Fighter's Mind, A (29 page)

Renzo seemed apart from the convoluted family politics. He put himself out there, and he embodied what the Gracies claimed to be about. He fought anyone, anytime. When you step back and look at his fighting career as a whole, Renzo is probably
underrated
. In the beginning, when Royce won the UFC, not many people were aware of what he was doing. He was armbarring fighters who didn’t know the danger they were in. The legendary Rickson has always been criticized for not fighting the best available, but in truth (being a generation older) he came up at a time when there wasn’t as much competition, especially outside of Brazil. Rickson was retiring as international MMA blossomed.

Renzo consistently puts his money where his mouth is, and he fought with the best he could find. He fought and beat much bigger guys, and not clueless boxers but seasoned mixed martial artists such as Maurice Smith (235 pounds), Oleg Taktorov (210 pounds), and the like, most of whom outweighed him significantly and knew his game. His natural fighting weight would have been 155—and he was fighting heavyweights,
good
heavyweights for the time. It’s unimaginable now. What I also love about Renzo is that he kept doing it, even through losing fights to bigger fighters like Sakuraba or Dan Henderson. Royce and Rickson seemed protective of their legacies, but Renzo was never precious about his. He would risk it (and himself) at the drop of a hat. In his last three fights, Renzo has beaten three former UFC champions—Pat Miletich, Carlos Newton, and Frank Shamrock.

Renzo was never a muscular freak of an athlete but a normal guy with a head of thick black curly hair and an open honest face. His standup wasn’t his strength, but it was effective, and he was a fighter—he’d force opponents to respect his hands, just a little. His ground game was superlative. To this day (in the twilight of his career) he still has to be considered one of the best in the world on the ground, and an elite-level fighter, for despite the sport’s quantum growth he has grown with it. Renzo still sometimes throws in his hat at Abu Dhabi, one of the very few MMA guys who will compete in pure grappling competitions.

Renzo has done it all with an incredible lightness of spirit, a human warmth and ease that makes him one of the best on-camera interviews in the business and one of the great teachers and most respected men in the fighting world.

 

Renzo was born into fighting. Fighting was the family business. His brothers and cousins and fathers and uncles were all dedicated to jiu-jitsu. The Gracie family had decided to go that way, to make their bones in that world, as a family. Renzo makes it clear that it wasn’t forced, that nobody had do to anything they hated.

“We all grew up like champions, eating right, thinking right—we were built and forged to be the best. But everything came very naturally. We were never forced to fight. It surrounded us. Everything began as play. We spent time as kids at the academy, my brothers, cousins, everyone. Many in the family don’t follow fighting as a profession, but they are still very strong-minded.” The Gracie family is huge, and not everyone fights professionally, but almost everyone has logged some mat time.

“You start seeing your relatives, the people you love and admire, involved in jiu-jitsu and so you end up embracing that. It becomes a way of life, and then of course you want to excel and be the best. It comes naturally. And the way jiu-jitsu is, you want to win. You start to know that to be second place is just to be the first loser. That appetite is such a big part of the game.”

Renzo sometimes seems a man out of time. There’s something about him of the nineteenth-century gentleman, to whom honor and respect are far more important than life and limb, something about the feudalism of Rio and the nature of what he does. Brazil in the 1970s (when he was a boy) was still governed by colonial ethics, with the remnants of the Portuguese romanticism. There’s a great new documentary film, called
Legacy
(made by Gethin Aldous), about Renzo, and in it Renzo’s brilliant loquaciousness is on full display, bon mot following bon mot. Renzo talks about his father, Robson (also a jiu-jitsu
mestre
), who at one point took to the streets in an attempt to change things for the better and nearly lost his life. The Gracie family name saved him. Robson was obviously another iconoclast in this family of warrior monks. All of these factors combine to make Renzo a more unique individual than even he realizes.

 

I came to New York to talk to Renzo and hung around his school until he showed up. “Meet me at six,” he said, and showed promptly at ten, classic
carioca
(the slang in Brazil for someone who lives in Rio, where punctuality is not a virtue). But once I got hold of him, Renzo understood what I was after and showed me why he was the most fun interview in MMA. The next day I drove out to his house, where he made me welcome.

Renzo laments the rudeness in America, even while he agrees it makes life simpler, the hermetic modern life where you never acknowledge anyone you don’t know.

“Back in Rio, on the beach, I used to fight three or four times a day. And no one really held a grudge. The police would just send you home, maybe yell at whoever started it. But here everything is so serious. A guy insulted my wife and kids at a gas station”—here the mind reels—“and I went over to talk to him, to get him to apologize, and so he insulted me and I slapped him. He throws himself on the floor, crying for the police, says his neck is hurt. I had to go to court five times, pay fifteen hundred dollars, all for this damn slap we do harder every day in practice.” He pauses and shrugs, then says with a hint of melancholy, “Life here is simpler. You don’t waste time saying hello to everybody.”

Respect—the essence of the fight game—was a huge part of Renzo’s growing up. “My father, my grandfather, I respect them so much I am very quiet around them. I wanted to make sure that anything that came out of my mouth made sense. I idolized them, but I saw they were human, too.”

Renzo’s father, Carlson’s brother, was an integral part of the family and eventually president of the Federation of Jiu-jitsu in Rio.

“I recently realized how important my father was, because he was always telling me that the impossible is nothing. Even though I was extremely weak physically, and small, he would always tell me that I was so smart and technical that without time limits I could finish anyone in the world.” The old
vale tudo
fights were often fought without time limits, as that was closer to a real fight. The Gracie style could be played in a safe, defensive, relentless way that would eventually yield a choke or submission, given enough time. Fighting without time limits is something they miss.

Renzo laughed hard, something he did about every third sentence, with a face like a cherub. His heavy Brazilian accent is iconic. It’s not only his accent but the rhythm and variations in tone that are so signature Brazilian jiu-jitsu,
my friend
. He’s almost cartoonishly animated, his eyes flaring wide, eyebrows reaching for the heavens.

“Now, that wasn’t true back then. When I fought good guys who were big, they could give me trouble. But my father was always placing little pearls in my brain. And I believed him!”

Renzo grew up in the perfect environment in which to groom a fighter, and he fell deeply in love with jiu-jitsu and with competition. He would be a warm-up to best guys as a kid. His confidence grew. By the time he was a man he knew as much jiu-jitsu as anybody in the world (with the possible exception of Rickson).

“Every time I step in the ring, or onto the mat, I always feel that there is nobody that knows this better than I do. It’s not a magic box. There’s no surprise for me, no situations or positions that I can’t understand. So I am very relaxed for fights. I even fall asleep before fights. A few times, in Pride, I bring a pillow from the hotel . . . and they have to wake me up to get me to warm up!” He finds that hilarious.

 

Renzo’s career is unique—he is astride the transition of MMA. He fought in Brazil in the “old days,” in the
vale tudo
. He fought in Japan in Pride, in front of forty thousand fans, and he fought for the UFC, for the IFL, for Elite XC . . . he’s outlasted most of these promotions. He shrugs when he thinks about it. “It’s been an unbelievable ride up to now,” he says.

Early in his career Renzo had come to America. He wanted to teach in New York, and he struggled. He was doing okay but was having problems with his native partner. “My worries had a base, because in the end he kicked me out of the country. He tried to call immigration on me and my visa was under him . . . it was a mess. I had to go home with my tail between my legs. That’s one thing when you are alone, but another thing when you have a wife and three kids.”

He needed money and took some fights, first Eugenio Tadeu, a
luta livre
star; and then two weeks later, Renzo was fighting in Japan. “So I fight, jump in a plane and then fight Akira Shoji at Pride One. I needed the money. I give it straight to the lawyers and split from that partner and get my green card.”

He glosses over it blithely, but I press him. I know about the Tadeu fight, one of the last famous
vale tudo
matches.
Luta livre
basically means “wrestling” in Portuguese and it was the name taken by Gracie students who split off from the family (and the g
i
), often poorer guys from the favela in Rio who couldn’t afford the
gi
. They wrestled and grappled no-
gi
and fought
vale tudo
and of course had a deep and undying enmity with the Gracies. I used this opportunity to ask Renzo about the age-old question:
gi
or no-
gi
?

MMA fights are not allowed with the
gi
on, so is it better to train without one all the time, or for jiu-jitsu do you need to practice with it? Greg Jackson’s guys have high-level jiu-jitsu and they never train with it. Eddie Bravo threw away the
gi
but still wears the
gi
pants (and let me just say this: rolling in
gi
pants is NOT no-
gi
). Usually, the answer is pretty standard. The wrestlers feel like you don’t need it, and the guys who come from traditional jiu-jitsu feel it’s important. Renzo’s take was interesting.

“If you want to be a really good grappler, you
have to learn
with the
gi
. With a
gi
on, everything is so much harder, a hundred times harder. With no-
gi,
you take a good wrestler and in three months he understands where the danger comes from and his game will be fine. The moment you put on a
gi,
the opponent has handles to grip, so everything is much harder—harder to pass guard, to defend guard—so it teaches your hips to be extremely active to get out of the way.

“What I see in MMA now is a lot of guys go straight to no-
gi
and then MMA. So their guard is a joke
. Poja,
I been on the bottom in every fight that I did and I never get hit. You see BJ Penn, he never takes damage on the bottom—and he trains in the
gi
all the time. He comes from my brother’s school. I see these other guys go in there and lock their legs but they get hit the whole time they’re in guard.

“When you train in the
gi,
your hips are better, sweeps are better, your escape from the mount is ten times better. With a
gi
on, the mounted guy has a hundred attacks, and without it, he has two or three. It’s a joke.

“In Brazil, the
luta livre
guys trained with us for a while. They were purple belts when they separated off and stop training in the
gi.
They were big guys, taking steroids. They were tough and strong-minded, but we never lose to them. We beat the shit out of them, and we train
gi
all the time and only no-
gi
right before the fight.”

 

Renzo was fighting Eugenio Tadeu in Rio, in one of the last
vale tudo
fights without gloves, pure old-school.

“I took the fight on last-minute notice, and the money wasn’t good, but I had to pay lawyers in New York. I just wanted to make sure that the floor was canvas, because I knew he was going to come full of oil. Whatever his body touched on the mat, I couldn’t stand on it.” Renzo means Eugenio would be greased up—making him much harder to submit.

The
luta livre
guys and the Gracie family had a long feud and had met many times before in
vale tudo
matches and informal fights on the beach that could turn epic.

“It was an interesting match because I always dislike him, his attitude, his way of being. He was always with the wrong crowd, surrounded by criminals and drug dealers. I was always on the police side. I train a lot of police. I was on the sport side. He was always playing the role of being from the ghetto, so it was an important fight for me because I don’t like him.” You can see the class difference coming out; the Gracies had long trained only the upper echelons of Rio society.

“My only pleasure in that fight was going to be to punch him in the face, because I knew right away he was completely greased up and hell to hold on to, like trying to hold a fish.”

This was a grudge match, and the
luta livre
guys had been filling up the arena for hours—they’d come in early and taken all the seats around the cage. And here the danger of Rio and Brazil starts to appear. It’s not that all Rio is so dangerous—in Ipanema, little old ladies walk on the street at night—but it is a place where shit can go wrong, really wrong.

“Now his people had invaded the event. He brought two hundred guys with guns and knives and they surrounded the cage. Even before our fight they wouldn’t let nobody get close. We were afraid of a riot, so we sent our guys up into the stands. When I walked out I saw the cage was surrounded by
luta livre
guys. There were no jiu-jitsu guys except my brother and a couple of others.”

When both fighters were in the cage, they fell into a long, wild-west gunslinger staredown, both men frozen and staring across the ring for minutes. Totally still. Watching it, you can almost hear the theme song from
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
.