Fighter's Mind, A by Sam Sheridan Page B

making the long journey. After two months one friend dropped out, and I just kept improving. There was one guy who was a man, and he used to beat me up, but then he stopped for five months, and when he came back I could control him. I had proof that I was getting better. I wasn’t a good student, and even now I never say I am better than anybody, but I know I love jiu-jitsu more than anybody. I love the energy and that it gets deeper the more you study.”
    Inwardly, I sigh. No silver bullet. “Is it just that you know more?” I asked him. “Sweeps, holds, counters . . . ?”
    Marcelo’s eyes lit up at “counters.” He liked that one. “I think I have a lot of counters, unnerstan’? I try to make him go into the position I want. I study a lot. I try not to make any mistakes, I try to be perfect, and I have a little more knowledge than most. It’s something I think about, how to get him to put his hand there or his leg where I need it.
    “Guys who face me, when they believe they can win, and when they are strong and come hard, that’s tougher. When they are tentative, or have too many strategies, when they try to beat me in my game . . .” Here he grins and his face lights up. “That’s not gonna work, guys. Of course I get caught sometimes, but most of the time I can handle it.
    “I’m always thinking when I’m rolling, and sometimes the guy can’t follow my pace and lets me get too far. When it goes too fast, then it’s just reaction. You have to train hard for that, train all the time.”
    When Marcelo was sixteen, his training wasn’t hard enough to satisfy him. He felt stifled by the future in his small town, the long commute limiting his training to three times a week. At a competition a teacher named Paulo Cezar invited him to move to a nearby city and train at his school. “I asked my mom, and she was shocked but she let me move if I finished school there. So two months later I moved and started studying there.”
    Marcelo’s jiu-jitsu training began in earnest. He loved the gym and the teacher, even though the teacher was just a brown belt. There were a lot of people around to train with and Marcelo trained three or four times a day for three years straight. When he started with Cezar, he was living on the mats, sleeping in the gym at night—a common enough occurrence in Brazil for the young, poor, and dedicated. Eventually he was given a small room off the gym, which he shared with a roommate. Over the next few years Marcelo met his wife, got his brown belt, and moved to São Paulo, where he started training with Fabio Gurgel, an elite-level coach. He was constantly competing in Brazil. Then came the Abu Dhabi in ’03. Marcelo had been a black belt for only five months.
    Marcelo actually lost the final of the qualifiers by one point. He’d pulled guard and lost a point and his opponent ran for twenty minutes. So he wasn’t expecting even to compete and was training in the gi for more gi tourneys. Fabio, the old hand, knew there would be last-minute cancellations, and visa problems, so he had Marcelo make weight and, sure enough, Marcelo got his chance. He had been waiting a long time for it.
    “I was really prepared. I felt nobody could take this from me. I had a hard bracket, but I knew that people didn’t know me, didn’t expect much from me, and wouldn’t have a strategy for me. I could play my best game. Everyone else is a big name, he’s a Gracie, whatever. I didn’t want to respect anybody too much. I thought to myself, I can win this thing. And then I started to make it real. I started to win, and I got stronger after each match.” Marcelo not only won his bracket, he submitted Mike Van Arsdale in the Absolute division. Van Arsdale is a former NCAA champion and superstar wrestler who outweighed Marcelo by two weight classes. Marcelo swarmed him, slipped up on his back, and choked him out in a minute or two. In the footage of the match, you can see Van Arsdale’s utter surprise