With a pained expression on his face, Minotauro performs the role of an anvil, before a full stadium and thousands of television viewers.
His adversary, heavier, hammers on the Brazilian.
With a bit of magic, and using the same technique he would use several times to no avail during the fight, he changes the scene and, without trying to extract revenge for all his pain and suffering, he sinks in one of his incredible submissions and gets the win.
The lines above can describe Saturday night’s fight, in the Mandalay Bay arena, in Las Vegas, against the giant Tim Sylvia, in the main event of UFC 81. But without a comma of changing, they can also describe several other Minotauro’s victories.
They could even be the metaphor of Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira’s life.
While watching the drama of Minotauro versus Sylvia, it was impossible not to be reminded of August of 2002, in the National Stadium in Tokyo, when 90 thousand people were overtaken with emotion as the hammer Bob Sapp punished the anvil.
Nevertheless, after trying the same move of going from the guard to the back on several occasions, he finally executed one successfully; he gets on top and stretches out the arm with the girth of a tree trunk of the former American football player weighing over 170kg.
(For those that haven’t seen it, don’t believe it or have forgotten, check out the epic struggle by clicking here)
In November of 2003, the drama would repeat itself with Mirko Cro Cop. The technique was attempted without success, this time, it was the takedown known as the double leg.
The expression of suffering was repeated, the knockdown came, but Rodrigo went back in to achieve the take down in the opening moments of the second round and ended submitting the Croatian with an armbar.
(Minotauro's happy ending you can see by clicking here)
All the emotion was brought to his home nation of Brazil on the popular Sunday program Fantastico, represented in Japan by Gloria Maria.
So what were the differences between that episode and the one we followed last Saturday evening?
This time, the one to catch up with Minotauro was Globo’s printed news (the biggest newspaper in Brazil sent a reporter to the event). Ary Cunha was the reporter chosen to spend carnival in Las Vegas, and he certainly yielded a story of this artist whose work imitates life.
For a journalist, how can one not be impressed by the fact that the suffering, the drama and overcoming we’ve witnessed in Nogueira’s fights is paralleled in his own childhood, when he was run over by a truck and spend months in hospital in between life and death, before turning the tides and submitting the accident?
Minotauro’s fight on Saturday was worth the interim belt among the heaviest of the greatest MMA event on the planet, the UFC.
Even there, there is a coincidence.
If this time the adjective interim was used because the organization still hopes champion Randy Couture will step into the octagon, back in 2003 Minotauro also wrangled the interim belt of the greatest event of that time, Pride, whose champion, Russian Fedor Emelianenko, was also playing hard to get.
The move he tried several times unsuccessfully was not the one he used on Sapp, neither the take down he eventually achieved in Cro Cop, but he did insisted in one this time again:
It was a sweep from half guard that seemed suicidal, for beating he would be exposed to.
And it was executed so masterfully that the massive Tim Sylvia acted like dead weight, sailing over the Brazilian till his back was to the canvas, at the mercy of Minotauro’s famous Jiu-Jitsu submissions.
At the press conference, the “O Globo” reporter didn’t beat around the bush and pressured the Pat Miletich trained giant:
“The fight’s conclusion was proof of Jiu-Jitsu’s hegemony. What do you think of the style?”
“I hate Jiu-Jitsu,” Sylvia fired back.
But, before the answer could take a tone of arrogance or bitterness, he added that he would go back to the mid-west, hunt, and… work on his Jiu-Jitsu!
Meanwhile, still with his eye cavities swollen nearly shut, Nogueira handles the UFC belt, becoming the first athlete to have managed the maximum prize in both of greatest organizations in history (Pride and the UFC).
And he carries on, with the promise of bringing more drama, more art, more history.
Minotauro’s destiny truly is predetermined.
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Click here to read UFC 81 coverage.
