Issue 057
December 2009
Americans view the USA as the Great Melting Pot, the Land of the Free founded by immigrants looking for a better life where all are created equal.
LEADING MAN
Ricardo Liborio
American Top Team Co-Founder
The American Top Team co-founder, Ricardo Liborio, exemplifies this view, heading up a team where fighters from Brazil, Cuba and even Canada carry the ATT flag into battle.
It has been a long but successful road for Ricardo Liborio. Libo (as many of his students refer to him) won the Mundial (aka BJJ World Championship) in 1996, also picking up the medal for most technical fighter. In April 2000 Ricardo co-founded the Brazilian Top Team, one of the most dominant teams in the history of Pride FC. Ricardo himself picked up a draw in MMA in 2001 before focusing on exclusively training fighters. In 2003 he co-founded ATT with Marcus ‘Conan’ Silveira (his right-hand coach) and Dan Lambert. Ricardo’s humble nature and fatherly personality blossomed at the Coconut Creek location, a facility literally every fighter refers to as “school” instead of “gym” or “team”.
Several Brazilian fighters moved to Florida with Ricardo, including current Dream lightweight champion Gesias ‘JZ’ Calvancante, Sengoku middleweight champion Jorge Santiago, and Thiago ‘Pitbull’ Alves (who recently fought for the UFC welterweight title). Ricardo is too modest to talk about how he has adapted BJJ to MMA, instead focusing on the contributions of the other trainers in the team, including 1976 Olympic gold medalist (boxing) Howard Davis Jr and Muay Thai coach Ouali Mohammed. This core group of fighters has since grown, at last count, to 25 UFC vets. One might think all this success could have gone to the head of Ricardo, but his humility is demonstrated when he constantly credits other trainers and even students, such as stating that Jorge Santiago’s progression started “when Ouali Mohammed came over here and started working more on his defense, his stand-up and striking”, or with Bellator middleweight champion Hector Lombard: “The whole, entire team helps him prepare”.
Having a conversation with Liborio is like a jiu-jitsu match, or better, a lesson with a true master. Just as a competitor might try to pass his guard only to be swept and submitted, Ricardo directs a conversation away from his personal accomplishments and focuses on the philosophy of the school.
“The team is not me, or Dan or Conan. The team is not one person,” states Liborio. “There are people here who have never put on a glove before who feed their families with American Top Team, take care of their kids with American Top Team, and pay their rent with American Top Team. That is the entire motivation behind American Top Team. My motivation was these people came to me and I have to look after this thing. I’ve got to find a way to make this successful. We have to survive to be independent for everybody. That is the whole concept of American Top Team. It is not one, two or three people; it is everybody. What do I know about striking? How do we get to the next level in wrestling? You need guys who know the next level. It is always going to be ‘us’, never one person. This is how ‘we’ feed our family. We all have the same surname: ‘American Top Team’.”
This perspective was put to the test earlier this year when Ricardo’s second daughter was hospitalized. Ricardo recalls, “In December, 15 days after her birthday, she went blind and the doctors misdiagnosed it. She had pressure in her brain which put pressure on the optic nerve and she went blind. The doctors saved her life. It was a matter of two more weeks and she’d die from the pressure on the brain. She had two surgeries and they reconstructed the skull. We didn’t know what would happen, if she would come out talking or walking. I was praying ‘just please don’t let her die’. If not for my background in martial arts, where I believed you should not quit, I would have been devastated. I could not be a depressed, miserable person because I could not fix the problem; I had to keep going. There has to be a God. I am not a religious person but there is something more, that I do believe. It was a big turning point where we have to be successful.”
During this time the rest of the team came together to help Mike Brown prepare for his title defense, and Thiago ‘Pitbull’ Silva fight Georges St Pierre for the UFC welterweight title. At that time Brown said “Even if there were no coaches, there is so much talent in that room you are going to get good,” while Alves stated, “We are number one not because of one guy, but because we are a group.”
Ricardo, like a true BJJ master, is both philosophical and patient. “This is something to be said, that there is always a tomorrow. You can lose, you can be smashed, but you can keep going because there is always a tomorrow. There is no pain that is endless. I believe this and it is why I wake up every day with motivation to deal with problems. Fall down, back up, and let’s go.”
