Fighter's Mind, A by Sam Sheridan Page B

both the UFC and Pride heavyweight belts. Liborio knew him well, had trained him for fights, and had interesting insight into Rodrigo.
    “He was born with some kind of slow nerves, man,” Liborio said with his Cheshire cat grin. “He doesn’t get frustrated when he gets beat up. Frustration can take your stamina, your appetite for winning. You get angry at yourself, not the guy beating you. Not Rodrigo. He often gets his ass kicked in the first round and most people would think, ‘What do I have to do different?’ but he just waits calmly for his chances. People say he starts slow, but he starts at the same speed he’s going to run all through the fight. He keeps going at the same level, and by the end he’s going faster than the other guy, who gets tired.”
    Liborio develops his point emphatically, jabbing at me with a thick finger. “You have to unnerstan’ you can lose. Somebody can beat your ass; but you can overcome, don’t get frustrated. You can’t be a quitter, you have to understand loss, that you can lose—it’s not your time, it’s not your day. Just because you lose doesn’t make you a loser. It’s not the same fight every time. One day the guy was so powerful, but maybe he’s not doing everything right and he gives you a chance to be better than him. But you can’t take it, for whatever reason. But next time? Be humble enough to understand it’s not the same fight every time. Most guys will give you a chance if you don’t gas out or emotionally break.”
    He paused and looked around and thought about how he was going to convince me of the importance of this idea.
    “Everyone is the same for the first two minutes, everyone has a chance to win, but after that you start to separate physically and technically.”
    He ponders the point, methodically. “You have to have the fire to develop, to find other ways to win. You can really change your game if you improve in certain ways. You have to keep working hard, withstand the presion, unnerstan’? The pressure. If you can resist it, and not get frustrated, you’ll step up eventually. One day you’ll just start beating other guys, some move you could never do, one day you’ll be able to do it.”
    Sean Williams, a Renzo Gracie black belt (you see the lineage qualifier? He’s not just a black belt, he’s a Renzo Gracie black belt; he trained extensively with the great man) who teaches in Hollywood, California, once told me a story of how when he was a purple belt he’d broken his jaw. It had forced him to the sidelines for two months. “As I was recovering I watched a lot of tape, and when I came back the other purple belts who’d been giving me problems were suddenly easy for me.” It seems to be the consensus—if you keep at it, one day you make a breakthrough.
    I asked Liborio what he thought of Marcelo’s game. The “game” in jiu-jitsu is someone’s style, and it’s a reflection of their environment, their teachers, their body type, and their personality. It’s as much an artistic expression as an athletic one.
    Marcelo had recently moved down from New York, and Liborio had been watching him train. “Marcelo understands balance well,” Liborio said. “He can get you off balance very easily. He gets you to shift your weight around. The way he moves his hips, I’m telling you, you can put a three-hundred-pound guy on him and he’ll find a way to move his hips. He’s got speed, but it’s not ‘Oh wow’ speed, it’s just the way he moves, and he has a lot of knowledge. He researches the position and there’s no wall for him—that I can’t get there.” Liborio is talking about mental barriers, that Marcelo doesn’t think of certain positions as static, or unwinnable. He has the creativity to look for new ways to “get to” good positions from the bad.
    “How does that process happen? How do you get to where you can think three or four moves ahead of everyone?” I asked him. I remembered something Chainsaw Charles