Fighter's Mind, A by Sam Sheridan

best game in the world, but his days of competing are long behind him. Now he’s the spark plug and linchpin for ATT.
    I’d met Liborio briefly in Brazil. He’d understood what I was doing instantly (more so than most of the Brazilians), and he gave me his number and invited me down to ATT. He’s an extremely pleasant and warm guy. He’d be the perfect foil to my understanding of high-level jiu-jitsu and Marcelo.
     
    I flew into Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and rented a car. ATT was in Coconut Creek, a little north of Lauderdale, lost down into the flatlands. I drove through the press of humidity, the flat swelter of the tropics, and the sense of some vast inland mangrove swamp somewhere outside the strip malls. You can’t see much landscape in this part of Florida, it’s so flat; there’s not much except the stormy clouds, epic and tortured mother-of-pearl cumulus over a blazing pastel blue and red sky.
    When I walked into American Top Team a vast, cavernous twenty-thousand-square-foot MMA dream gym, the first person I met was “Chainsaw” Charles McCarthy.
    Charles was a fighter who’d been on the Spike TV reality show The Ultimate Fighter (a guarantee of some celebrity) and who fought in the UFC. He was a friend of Mike C, and he had liked my first book, which was cool. If Mike C vouched for him I knew he must be okay and Charles felt the same way about me.
    Charles is a square-jawed, black-haired young guy who seems a little short to fight at 185 but he actually has a big cut to get there—he’s a very dense dude, a brown belt in jiu-jitsu and a smooth ground fighter.
    Jiu-jitsu players don’t get belts for free. You have to earn them in a very strict sense and be able to do a lot of things to advance, including compete. A black belt may take ten years of study.
    And who you get your belt from matters—lineage is very important in jiu-jitsu. So teachers are stingy, especially with black belts, because they will be judged by the caliber of their students. A brown belt is a very high level of jiu-jitsu. Charles runs his own school and manages fighters, already at twenty-eight on the backside of things, thinking more about the future.
    I told him about the new book and what I was here to do. I asked him to describe Liborio’s game to me. He chuckled. “Rolling with Liborio? You just get flattened. He’s so strong, he’s unstoppable. It’s a methodical flattening. You know it’s coming but you can’t stop it, because he’s more technical and much stronger than you.” He laughed again, “It’s like being pancaked by a steamroller. The pavement thinks it’s pretty tough, but as soon as the steamroller comes through it gets flattened. It’s like rolling with your dad when you’re eight years old. He’s a total nightmare, and he’s not even going full speed. It must be kind of awful to be Liborio, because no one can compete with him.” Charles grew wistful. “It has to lose a little something, it has to get pretty boring.”
     
    Ricardo Liborio is a burly, powerful man, with no neck and massive rounded shoulders, the classic build for jiu-jitsu. With a distinguished full head of gray hair and a cherubic face with bright eyes, Liborio is always smiling. He’s gleefully welcoming, almost childlike, and he grabs me with a firm hug.
    Over the next week we repeatedly went out to lunch or dinner, and he had no qualms about meeting me every day and chatting for hours, even though the demands on his time were immense.
    He is sure of his “recipe,” his method of building an MMA team. “You have to be open-minded,” he said, “and understand that everybody is different. But there is a recipe, at the same time. You gotta train hard, bring the right people in and do what it takes to move to the next level. It’s about understanding the game. You can get your ass kicked in one fight, and maybe he’s better or maybe it’s just his day, he’s got the right game on the right day, and he matches up with