Fighter's Mind, A by Sam Sheridan Page A

Marcelo beaming at me.
    Thanks a lot , Marcelo, I thought. That’s a big help in trying to understand your thought process. It was funny how hard it was to get these guys to talk about how they think . While many will admit that the great jiu-jitsu players do think about jiu-jitsu differently, they get resistant when you try to quantify that.
    I’d asked Scotty Nelson about it; Scotty had been a white belt with BJ Penn back at Ralph Gracie’s gym. “Do some guys think about jiu-jitsu differently than you and me?”
    “Absolutely,” he’d replied. “All the top guys think about it differently. I was hanging out with Nino Schembri. He was the guy, back in the day, submitting everybody. I asked Nino, ‘How did you get good at submissions from all these different positions?’ He said he looked at all the bad positions, all the spots where he wasn’t strong, and tried to figure out a submission from there. He doesn’t fight to get into the right position—he learns and practices submissions from positions he’s uncomfortable in. Nino said, ‘I’ll never be the best wrestler, I don’t want to be, but I figured out all the takedowns and have a way to flow into a submission. Off a double leg, I look for the triangle. Off the single leg, omoplata. If he goes for a high crotch, I dive over for a crucifix. I take what they give me and make a strong position out of a weak one.’”
    Maybe more revealing is the level of dedication that Nino showed, the clinical, thoughtful way of thinking about jiu-jitsu, the depth of his study. It’s that level of commitment that is distinct.
    I found that pattern repeated. Many good jiu-jitsu players will just train and because they know enough to beat most people they stop studying and learning. The great ones, though, are fanatical students, analyzing positions and all the tiny adjustments that make a position or a sweep work. The difference between a regular student of jiu-jitsu and the great players is the dedication to studying the game. Sean Williams, who got his black belt in four years from Renzo despite being sidelined for months with injuries, would fill notebooks after every training session, writing down everything he could think of. BJ Penn, the so called prodigy, who some think of as a mysterious genius, is the same way. The stories about him from his early days at Ralph Gracie’s Academy are all about his fanatical drilling of small positional changes. BJ would laugh about those days and talk about how jiu-jitsu invaded his dreams and daydreams, in the shower, biking home, lying in bed. All the great players talk about it, how it becomes an obsession.
     
    I pressed on with Marcelo. We started talking about where he came from, Minas Gerais, a big inland state in Brazil. Marcelo was from a remote town and, like many in Brazil, he started young in judo. Then he saw his first videotapes of the UFC. “I thought, I wanna do this,” he said. Marcelo found his first school and it was an hour and a half by bus away from his home. He was fourteen and could make it only two or three times a week. “You can always train jiu-jitsu if you want to bad enough,” he said. Where he lived there was only a small university and a few options—his father was a retired banker, his mother worked at home. He didn’t have the money to go elsewhere to study. But Marcelo realized he could make jiu-jitsu his profession. “I just enjoy it so much. I hope I can make enough to live off it someday. But I decide to make it my life.”
    In his off days, he would just wait and think about the next time he’d get to go train. “I loved the energy, of matching with each other. I loved the way I felt after training, that I’d done my job today. And after a few weeks I realized I could do this forever. I started with four friends, and I was the biggest one—I grew up early—but I was the worst one. The worst one of my friends. I wasn’t a natural, but even then I enjoyed it so much, and I kept