When Top Gun came out, the pilots had cool names like Iceman and Maverick. When my best friend from college became a jet fighter pilot for the Marine Corps (he flew AV8s), I asked maybe a little breathlessly what his nickname was?

“Boards.”

“Boards?”

“Yah, the flaps that slow down a jet are called ‘boards’ and my ears stick out, so ‘boards’.”

I was a little let down, but that was reality.

Brazilian nicknames can be the same way. I figured “Babalu” meant cowboy or warrior or something, until I was informed that it means bubble gum, because his clothes looked like a gum wrapper when he was a kid.

I asked Gabriel Gonzaga’s trainer what Napao meant, assuming it was ‘Gigantic Killer’ or something. It means “Big Nostrils.”

They say if you meet an American BJJ guy with a cool Brazilian nickname, he made it up.

In the States, he is known as JDS, but to his fans back home, Junior Dos Santos is ‘Cigano’.

So what does that mean? This picture tells the story:





It turns out ‘Cigano’ means gypsy. People in his academy made fun of him, claiming he looked like a character in a popular Brazilian soap opera.

Cigano explains. “When I had hair (laughs), I used to tie it back. So the guys would say I would look like the “gypsy”. I used to hate that, but the less you like it the more it sticks, it wasn’t any different here.”

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Read entire article… (original Portuguese)