“Don’t do anything flat.” Marcelo Garcia, the four-time Abu Dhabi Submission Wrestling World Champion and five-time Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Black Belt Champion, told me that once—after beating me up for seven minutes.

Here is how I understood his advice at the time: I wasn’t moving fast enough; I wasn’t reacting; I was holding positions when I should have been attacking. There was something about those minimalist (Mr. Miyagi-style) words of wisdom that held my attention. Marcelo had managed to capture perfectly a funamental problem with my jiu-jitsu: a tendency to hesitate and over-think. At the same time, although I doubt he intended to, he said something about me as a person. This unintended perceptiveness is a perfect illustration of Marcelo. For him, jiu-jitsu is a reflection of his inner self, and so he can’t help but see this kind of reflection in others, even if they don’t see it. There is very little separation between who he is and how he fights.

Marcelo first earned notoriety at the 2003 Abu Dhabi No-Gi Championships (the ADCCs). To the spectators that weekend in Sao Paulo, Brazil (and those watching around the world), it seemed like he was bringing something new and electrifying to the table. He had an aggressive style, hell-bent on the submission, with an unorthodox guard and lightning-fast transitions to the back. Marcelo became a crowd favorite with his abandon and his big smile. The guy was special, and people felt it. These were the first matches of his that I ever watched, and I, too, immediately became a fan.

My fan-boy attitude made it all the more surreal that my brother, Paul, became friends with the guy. Paul started setting up seminars for Marcelo in California. But I didn’t get introduced to Marcelo on the mats, as I had expected. Instead, I shook hands with him in front of a rollercoaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk amusement park, in my hometown. It turns out Marcelo loves amusement parks (and food) almost as much as jiu-jitsu. It was hard to maintain much of my wide-eyed hero-worship after I’d watched him rushing from ride to ride like a big kid. He had none of the big-ego Brazilian attitude that you come to expect in the jiu-jitsu world. In fact, he was kind of goofy and hilarious. At one point he and my brother were on the bumper-cars and got stuck going counter-clockwise on a clockwise loop. Several small children, no older than 9, jeered at them angrily; one girl called them “fools.” Paul and Marcelo just grinned, a little red in the face.

Considering he is a six-time world champion and three-time Abu Dhabi champion, Marcelo’s appearance and behavior are a bit disarming. He is a stocky, curly-haired Brazilian who smiles a lot. He's just a nice guy. But at the same time, there’s something relentless in Marcelo. He is not what I would call “laid-back,” which is often the trait associated with niceness. Rather, he's intense—a dynamo of constant activity. He always seems to be moving, doing something, going somewhere. And he expects the same from those around him.

It's an approach that's gotten him in trouble. At the 2007 ADCCs he lost in the Absolute Division finals to Robert Drysdale. Marcelo pushed forward and went after his opponent, but Drysdale caught him in a perfectly timed D’Arce choke. Marcelo could have played it safe--scoring points and out-gaming the bigger, taller Drysdale--but he attacked, literally head-first, without hesitating. That's Marcelo for you.

The second time I met Marcelo was a year or two after the amusement park trip. By that time, he had opened an academy in Florida, and my brother was being groomed for a possible teaching gig. I was fighting professionally out of Santa Fe and took a trip out there in between fights. I arrived in Fort Lauderdale in the middle of October. I stepped off the plane into tropical humidity and heat—a far cry from the dry-cold of New Mexico. A friend of my brother, Andrew, drove me to his house in Coconut Creek, a sprawling, palm-tree infested suburbia.

I trained at Marcelo’s academy that night. Even the warm-up at the beginning of class was non-stop and exhausting. When we trained together, he destroyed me even more than I expected, and my expectations for myself were pretty low. Marcelo trains just like he competes--relentlessly moving forward. Within his constant aggressive attack, there is no room to move or breathe. He makes you feel that the only option is to attack as aggressively as he does, which, of course, does you no good either. Someone once said, “Fighting Marcelo is like trying to turn a greased doorknob”—the more you try, the less progress you make.

The next day in Florida, after the afternoon training session, Marcelo called Andrew and me and suggested a trip out to Bass Pro Shops. The three of us drove in Andrew’s van 30 minutes out of town to the outlet. If you don’t know already, Bass Pro Shops are monolithic outdoor-recreation stores. This one seemed like it had every product that has ever been made. It held the promise of lots of stuff to do, which was right up Marcelo’s alley. Shortly after we entered the store, Marcelo disappeared. Andrew and I scanned one aisle at a time, afraid we'd lost him. Then we turned a corner and there was Marcelo, staring at us and smiling. Somehow he had found a full body, skin-tight rash-guard made with authentic hunting camouflage (the kind with photo-realistic branches and leaves). It was essentially the same outfit he was wearing when he won the 2003 ADCCs, except this one made every part of his body except for his head, feet, and hands, look invisible. “Marcelo?” Andrew called out, squinting his eyes.

These days Marcelo lives in New York City, where his academy draws talent from all over the world. It's clear the moment you walk through the door that the place is an extension of Marcelo: There is an open feeling there, but also an intensity and focus. You might think that an academy with such a high profile jiu-jitsu star would create a cult of personality, but I don’t see it. Even when big UFC stars make an appearance, they seem to become more themselves on Marcelo’s mats—more accessible, more human.

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