Fighter's Mind, A by Sam Sheridan Page A

you. But you can improve your game, take it further and jump to the next level.”
    He’d smile at me with tired eyes over his food late at night, or over lunch, and answer the phone and talk to his nanny. He was juggling a gym full of egos, running a business, and caring for a sick infant daughter, and he was wearing a little thin around the edges. But his enthusiasm never flagged, not for a moment.
    Liborio told me stories of when he started jiu-jitsu, back in the early 1980s, when he was fifteen. He was a part of the formative years of the sport, when all the icons of today were young and just finding the gym: Murilo Bustamente was a purple belt, Wallid Ismail, Bebel, Zé Mario Sperry, Amáury Bitteti was just a kid. Liborio was incredulous when he said, “Everybody was so young at the time.”
    “I had a gift for it, I liked it and I got my blue belt in two months. As I progressed I quickly started teaching, too, and I realized that not everything I do is best for my students. The game varies body to body, and you got to understand that.”
    Liborio spoke about Carlson Gracie and his MMA team, probably the most important MMA team of all time. Carlson passed away in 2006, but I had met him in Rio and even gone to cockfights with him. Scotty Nelson, owner of OntheMat.com and a lifelong jiu-jitsu enthusiast, had allowed me tag along when he went to private parties with Carlson. “Carlson really was the original fighter who adapted jiu-jitsu for MMA. He had his power game, and he’s said many times ‘never train jiu-jitsu that doesn’t work no- gi, make sure it works both ways,’” Scotty said. This is something that Marcelo also does, as when he tore through his first Abu Dhabi he’d been training mostly gi .
    Scotty, Carlson, and I had been watching a UFC (with a whole family of old-time jiu-jitsu players around us) and Carlson was critical of Pe De Pano’s game, because he was doing things that were gi- related, in the UFC, and getting stuffed, while BJ Penn’s game was working beautifully. Carlson felt strongly that training instincts to work only in a sport setting was a mistake; you had to train all the time for the fight, for self-defense. Carlson’s legendary team had split up long ago, scattered to the winds, and Liborio was part of that diaspora.
     
    Liborio talks about the cultural differences. In Brazil, there is a lot of training but less instruction. What he means by “training” is synonymous with “rolling” or “sparring,” when the guys just roll hard with each other, looking for a submission. This is a huge part of learning jiu-jitsu, developing those instincts through struggle. Training against real resistance is essential to learning about the intensity and pace of a real fight. This idea, called randori in traditional Japanese martial arts and promulgated by Jigoro Kano (the founder of modern judo), is the beating heart of jiu-jitsu. You need to develop a feel for what a fight is like, the intensity of the moves, how desperation fuels the struggle.
    For the same reasons it is beneficial, just rolling can be limiting; sometimes you end up in survival mode, doing the same things over and over, sticking to your few bread-and-butter techniques. This trap can be even worse with the pro fighters, who often think they’ve had enough instruction and just want to train. Jiu-jitsu players, probably because of the Brazilian-to-English transition, use “train” like boxers use the word “work”—they use it for everything.
    Liborio makes sure that his pro fighters get instruction as well as training every day. “For the good guys, the black belts, it’s just as important—they need the resources.”
    We talked at length about “Minotauro,” Rodrigo Nogueira, the Brazilian Top Team fighter with whom I’d gone to Japan for the Pride Fighting Championship four years ago. Rodrigo had just captured the UFC interim heavyweight belt from Tim Sylvia and was the first fighter ever to have had