Global Training Report

At well over 136 kg., Cleiber Maia is not in competition shape, he'll be the first to admit. It's been a while since he was one of the best freestyle wrestlers in Brazil. Now Cleiber is passing his knowledge on to the new generation. He teaches wrestling at Mauricio Sabbatini’s judo school on Rua Barata Ribeiro, around the corner and two blocks down from Aloisio Silva’s Dojo Jiu-jitsu, where he also trains. Cleiber has a jiu-jitsu black belt. And a judo black belt too. Cleiber is well rounded. There he is in the photo below with Ricco Rodriguez. Ricco is on the left and weighed about 300 lbs at the time (July 1999).

  Jiu-jitsu fighters know they are missing something they need. The vale tudos against those big American wrestlers taught them that. Or rather, reminded them, because according to his brother Reyson, Rolls realized that he needed to work on his standing-up game after he failed to defeat the strong Cicero from Niterói and would have himself lost by takedown, if points were being scored (1). And he did work on his standing game, revolutionizing jiu-jitsu in the process. But stand-up is rather neglected in jiu-jitsu academies.　Most academies focus on what happens on the ground, rather than on how you get there. In a typical self-defense situation, against a large but unskilled brawler who is trying to decapitate you rather than avoid you to clinch, human anatomy and Newton’s Laws more or less ensure that the fight will indeed “end up on the ground”.

  The wrestlers showed it’s not always that simple (at least not in a vale tudo against an Olympic level wrestler twice your size). And so many people are competing now. The competition is intense. You need every advantage you can get. Jiu-jitsu fighters know it’s contraindicated to try to beat a wrestler at his own game, but it can’t hurt to have a few good wrestling moves yourself, for opponents who are not particularly strong at wrestling. That’s where Cleiber comes in. He is a “Fighting Sports Advisor”.

  One of his clients is his very close friend, Mário Sperry. Mário told me so. He also told me that Cleiber is his wrestling coach and he showed me a move he learned from Cleiber that he later used against Roberto Traven in the Abu Dhabi 2000 event. It looked like a pretty good move to me.  

  (Cleiber offered to introduce me to Mário in Rio. A lot of people offered to introduce me to a lot of people—Aloisio offered to introduce me to Helio Gracie—but usually not much came of these offers. They were sincere offers, undoubtedly. But something else always seemed to come up. Life is complicated and the future is just so unpredictable, you know. No matter. Sooner or later, one way or another, you met everyone, probably in an academy or at a tournament.  In the case of Mário Sperry, I met him at Gracie Japan, in Tokyo, where he was prepping Ricardo Arona for his April 20 Rings debut. I got the chance to roll with the Zen machine himself, too, sem quimono. Tough guy, for sure, but also very intelligent, and very articulate in English, not surprisingly, since he lived in England for two years when he was a kid, and went to the Anglo-American High School in Botafogo, the same school Rickson went to.

  Cleiber showed me how to do a wrestler’s double-leg, which differs somewhat from the way jiu-jitsu fighters do baianas. A baiana is what a double-leg would be if your opponent, instead of sprawling, was swinging for your head. Mechanically, it’s simple. It’s all in the execution, which is a matter of timing. Timing and commitment. Double-legs cannot be tentative. Tentative double-legs will get you flattened and back-mounted, or cow-catchered and Saturday-nighted, or guillotined. Or worse. You have to drive in when your opponent advances. (Obviously, in a street fight, if your opponent is not advancing on you, you don’t need to do anything at all.) Being able to sense when the moment is right and execute without thought is 90 percent of a double-leg. Keeping your spine straight is the other 10 percent (which you do by bending at the knees, rather than leaning forward). Cleiber also mentioned that it’s easy to avoid double-legs if that is your only goal, but it isn’t easy to attack and avoid them at the same time. Why don’t jiu-jitsu fighters work more on their takedown skills, I asked Cleiber. “They like jiu-jitsu”, was his answer.

1. As reported in Luca Atalla's excellent article "Rolls, the Legend of the Gracie Family", in Gracie Magazine, June 1999. Regrettably, I neglected to ask Reyson about this when I met him at Dojo Jiu-Jitsu