Alliance Jiu-Jitsu

 

By Roberto Pedreira

I left Brazil and returned to Japan, stopping off for a month in Thailand, thinking that the two months I had spent on the tatames in S�o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro would suffice. I couldn't have been more wrong. 

By the time I returned to Brazil, five months later, Master Jiu-Jitsu was gone. Not gone, just moved, moved up the street and around a corner on the fifth floor of a small building overlooking a big park in the center of Ipanema, Pra�a N.S. da Paz, on Rua J. Angelica

Training was in progress. Someone asked what I wanted. I said I was looking for Malibu. A guy who looked like John Cassavetes in the Dirty Dozen came over and introduced himself. He was Romero Cavalcanti�better known as Jacare, the owner of the school and one of only five guys to earn black belts under Rolls still teaching, and something of a legend himself.

Jacare not only looked like John Cassavetes, he talked like him too, in very good English (as good as John Cassavetes at least). No wonder. He went to high school in Manhattan. Jacare had heard about me from Malibu�s assistant Eduardo. I was the American writer. Jacare invited me to train.

I came back the next day for the iniciantes (beginners) class. But jiu-jitsu schools don�t really have beginner�s classes. Apart from the Infantil and Juvenil classes, what happens depends on who is there.  Adulto classes are for anyone who isn�t more comfortable in a juvenil class, in other words, anyone about 16 years or older and not too small. In the first beginners�Eclass I attended, the majority of the guys were blue and purple belts. From time to time there would be brown and even black belts. As a white belt, I was in a small minority. Most days, I was the only white belt there. There was a certain demographic pattern though. Anyone at any age could begin learning jiu-jitsu and would of course be a white belt. But in Rio, most start in their teens, and they keep their blue belts for a long time. I met people who had started when they were kids and had been blue belts for six years. In one case, I met someone who had been a yellow belt for 8 years before receiving a blue belt.

Young guys go to school (if their parents have the money to pay for jiu-jitsu lessons, they have enough to put them through a private school). For the same reasons, they don�t work. Unlike typical middle-class Americans, Brazilians don�t think a part-time after-school job is a good character-building experience. (If they are poor Brazilians, it�s either a necessity or impossibility, assuming that they are lucky enough to be able to go to school at all.) Older guys tend to have jobs (if they don�t, they can�t afford jiu-jitsu), and they generally aren�t free to train during the afternoons. So, the brown and black blacks tend to be older and train in the evening, while the blue and most of the purple belts tend to be young and train in the afternoon. This is just a generalization of course. Younger guys, and blue belts of all ages are perfectly free to train at night. But you�ll see many black belts in the evening, few during the day. One reason may be that the black belts come when they expect other black belts to come.

I went to the beginners�Eclass because I was in fact a beginner. Also because it was less crowded and I thought it would be good to roll with people who were better than me, but not so much better that they would be too bored even to try. Since white belts were scarce, blue belts were best. I doubted I could tap any of them, but at least I had a reasonable chance of successfully defending myself. Against an average size purple belt, and any brown or black belt, only in my dreams would I not have to tap.

Now, there�s nothing wrong with tapping, as Jacare explained. In fact, it�s the key to getting better. It�s what lets you practice realistically without getting too hurt to continue practicing. (If you practice Muay Thai with total realism, you are going to be too injured to be able to practice long enough ever to become good.) At the same time, doing nothing but tapping won�t help you very much either. What we need is a balance. It�s good to roll with people who are light years ahead, from time to time, if for nothing more than to keep your ego in check. But you have to crawl before you can walk. For routine training, it�s best to have an assortment of guys, some a bit better and some a bit worse. Then you�ll be able to�have to in fact�work on both offense and defense. It�s good also to have a few guys who are clueless, so you can succeed with a new technique once or twice before trying it on a more wary and dangerous opponent, one who will make you pay if you miss with it (which is most likely to happen the first time you try it).

In my case, there were no guys that clueless. I had to pay every time I tried a new technique.    

This was a rare opportunity. Jacare was in fact living in the United States but was in Rio for Christmas. I would be able to learn personally from someone who had been one of Rolls Gracie�s top students, and also to talk about jiu-jitsu�s history with someone who had been there to witness a substantial part of it.

Since the boom began, tournament activity has increased. Before there might be a tournament once every several years. Now there are big tournaments every few months, and since 1996, a world championship every summer in July. But Jacare has been involved in jiu-jitsu since before the boom, when jiu-jitsu was fundamentally a form of auto-defesa (self defense), as it had traditionally been. (It was primarily Jacare�s teacher Rolls who had been responsible, almost single handedly, for giving jiu-jitsu its sport form).

Jacare believed everyone should have a solid foundation in self-defense before delving too deeply into the intricacies of sport jiu-jitsu. His classes typically began with two or three defenses against various types of attacks, such as a bear hug from behind, over or under the intended victim�s arms, a headlock while standing, and most of the other standard �common�Eattacks. However, I never saw a defense against a wrist grab. Maybe Brazilians don�t grab wrists. (I fact, I once saw a student demonstrating a hapkido counter to a wrist grab on another student; others quickly gathered around to watch, and were impressed. They all wanted to learn how to do it themselves.)

The self-defense segment was short. �We don�t practice auto-defesea as much as before�E Jacare admitted, �because we don�t need to�E He elaborated: �We think rolling is the best preparation for self- defense. You develop the conditioning, the endurance, the resistance to pain, the sensitivity to an opponent�s moves, and the other elements you need for good self-defense�E 

It�s more fun too.

Jacare explained that jiu-jitsu was originally designed for self-defense, but many guys found it too tedious to endlessly repeat moves against attacks that never happened anyway. They liked rolling. There weren�t exactly what you could call rules in those early days (actually, the days of Rolls�the middle 60�s to 1982), but it was recognized that passing the guard is better than not, mounting is better than being mounted, and so on, and obviously, making your opponent tap is best. So there were sort of unofficial but generally understood and accepted rules. It was the competition that made everyone get better, that and the open-mindedness about incorporating new techniques into jiu-jitsu from where ever they could be found. �Rolls was the one who did both�E

There are some Brazilians who resent Rorion for monopolizing the family name, his uncles Carlson and Carley to mention just two. Jacare, like others, had a more pragmatic view. Rorion may be getting richer than everyone else, but everyone is making money, with lessons, videos, fights, endorsements, and Rorion is the reason. �Rorion made it happen�E Jacare said. "N�o se pode tapar o sol com a paneira", he added (you can�t block the sun with a sieve). I had no idea what that meant. 

The next day, I came early to watch the various classes. The infantil class was taught by Rodrigo Medeiros and Ricardo Vieira, both purple belts (Rodrigo had been a blue belt at the old Master location when I was there six months before, and would be a brown belt by the time I left the new school two months later). The Brazilians are realistic about what kids can and want to do. Their attention span is short and they aren�t really very concerned about self-defense at that age. Most of the class is spent letting them burn off energy, running around in a semi-organized way, kicking a soccer ball, wrestling, just primarily getting used to being in an academy and absorbing the way things are done and what they mean. The class begins and ends at a set time. Rodrigo or Ricardo would call them to attention from time to time to organize a new activity. Rodrigo did teach one technique that day that looked interesting, an escape (or as they say, an exit), from the mount. It wouldn�t work on an aware adult opponent but for a kid, it probably would, and if you did it from the guard, it would be a workable sweep. Even at that age, they are learning useful skills.

The next class was for juvenils, which Rodrigo and Ricardo also taught. Burning energy was also a part of this class. I�ve never seen an adult class do anything remotely approaching this degree of �warming up�E Only guys this age could have energy left over to actually continue training. But the warm-up was combined with skills training. First, they practiced takedowns, both guys attempting to take the other down, while defending strenuously. Next, they practiced passing the guard. Finally, a clinch drill with a variation that makes a lot of sense. One guy actually tried to slap the other hard on the face. He would either clinch or get slapped. Only a few guys got slapped and even then not more than once, but the possibility made their clinching more emphatic. I would have liked to have done this myself, but I�ve never seen it done in an adult class. After this, they did a regular class of positions and rolling. I was exhausted just watching the class.

The afternoon adulto class was next. As mentioned earlier, most people in the afternoon classes, are younger guys with blue belts. There are more blue belts than white in every academy I saw in Brazil (not so in Los Angeles, where the blue and white belts tend to go to different classes, and definitely not so in Tokyo at Gracie Japan). One reason is that jiu-jitsu is now well established and there are few newcomers in relation to veterans. Another reason is that it is relatively easy to get a blue belt in Rio (compared to anywhere else I�ve trained). Most agree that about six months of steady training three days a week is sufficient to get a blue belt.

Jacare taught this class. He seemed to be in a stand-up frame of mind that day. The techniques were good, solid, basic defenses against punches. Against a wide swing, Jacare recommended an overhook; that would block the punch and then trap the arm for a takedown or throw. Don�t assume the first punch is the only one, Jacare cautioned. Be ready to overhook the other arm if it comes. Then you can lean him to either side, and toss him over your hip. If the punch hasn�t come yet, you can simply reach out and check it (the way Silatists do).

A tight, straight punch is a different matter, Jacare said. You can�t overhook a punch that is �inside�E(to borrow a kali concept). Instead, you need to parry it, which will put you outside his arm and close to his back�a nice place to be. Once you�ve done this, it�s easy to clinch and follow up with a takedown of your choice. One point to remember, he added, if you get behind him, put one foot back, to avoid his counter throw. Always assume he has a back-up plan, and accordingly, have one or more of your own.

The next technique caught my attention because I recalled it from a Goju-ryu kata. Although I studied Goju karate for five years (1972-1977), at no time was any self-defense move explicitly taught. In fact, the sensei (a Black Belt magazine hall of famer) frequently warned us not to try to use karate for self-defense (he recommended running away�I give him high marks for candor). Possibly, the moves were contained in the �advanced�Ekata  Possibly, we were expected to realize that they were in the kata and that we were expected to extract them. On the contrary, we were too busy memorizing the kata for promotion to think about what most of the movements were supposed to be (occasionally the sensei would explain that a particular movement could be used as either a block or a punch for example; this tended to happen in cases where it was obvious anyway). What I gathered was that the techniques were hidden in katas and that it would take many years to understand their application. Moreover, I gathered that neither the sensei nor my seniors would tell me this.

Mind-reading of this variety is taken for granted in Japan. Explicitness is not a virtue, ever, and the Japanese believe that anything that is easy to learn is not worth knowing. The Brazilians don�t have a problem with explicitness. They tend to prefer it. And whether something is worth knowing depends on what it is and what the person who knows it wants and needs, not how difficult it was to learn. The Japanese believe that doing difficult things both develops and demonstrates good character. The Brazilians believe doing difficult things demonstrates that you couldn�t find an easier way to do something (which any sensible person would prefer, because they�d then have more time to go to the beach), or are too unimportant to have the necessary connections to have someone else to do it for you. The Brazilian emphasis is on the function rather than the form, the result rather than the process. Now obviously, function and form, and result and process are related. Sometimes it yields better results overall to emphasize the process. The Japanese think so. If you are dealing with huge numbers of very well organized, and very similar people, who have been specifically educated to be good at and to value following instructions, then the Japanese way works well. But these conditions have never existed in Brazil and the Brazilians have not adopted this assembly-line model of education. (Brazilians find certain aspects of Japanese culture appealing, but the regimentation�so it seems to them�of most parts of Japanese life and human relations isn�t one of them)

There was a break of several hours before the adulto class. Fernando Gurgel, Fabio's older brother, was leading the class. Fernando�s apelido (nickname) is Magr�o, which means �skinny�E Magr�o might have been skinny when he first got the apelido, but at 6�E�� and about 185 lbs, with enormous hands and forearms, he�s hardly skinny. Almost everyone in the class had either a black belt or a faded brown belt. There was a smattering of purple, blue, and even white belts too. Jacare was there too, to be with his old friends, and do some training himself.

Jacare is 45, about 6�E(183 c.) and 165 lbs. (75 kilos). The downside to being really good is that it�s hard to find people to push you. But if you are a good teacher, your students become good too, maybe as good as you. Maybe better. Jacare must have been a good teacher, because he had a lot of good students�Fabio Gurgel, Roberto Traven, Alexandre Paiva, Rodrigo �Comprido�EMedeiros, all Mundial champions, to name only four. 

Jacare called a huge brown belt to roll. This brown belt had enough strength and skill�and the benefit of excellent teaching�that he might be able to make his teacher tap. If not tap, then at least to make him lose face by not being able to defeat his younger and bigger by about 60 lbs. student effortlessly. Now a karate teacher can finesse getting scored on by a student just by saying �nice shot�E The fact that he�s the one judging the quality of the technique shows that he is still the top dog (imagine the student saying �nice shot�Ewhen the teacher scores). And he and everyone else can say that the shot wasn�t hard enough to do damage, or that the teacher wasn�t really trying.  

A  jiu-jitsu instructor doesn�t have that way out. Despite everyone saying it�s ok to tap, most guys would almost rather have their arm broken than tap to a lower belt. (The ones who usually say it�s ok to tap are the ones who are so good that they personally never do. But the fact that it has to be repeatedly said that it�s ok to tap indicates how strong the reluctance to tap can be. I have never witnessed anyone voluntarily tapping to a lower belt or not being visibly embarrassed or upset if it did happen). If you tap, it�s because you had to, which means your opponent did the technique correctly enough to shatter your joint or put you to sleep or asphyxiate you if you hadn�t tapped. And you were trying to avoid tapping. No one would ever believe otherwise.

The brown belt student was actually going all out trying to tap his instructor. This was not regarded as disrespectful. It was simply the reality of rolling. If a karate student is invited to spar with his sensei in front of a class, it is generally for the purpose of staging a demonstration, whether the student is aware of this or not (if the student is advanced enough, he will know what is expected; otherwise, he will be used as a mere prop). If you are called to roll with a jiu-jitsu instructor, rolling means rolling. He may toy with you. He may decline to tap you. But he expects you to do your best to defend yourself and to attack him. (Once I heard a blue belt, after rolling with Rickson, tell the others (after Rickson had left, of course) that he had almost tapped Rickson, but let him go. Everyone laughed at him). When an instructor�s body can no longer do what his mind tells it to, then he does not roll with students in this way, but provides wisdom and leadership appropriate to his rank and age. 

Tapping people isn�t the end-all of rolling. Brazilians have plenty of common sense. Jiu-jitsu is designed to permit a small person to survive against or possibly subdue a larger one. That doesn�t mean a 120 lb. black belt is going to have an easy time with a 240 lb. purple belt. Royler may be better at jiu-jitsu than Mario Sperry, but not enough to compensate for a sixty lb. plus weight disadvantage. Skill is important but so is size. Which is more important in a particular instance depends on more things than can be specified in advance. Sometimes no one taps because both players are equally good on both offense and defense. Other times, it is because one or both are practicing something other than finishes, for example, getting and keeping, or escaping or regaining a particular position, or possibly simply setting up a finishing technique without executing it.

The adulto class was scheduled for 7:30, but people wandered in as late as 8:45. Everyone was lying around, looking relaxed, chatting. Most were stretching lightly, no one doing anything strenuous. At about 7:45, Magr�o stood up and started leading the class through some light warm-ups. The black and brown belts remained where they were. Perfunctory warm-up completed, Magr�o demonstrated two techniques, both variations on the omoplata shoulder lock. Most of the older guys there seemed familiar with both and didn�t bother to practice them. This also out of the way, the rolling started. Sergio Malibu had mentioned to me that most of the techniques of jiu-jitsu are learned before going to brown belt; after that, it�s a question of perfecting them rather than learning more. This seemed to be true. The brown and black belts had come to roll.  The rolling in the adulto evening class was less structured than in other classes. In fact, the only structure provided was that someone, in this case, Rodrigo, who seemed to live in the academy, called �E#060;I>vai�Eto begin and �E#060;I>tempo�Eabout ten minutes later. This was for the benefit of those who wanted to roll with time limits. Most guys began when they felt like it, although most ended on �E#060;I>tempo�E It seldom happens that guys roll with the same opponent twice during the same class, especially not in a row, but in this class everyone did what they wanted to do. The class is scheduled to finish at 9:00, but some leave sooner and some continue to train. One or two show up after 9:00. The brown and black belts don�t appear to want or need a rigidly structured class, but rather a place to roll and people to roll with. Most of them have been training together for a long time and they have a lot in common. Jiu-jitsu has been a big part of their lives and thanks to the Gracie revolution, they are part of an elite. Guys frequently show up at the academy simply to see their friends. 

Jacare stayed for about four weeks and then the Christmas and New Year holidays started. When the academy reopened, Jacare was back in Atlanta, teaching at his new school. Rodrigo took over Jacare�s class.  Magr�o taught in the evenings and occasionally supervised open-mat sessions and taught privates on Saturday.  I rolled often with Rodrigo and once with Magr�o. Rodrigo seemed to be working on his omoplata shoulderlocks. Every time I thought I had passed his guard I�d end up in an omoplata. He had just gotten his brown belt, after wearing a purple for less than a year. For all I knew he might have had a blue belt for the ten years before that, or Jacare might have been right that he was simply a �natural�Ejiu-jitsu fighter. Of course, he spent all day five days a week in the academy. That couldn�t have hurt.

I often had the feeling that I had almost pulled off a brilliant move, possibly even come close to tapping Rodrigo. But it was an illusion. He knew how close he could afford to let me get to his back or neck before working on what he had been planning to work on all along. Deception ruled the day. Traps were everywhere

I didn�t have that problem with Magr�o. He didn�t see me often enough to know what I could do. True, my belt was white and his was black. There�s a lot of belts between white and black, as someone else said. But sometimes someone who is clueless in general can do one thing well and can give a much better guy a hard time for a while. Maybe he has a wrestling or sambo or judo background. Maybe he�s abnormally flexible. Magr�o didn�t take any chances. He avoided me to put him in my guard, established a cem kilos position, and finished with�something. I don�t remember. What does it matter? But he was nice enough about it. �It takes time to get accustomed to the positions�E he said.  

Many people told me that tapping a lot when you are a white belt is the key to getting better. (And appreciate your freedom to tap while you can, because as you advance there will be fewer and fewer guys you can tap to without feeling embarrassed and being laughed at.) If that was true, I must have been getting damn good. But it didn't seem like it to me. I wasn't tapping to get better. I was tapping because my arm hurt. I kept getting caught in arm locks from the guard. 

During the summer (which in Brazil is December to March), we trained sem kimono (without gi). This had two interesting effects. One was that without my kimono to hang on to, big guys, like 220 lb. Fabio Duarte, recently promoted to blue belt, could pry my arm up into a kimura even when I had gotten a half mount. Even from what seems like a superior position, danger abounds. At the same time, I found it easier to avoid getting my arm locked out by the small flexible guys while in their guard. It was also easier to pass their guard (or rather possible to occasionally pass their guard.) They in turn had an easier time exiting my cem kilos holddowns. 

The other effect was that when unfamiliar guys showed up to roll, which happened everyday, you wouldn't know what belt they had, because we didn't wear belts. I tried to infer their belts indirectly, by observing their interactions with Rodrigo and guessing how long they had been around. Their size and facial expressions didn't provide useful information, but the guys who later turned out to have the heavy belts were generally the ones who seemed the most relaxed before the rolling started.

This one guy came in, about my size, and called me to roll. I tried to put him in my guard using a tricky move taught to me previously by Sergio Malibu. The move failed utterly. He immediately took my side and mounted. My attempts to reverse him with the uupah exit also failed. He grabbed my throat with both hands and began squeezing. I swam my arms through to break his grip, but after having done that, my uupah again failed and he merely returned his hands to their previous position and resumed squeezing. I did the same move, again, and so did he, again and again, until finally it seemed easier to be choked out than to continue struggling in vain. I tapped.

This was pretty discouraging, because his attack was so crude. Any clown could do it. I had never seen anyone attempt anything so artless in any academy. It reminded me of my boyhood in one of the rougher regions of the nation, at one time murder capital of the country. There, people did things like this. This choke actually had a name in Rio though. Rodrigo called it a "Copacabana choke". He elaborated that the Copacabana choke is just for "brincar" (joking around) because, obviously, it's too easy to escape for it to actually work. That made me feel even more discouraged, for the obvious reason that I hadn't known how to escape it.  My defense was one of the two Rodrigo later taught (my execution of it failed because I wasn't able to reverse the guy, who turned out to be a purple belt). But Rodrigo's other defense was better. Instead of swimming your arms through from inside to outside, you do the reverse, dropping your forearms on his inner elbows, and trapping them there. That will leave him with no arm to post with when you do the uupah. And if for some reason the uupah still doesn't work, at least he won't be able to choke (or punch) you.

When I first arrived in Brazil, my top priority was to train jiu-jitsu as much as possible. Accordingly, I trained at least five days a week, sometimes six. My second priority was to not get injured while training. Anywhere else, one of the minor injuries that keep you off the mat for a week or two are not major disasters--the downtime gives all of your stressed but not yet quite broken body parts a chance to heal. But when you've flown halfway around the world and are living in a hotel and basically don't have a hella lot else to do there anyway, well, two weeks or even one, can be a long time.

So when the inevitable happened--a minor knee injury that restricted my mobility, but, as it turned out, healed up in exactly two weeks--I decided it was probably time to head back. The fact that I was out of cash and had maxed out my Visa card influenced my decision too.

Was this the end of Roberto's jiu-jitsu odyssey? Not hardly.  It was a mere intermission.

 

 

A Arte Suave index

GTR index

�2000, R.A. Pedreira. All rights reserved .

Revised December 2001

Revised April 23, 2004

Revised Novembre 29, 2005

 

 

.

 

      

 

Note: In fact, my first stop in Brazil was S�o Paulo where I trained at Rick Kowarick's Top Form Academy. Training there was all good too. I wrote about it in the July 1998 issue of Black Belt magazine. It was Rick who told me, "if you want to see the best and the most jiu-jitsu, go to Rio." So I did.