Ricardo Libório and the Meaning of Greatness

Ricardo Libório imparting his knowledge

There are names that are spoken of in hushed tones in gyms where men and women learn what it means to not give up. Brazilian jiu jitsu has its heroes; athletes who ascend to the pinnacle of the competition circuit or transition successfully into mixed martial arts. Their names are invoked in casual conversation when discussing how to set up a new technique or execute a match-ending submission. 

But there is a still higher pantheon of jiu jitsu masters. Their feats are near mythical and their abilities merge with their personas to cast a larger than life shadow across the whole of the sport. American Top Team founder Ricardo Libório is such a man.

Libório began his jiu jitsu career under the tutelage of the great Carlson Gracie, son of the founder of Gracie jiu jitsu. Due to his childhood background in judo and his facility for grasping techniques quickly, Libório became one of Carlson’s prize students. His reputation quickly spread as one of Carlson’s fiercest competitors in all of Brazil. Very early in his career, Libório was talked about by his trainer and many of his peers as possibly the greatest of his generation.  At the inaugural Brazilian jiu jitsu World Championships in 1996, Libório entered two weight classes above his usual division and dismantled the competition. He captured a gold medal in the 100 kg weight class, closed out the open weight division with his teammate Amaury Bitteti and was voted most technical competitor.

As Carlson's focus shifted increasingly to MMA in the mid-90s, Libório became one of the main instructors at the academy. He continued his competition success at the World Submission Wrestling Championships hosted by the Abu Dhabi Combat Club, taking third place in 1999 and second in 2000. The legend of his otherworldly skills only grew during this period as Libório would disappear from the academy for weeks or months at a time due to a full time job at a Brazilian bank. According to lore, he would come in on lunch breaks, change his clothes and tear through some of the toughest fighters in the world in minutes before re-robing and heading back to the office.

Following a schism with his trainer, Libório went on to found the Rio Jiu Jitsu Club and then later the Brazilian Top Team (BTT) with his old teammates. He became the primary jiu jitsu instructor at BTT, developing the grappling game of their MMA fighters while helping coach jiu jitsu competitors such as Fernando Margarida Pontes and Ricardo Arona to World Championships.

In 2002, Libório decided to pursue new opportunities in the United States, opening the American Top Team (ATT) with Dan Lambert and Marcus and Marcelo Silveira in Coconut Creek, Florida. Immediately upon arriving, Libório set about infusing the academy with his character of openness and always being willing to lend a hand to someone in need. Fighters dropping into ATT to train with the fabled master were shocked to meet such an affable gentleman capable of making them feel so helpless in training. His merciless pressure and technical precision on the mat became part of modern jiu jitsu folklore as high level competitors left training sessions doubting everything they ever knew about the art.

Not content to keep his knowledge bottled up, ATT expanded and Libório began spreading jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts knowledge through his students’ academies. Over the years, Libório has trained a who’s who of mixed martial arts champions, including UFC Welterweight Champion Robbie Lawler, Bellator Champions Will Brooks, Douglas Lima, Daniel Straus and Hector Lombard, WEC Champion Mike Brown, Sengoku Champion Jorge Santiago and WSOF Champion Jessica Aguilar. He has also trained grappling and jiu jitsu world champions such as Jeff Monson and Marcelo Garcia. In 2009, he was named the head coach of FILA’s US Grappling team where he successfully led the team to a gold medal in gi competition at the World Championships.

Shortly after the birth of his daughter Bella, jiu jitsu would come to take on a whole new meaning for Libório. When she was just a toddler, Bella was diagnosed with a cranial ailment that caused her to lose her eyesight. Following a harrowing ordeal of surgeries and rehabilitation, her father turned to the art that had defined his life to give his daughter an extra set of tools to interact with the world around her. Drawing on a mastery of the art few on earth have attained, Libório devised a methodology for teaching Bella jiu jitsu, focusing on vivid verbal descriptions and the close contact that characterizes the sport. After realizing success, Libório did what he’s always done: spread his knowledge to as many people as he could. He has since pioneered a special jiu jitsu program for blind children and made ATT one of the largest gyms in the US to cater specifically to paralympic combat athletes.

In the often ego driven world of fight sports, it can be a challenge to find someone who balances near superhuman abilities to impose their will with unrelenting generosity and kindness of spirit. Competitive or commercial success can draw anyone down the path of believing their own hype and becoming unapproachable and withdrawn. But those who have met him will testify that the mythical status Ricardo Libório enjoys is tempered by the fact that he is so adept at simply being a man.

Conor McGregor and the Winds of Change

Conor McGregor celebrating with his paymasters

The cult of personality around celebrities of any stripe is always unnerving. The idea that a particular talent gives one's words more weight or that being well known makes any expression of basic niceness a sign of amazing virtue has disquieting implications for what it means to be a social individual in our mass culture. It also shows how easily taken in we can be by a little charisma from someone corporations have elevated for the sake of enriching themselves. It is touching the royal robe taken to an absurd extreme.

More disturbing is the idea that celebrities, but particularly athletes, owe their fans a perpetual obligation. They literally give us their flesh, on fields, courts, ice, tracks, mats, rings and cages. For this, they are well compensated, to be sure, but that compensation is between employer and employee. It's hard to imagine the level of effusiveness toward their customers required in sports being asked of any other profession. In most other vocations, workers are asked to treat their customers with courtesy, but most importantly, to do a good job. Somehow in sports, watching the athletes perform can feel like we are participating (and because of the profit structures, in a sense we are). Through this quasi-participation we demand our pound of flesh, but we also demand a sort of deference that borders on servility. It is not enough that athletes, and fighters in particular, give us their bodies and receive payment for it, but we also demand they be grateful to us for allowing them to make that sacrifice. For all the glorious pretense of sport, there is still something deeply ignoble about earning money with one's body and so we insist on supplication to enforce illusions of status over people who are physically gifted.

In light of the grueling training camps and weight cuts fighters go through and the documented trends of severe social anxiety among those who choose beating and getting beaten as the best way to earn their daily bread, it seems they can be forgiven for not always being affable. Brooding over entering a cage to hurt or be hurt is a grim affair. The fighter who can approach it with enough aplomb that managing mass fan interactions is an easy assignment seems more suspicious, not less.

And more importantly, populists who give the media and fans the "corn," as Ali called it, can be mistaken for deserving more than they do in the naturally meritocratic fighting world. At this point, most people don't even debate that Conor McGregor should be in a title fight and when they rationalize how he managed to earn it, it's mostly promotional regurgitation. It is only the invincibility of Jose Aldo that has created this opportunity. McGregor's talent is real, but it is the loudness of his questioning Aldo's invincibility that has made the fight of interest. Due to the tactics employed, there have even, startlingly, been comparisons to Muhammad Ali, which tragically misconstrues the context of resistance to oppression in which Ali's performances operated.

In drawing Chad Mendes instead, the narrative changes to being more about Conor proving his worth, though the promotional engine would have one believe it's simply a coronation. Mendes represents a bulwark against the subversion of meritocracy in MMA in favor of base hype. A meritocratic rise to the top fueled by a pure love of combat is fairly sacred among fighters and some fans. It's one of the reasons why taking dives or easy fights is considered so deplorable as just performing for the money is insuffficiently transcendent to fit the metaphors we would graft onto watching people batter each other. Talking big and gladhanding fans is an equally reprehensible way to the top in some quarters, but fighters know how hardscrabble the business is, so few will object unless they feel overlooked or unless pressed by a relentlessly questioning media.

Conor McGregor is unique right now, but he's barely treading new ground. A victory over Chad Mendes, however the fight came about, will launch him into serious conversation in earnest, but until he accomplishes such a feat, the show he and the Zuffa promotional team are putting on should be greeted with skepticism. It may bode ill for the sustainability of our sport despite the short term spike in revenues it brings to a UFC that has gotten used to flash in the pan stunts in the wake of becoming a global brand. For McGregor's sake, I hope he's everything he claims to be. After UFC 189, we will at last be able to judge him based on what he's done rather than what we've been told. How fandom reacts or is reshaped by this bright and unexpected star may well impact the sport for some time to come.