“Mestre” Rafael Cordeiro, one of mixed martial arts’ top trainers, returned home to Brazil a couple weeks ago to put the finishing touches on the latest training camp for arguably his most impressive fighter.
Compared to Cordeiro’s other pupils who flourished under his guidance since the end of his competitive fighting days in 1999, that’s no small statement about the success and skill of late-blooming revelation Fabricio Werdum.
Werdum, 38, stands ready to anchor UFC 198 this Saturday in an event that stacks up as the biggest celebration of MMA Brazil has witnessed in its long history of watching these types of contests.
In many ways it’s fitting that Curitiba’s Arena da Baixada – a 42,000-seat soccer venue that sold-out in nine hours – will host the UFC’s first stadium event in South America. Based on the collective legacies of fighters like Cordeiro, who rose from the city’s impoverished areas to create a future for themselves inside the fabled Chute Boxe Academy, the people of Curitiba deserve such a fistic spectacle to honor their own.
From of the hardest of the hardcore in mixed-fighting – then known as “no-holds-barred” contests sometimes featuring up to four bouts a night in demanding single-elimination tournaments – the likes of Cordeiro, Anderson Silva, Jose ‘Pele’ Landi-Jons, Wanderlei Silva, Chris ‘Cyborg’ and ‘Shogun’ Rua asserted themselves under the Chute Boxe banner.
They brought their style to the best in Brazil. Then they brought it the best in the world.
For several years Chute Boxe sat atop the sport during a legendary run in Japan’s seminal Pride Fighting Championship.
The first time I saw Chute Boxe fighters in person was on the streets of Tokyo. Wanderlei Silva was set to fight Dan Henderson a couple days later, on December 23 2000, at Pride 12. He walked alongside a handful of men, including the team’s founders Rudimar Fedrigo, and Cordeiro, who then and now smiles more often than not.
Silva, a brooding light heavyweight, made me nervous with a quick glance from underneath his hoodie. It didn’t seem implausible that like a leashed jaguar out for exercise he could snap.
That fight with Henderson is among the most vicious I’ve seen in person.
Pride 12 featured representatives from the major branches of Brazilian MMA: Vale Tudo (Muay Thai and Brazilian jiu-jitsu), Luta Livre (“free fighting” rooted in catch wrestling and judo) and, of course, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, the famous familial art derived and evolved from judo.
In Brazil, anything went, bare knuckles and all. Chute Boxe fighters relished these circumstances until the action became popularized and they needed to adapt their tactics to fit more structured boxes.
By the time Anderson Silva left Chute Boxe in 2003 following a contractual dispute with the team’s management arm, the school had come to represent a pioneering force in MMA.
Far silkier a fighter than most of his old teammates, Silva was well served by striking out on his own, though some fans have not forgiven him for his divorce from Curitiba’s once dominant and fabled fight team.
Notwithstanding this week’s unfortunate news of Silva’s emergency surgery to relieve him from the excruciating pain of a burst gallbladder, the lineup for UFC 198 remains loaded with 14 Brazilians, including well-known and about-to-be discovered fighters with Chute Boxe ties.
As the UFC raises the profile of mixed fights in Curitiba, MMA in Brazil has become more homogenous and an accepted part of the culture than ever before.
That evolution also means most gyms tend not train like Cordeiro and his squad did when they went about their business in the 1990s.
By current standards, though, Cordeiro’s facility in Huntington Beach, California, still keeps it rough.
Fighters at Kings MMA spar full-go twice a week, and whatever magic he instilled in his top fighters has undoubtedly soaked into Werdum and another current UFC champion, lightweight Rafael dos Anjos.
For all of Werdum’s ability as a fighter, his status as UFC heavyweight champion, and his charisma outside of the cage, ‘Vai Cavalo,’ the ‘go horse,’ would not be the man many Brazilians think of first to headline the UFC’s third massive arena show since 2015.
Hailing from Porto Alegre, a short flight south from Curitiba, Werdum claimed his spot in the main event ahead of icons like Anderson Silva, Vitor Belfort and Chute Boxe’s powerhouse female fighter Cris Justino, who makes her long-awaited UFC debut on the undercard.
He has held up well in that role.
Eleven months ago, Werdum (20-5-1) put together a superlative effort to topple Cain Velasquez in Mexico City, and after an aborted rematch, the 6ft 4in multiple-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion will finally attempt the first defense of his belt against the American Stipe Miocic (14-2), a formidable 33-year-old boxer-wrestler.
During five-plus years under Cordeiro’s guidance, Werdum went from a relatively uninspiring mixed martial artist to one with the capacity and wherewithal to dominate.
No heavyweight in UFC history has defended the title more than two consecutive times, an indication of the parity and danger that exists when skilled big men square off in the Octagon.
If any fighter is poised to break the mold it’s Werdum, who in 2010 became the first mixed martial artist in nearly a decade to topple Russian great Fedor Emelianenko.
The truth about Werdum is that, after venturing into martial arts for the first time after the age of 20, he won everything he set his mind to.
Should that happen again, and again, Curitiba will celebrate, and debates over Werdum’s place on Cordeiro’s list of star students would be settled, shifting the discussion to where he stands among MMA’s all-time best heavyweights.
