“There’s a big misconception about how to win a chess game. If you have material or a positional advantage over a world-class opponent, it doesn’t mean you’ve won. You don’t just take a winning position and win it. A good defensive player can always swat away lunges for the throat.” I have always been amazed at the opportunities for defense that chess contains. Things may look bad but, if you look hard, you can often find some piece that can save you.
“The way to win a game like that involves maintaining and increasing the tension. The person who makes the first break, who releases the tension, it’s going to go against them, partly because they’ve broken the tension and now the other guy has the first move to exploit the new play dynamic.”
In his chess tutorial, Josh talks about “cat and mouse.” When a cat stalks a mouse the tension mounts as the mouse sees the cat coming. They are frozen, staring at each other, but the cat is comfortable, relaxed in the tension; “present” is the word Josh favors. The mouse is not, and it leaps first when the tension becomes unbearable. The cat reacts with the advantage of seeing which way the mouse is running.
“If I have a slightly better position, and I’m improving my position, then all the tactics are hovering like potential energy. I’m increasing the tension. And so are you. The tension mounts and there will come an inevitable explosion point, when the character of the game shifts. From abstract plans to precise calculations . . . usually whoever is in the worst position has to make that shift happen.
“What’s interesting is that pretty much without exception there’s a psychological component that is parallel. The tension is mounting on your brain, and on mine, the complexities and wildness. In a big game against a world-class player it feels like your brain is in a vise. The stronger player is better able to maintain and be at peace with the tension . . . they convert it into peace.” Josh calls this ability
presence
. Just like the cat.
“In the mounting tension, eventually it has to explode, and in that moment everything hangs—you can be incredibly close to winning but also losing. Just a slight miscalculation or overconfidence can lose in that moment.
“You can see that tension in jiu-jitsu, when a guy goes for a submission too early and the other guy escapes. You’re in cross sides, and he’s rolling away from you and you’ve got the kimura grip on his top arm, so there’s an armbar there. But it’s not super-tight and a lot of guys can escape from there. So instead you hook the arm and play against his neck and increase the tension, make him roll onto his stomach, make him give you the armbar . . . so you convert with the double attack, increase the tension, and win. Or you lunge for something and maybe he escapes and reverses you.”
A fighter friend of mine named Chad George does something he calls the Gumby guard pass—he lies in your guard, on top of you, like a fish, loose and completely relaxed. But he’s poised to explode, and he waits for you to try something, some sweep, or a submission, and then he explodes. It’s hard to outwait the opponent; when I try it, my inclination is to get moving and try something. But the key is to wait, wait, wait for the guy on bottom to commit to something, and then explode in the opposite direction. Chad exploits that exact tension.
Josh continued.
“There’s some real simple similarities, too, like the two ways to beat someone else who has a good game. Either you squelch his game, shut it down, or you push it and overextend it. Most people tend to squelch—if he’s fast then slow him down. But the other way is to get him to run out, run his game too fast for him to control. In Taiwan, I gave my opponent the feeling in critical moments that his power was overwhelming.”
I was reminded of Pat Miletich; sometimes the best way to beat a guy is to go into his strengths, not his weakness, to go where he doesn’t expect you, where he feels so confident he’s vulnerable. If you can get him to show a weakness, a flaw, a tiny crack in his strength—like Gable said, “loosen that wire in his brain.”
Josh laughs. “In terms of the pysch-out game, chess was so hard and so highly developed that martial arts seems easy. I mean, these guys are great athletes, even incredible, but the mental pysch-out game is so much less developed. They can be dominated, pressured.”
The way to survive and thrive under that pressure is through presence. Josh wrote in
The Art of Learning
:
In every discipline, the ability to be clearheaded, present, cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre . . . if one player is serenely present while the other is being ripped apart by internal pressures, the outcome is already clear . . . We cannot expect to touch excellence if “going through the motions” is the norm of our lives. On the other hand, if deep, fluid presence becomes second nature, then life, art and learning take on a richness that will continually surprise and delight . . . The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the board room, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage.
Josh is a close friend of Marcelo Garcia, and he says that Marcelo does jiu-jitsu with wonderful, pure tai chi in it.
“There’s the universal player versus the stylized player. Marcelo is stylized—he doesn’t study his opponent and shut him down. Instead, he expresses his game. He makes you play with him. A universal player observes the opponent’s rhythm and builds a game plan around it.
“Marcelo doesn’t talk in shades of grey. Everything is black and white.” Josh was with him at ADCC in 2007, and when he lost to Drysdale, Josh had talked to him about why. Was it that he needed more training against the darce (the choke Drysdale used, now much in vogue) or was it that he needed a game plan for long-armed opponents? Had Marcelo gotten too predictable with the single-leg takedown? “I need to be faster,” Marcelo said with a smile.
“I’m more of a grey-type of guy, so it can be frustrating, because at times he seems overly simple. But it’s incredibly powerful for him. In the chess world, there were plenty of guys like him who I envied, guys with pure clarity and no existential dilemmas, without angst.” Josh laughs. “I was all angst. I was a tortured soul, until I started to really learn to use my emotions, to channel and get them to work for me.
“People talk about Marcelo as if he thinks ten moves ahead, but I don’t think he does. People have the same misconception about strong chess players, that they see ten moves ahead. They don’t, but they know where to look. They think two or three moves ahead but in the right direction. The computer has to look at every legal move. So if there are forty legal moves, and then each of those moves has forty moves following, quickly the play goes into the trillions, right? The strong chess player only looks at two or three moves but because of his intuitive understanding, his pattern recognition, when he analyzes just those two or three moves he gains insight into the position. He thinks thematically. In chess, you don’t need to think of everything, just the
right
two or three moves, and you’re
golden
.
“Same with Marcelo. I don’t think he’s thinking that far ahead, but he’s a few moves ahead in the right direction. I’ve studied him closely, both his DVDs and as a human being, as a teacher and a training partner and a friend.
“That thing about how he gets the back from everywhere, that seat belt thing?” Josh is talking about Marcelo’s uncanny ability to “get the back” on opponents, to take a great position on their back. A universal experience of opponents rolling with Marcelo is they think they’re safe, and somehow he gets their back from a seemingly odd position. He does it with a grip he calls the “seat belt.” He reaches around you and starts cinching himself onto your back.
“It starts his squeeze. You think you’re passing his guard, but you give him a little angle, and he starts that seat belt thing and BAM he’s chest to back on you.
“His squeeze is deadly. But it’s not the pressure, it’s more the commitment, it’s always getting tighter. He even says ‘once it starts in, it never comes out.’ He tightens millimeter by millimeter, inching it in. You’re defending and think you’re okay but it’s never backing off, it’s just getting tighter all the time.
“He commits to the idea of never going backward, in terms of chokes. That seat belt squeeze that precedes the choke is trippy. It comes from all different places and starts and then pretty soon he’s got your back and he’s going to choke you without hooks in.
“But he’s always letting people out in practice, especially guys under him. He plays in transition. It’s very important. His whole life is spent in transitions. He’s a ball, but when you roll with Marcelo sometimes it feels like you’re very close to getting a position, and then he rolls out and you’re not quite there. He’s the purest tai chi I’ve ever seen, deflection, letting attacks roll off. Everything tai chi is supposed to be, that’s what Marcelo is doing.”
Before meeting Josh, I thought about what happens to a fifteen-year-old kid who has had a movie made about his life. It could easily destroy someone. Josh writes that he had at first enjoyed the attention, especially from girls, but then it had gradually derailed his chess career. He’d play tournaments and the organizers would pull out a life-size poster of the movie and stand it next to him. Grandmasters would come after him with long knives. Lesser fame than that has ruined lives; the narcissism that celebrity seems to generate can cripple people.
I had noticed a similar thing at Harvard, on a smaller scale. Kids finish high school, seventeen or eighteen, and right at that moment of learning their place in the world they get into Harvard and their inflated sense of self-worth (that most teenagers have) is validated.
I am that great
. A friend of mine married a movie star who was on the cover of
Time
magazine when she was eighteen. Miraculously, she recovered, a testament to her intelligence and wisdom. And also grit—there’s an essence of grit to fight through something like that. You have to get down and dirty and battle with yourself.
I am just like everyone else
.
My work can be great but I’m nothing special.
If you don’t win that one, you’re finished as an artist, a student, a fighter. Josh won that battle, maybe his most important fight.
Josh is no asshole. He had fantastic parenting or his own internal compass saved him (or maybe both) because he walked away from chess when it started to make him miserable and dove into tai chi—and he rode that out until he won a few world championships in Taiwan. He came up for air, wrote a book, looked around, and saw Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and that took him back to square one. He really
is
that kid from the movie: he’s managed to dodge bullets of fame and celebrity. And that is a testament to his intelligence as much, or more, than any annotated chess game or book. He genuinely wants to help people see and learn what he’s learned.
Josh and I got along smoothly, each cloaked in honesty. Both of us, to a certain degree, hide in plain sight. He’s a good dude, mellow and friendly, although intensely competitive and driven beyond belief in his chosen areas. He’s got a lot of gameness, as a little kid on the beach his sister would set him to cracking coconuts and he’d be at it, doggedly, for hours, while she sunbathed.
We talked about innate ability, how a six-year-old gets drawn to chess, and he said, “There are a lot of people who could do it . . . maybe not everybody, but you’d be surprised—a lot of different minds, if taught in a way that used the natural strength of that mind, could be great at chess.”
With goals like that in mind, Josh writes and thinks and clarifies his world, and he wants to make it a better place.
Once a simple inhalation can trigger a state of tremendous alertness, our moment-to-moment awareness becomes blissful, like that of someone half-blind who puts on glasses for the first time. We see more as we walk down the street. The everyday becomes exquisitely beautiful. The notion of boredom becomes alien and absurd as we naturally soak in the lovely subtleties of “banal.” All experiences become richly intertwined by our new vision, and then the new connections begin to emerge. Rainwater streaming on city pavement will teach a pianist to flow. A leaf gliding easily with the wind will teach a controller how to let go. A house cat will teach me how to move. All moments become each moment. This book is about learning and performance, but it is also about my life. Presence has taught me how to live.
That’s where Josh ended up. He’s doing something right.
CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DESERT FOX
A shadowy figure lurks at the edge of the known MMA world. A coach, a trainer, a quiet unassuming man with a bald head, a thin blade of a face, a beard, and assassin’s eyes. I started seeing him everywhere, in every other corner, at big events, walking behind this contender or that champion, with no clear connection between the fighters except the man. His name started to circulate. Greg Jackson. Who was the dude? He had no MMA record at all. He wasn’t a former champ like Pat Miletich or a world-class jiu-jitsu player like Ricardo Liborio.
Jackson claims ten world champions (and, as of this writing, two UFC titleholders), and his grapplers have won all kinds of competitions. He is the first MMA trainer famous only for his product. His fight team has the “highest winning percentage,” so rated by some of the MMA Web sites, and his stable of fighters has fought on all the big shows—Pride, the UFC, and all the new upstarts. Fighters as disparate as George St. Pierre, Joey Villasenor, Rashad Evans, and Keith Jardine—fighters with no stylistic or otherwise observable connection—all train at his camp.
I knew Greg’s wrestling coach was Mike Van Arsdale, a superstar at Iowa State who’d been an Olympic alternate a few times and a formidable top level MMA fighter (Mike has since moved, for love, to Arizona). I’d heard about Michael Winkeljohn, his kickboxing guy who was an old-school ISKA standout, a multiple former champion. But Greg was a mystery.