsu is the
middle of the way
. It’s the path between one position and another—the transition—that makes the difference between a mediocre fighter and an unbelievable fighter. A bruiser, a guy who is just headbanging and pushing his way through, it stops when he meets someone stronger, and for every ten victories he’ll have ten defeats. But when you have an understanding of the middle of the way, the ability to
think
and to see, your situation will get better.”

I was instantly reminded of Marcelo Garcia, and what everyone always said about him—he was a master of the transition; he
lived
in the middle of the way. Renzo liked Marcelo’s game because he’s trying to finish all the time. “The beauty of Marcelo is that he developed such good defense, being the little guy at the academy, that he brushes off all finishing attempts on him, he’s so efficient and focused on the finish. It’s pure jiu-jitsu.

“I realize now that my jiu-jitsu is much simpler than when I was a purple belt. When I was a purple belt I tried the most amazing moves—I ran a marathon to get five miles away. Now, everything is much clearer, you don’t waste time or strength, you just go straight to the point. I used to see this on Rickson a lot—his jiu-jitsu is very simple, he just goes straight for the finish. Even though everyone knows what he’s trying to do nobody could stop him. He’s very simple, with direct moves and objectives. He’ll go
right there
and get you
right there
. Even though you knew what was happening, his precision and his tightness were so good that you couldn’t stop him. The better you get the simpler everything gets.

“I always knew that nobody could control the situation better than I could, so that made me extremely confident. And nobody can make me give up. I remember a fifty-one-minute fight in Japan, the guy outweighed me by thirty kilos, and I thought,
I’m gonna be here all night. If I can’t finish him, we’ll be here tomorrow morning
. Because I don’t give a fuck, I’m not giving up. I’m going to see how he’s gonna make me quit. It’s impossible.” The words are ordinary, but when Renzo says them they are moving, because he lives and dies with them.

“I think the jiu-jitsu mentality gives you that. From a young age we go—we believe that if we go until one of us quits it’s never gonna be me!” He’s almost shouting at me.

“I never could see myself being beaten. I could never ask for water, never ask for the bill.” He laughs, “I could never be the one. If he’s tired let him ask for the check.” I remember Sean Williams, one of Renzo’s students, who I studied under in L.A., telling a story about Renzo playing a video game. It was a game that Renzo had never played before, but he had it set at the hardest level. “That’s when he was having the most fun,” said Sean.

Renzo continues quietly. “The mentality is from my grandfather, my father, but really it’s the jiu-jitsu mentality, and probably goes back to Maeda, his master. It’s the soul of jiu-jitsu. Like that famous picture of a little cat looking in the mirror but he sees a lion on the other side.”

Renzo sees the lion, believes it, makes it true.

A quote used in my first book would often drift into my mind, wonderfully eloquent. “
These are forces played out on the physical stage—the raised white canvas is a blank and basic
platea—
which makes it possible to see great fighters as great artists, however terrible their symbolic systems. It may be, and perhaps should be, difficult to accept the notion that a prizefighter’s work merits the same kind of attention we lavish on an artist’s, but once we begin attending to and describing what he does in the ring, it becomes increasingly difficult to refuse the expenditure. The fighter creates a style in a world of risk and opportunity. His disciplined body assumes the essential postures of the mind: aggressive and defensive, elusively graceful with it’s shifts of direction, or struggling with all its stylistic resources against a resistant but, until the very end, alterable reality. A great fighter redefines the possible.
”

It’s from an essay by Ronald Levao, in a book called
Reading the Fights
. I have always found the lines to be uniquely moving, and they seem particularly relevant to this project. I think we can and should consider great fighters as artists. We do, to belabor an obvious point, call it “martial
arts
.”

Here we come to a fundamental question: is it interesting to talk to artists about how they think about art? Is there anything to be learned?

I have some unfortunate history with this question. I was an art major at Harvard, and I had a somewhat adversarial relationship with the department. The central dissension (I thought) I had with my professors was about language and art. Simply put, I felt that art is visual and language is not, and so talking about art is something of a waste of time. Certainly talking about how artists think wasn’t important; what matters is their work. I didn’t care about the history of a painter, or what tradition he’s refuting with subtle accuracy. Does his painting, does the picture on the wall, knock my socks off? If so, great. If not, who cares what he intended?

Well, I was an arrogant, callow youth, for now I find myself doing just that: discussing artists and how they think. Strangely, upon revisiting, I found that one of those same professors agreed with me the whole time. Maybe I was just a bad painter.

 

I tracked down Peter Schjeldahl, an art critic who had served a brief stint as my professor. Schjeldahl has written for the
New Yorker, ARTnews,
and the
New York Times
; his criticism has won awards. He’d been around the art scene in New York since the 1960s and known Andy Warhol and everybody else. David Salle, a painter, said of Peter, “He has a formidable ability to cast into lively prose the paradoxes and conundrums of looking at art. And his biggest influence was Red Smith,” one of the great sportswriters of all time.