- Mark Jacobs
- Aug 27
- 8 min read
NEVER STOP EVOLVING
Ricardo Liborio had spent most of the year preparing for a single match against grappling legend Mario Sperry at the Abu Dhabi Combat Club Submission Wrestling World Championship. Then, three weeks out, he fractured his wrist.
Nearly 20 years earlier, when Liborio was considered one of the best Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitors on the planet, his career had come to a similarly sudden halt.
It happened when a broken jaw and the 11 surgeries required to repair it had cost him almost two years of mat time, effectively ending his brief reign.
The Superfight with Sperry was to be the first foray back into competition in 14 years for the 49-year-old Liborio, so he wasn’t about to let a broken wrist get in the way.
“We’d drill light, and when he’d bump it, he would fall down in excruciating pain,” said Mike Brown, a student of Liborio’s and a longtime assistant coach for the American Top Team. “I thought there was no way he’d be able to compete, but he did. And he won. But he’s not like a normal guy — his skills were always legendary.”
Affair of the Heart
The legend of Ricardo Liborio began when he was just 14. He’d dabbled in judo, taekwondo and boxing before a meeting with a student of Carlson Gracie led him to Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
“He was the uncle of this girl I was dating,” Liborio said. “I was sort of short and thick, and he said I’d be good at jiu-jitsu so I should go to Carlson Gracie’s to start training.”
Gracie’s school in Rio de Janeiro has since assumed near-mythical status in the BJJ world based on the many champs who’ve come out of it, including Liborio and Sperry. Back then, the dojo contained several mat rooms: one that hosted the classes run by the late jiu-jitsu great Rolls Gracie, one where the majority of Carlson Gracie’s students trained — and then there was “Room 301.” Only members of Carlson’s competition team were allowed into that room.
“It didn’t matter what belt you were, you had to be selected to train in there,” said Liborio, who, by dint of practicing four to five hours every day, was elevated into Room 301 in less than a year. “It wasn’t for everybody. It was tough, very fast-paced. The pressure was the highest level you could get.”
Pressure Cooker
Liborio thrived on the pressure, continuing his manic training schedule through college. He’d get up early to run, then train at 7 o’clock each morning before taking classes at the university. For lunch, he’d spend another hour doing jiu-jitsu.
“Carlson understood my time was limited, but he never let me slack,” Liborio said. “He’d say, ‘You have to go train, you have to go compete.’ He knew I’d do the work because I was passionate about it.”
Liborio’s passion led to success, garnering him an entry in the first Brazilian jiu-jitsu world championship in 1996. There, he competed as a superheavyweight, two classes above his actual weight class, to exact revenge on Leo Castello Branco, one of the few who had beaten him in competition.
Liborio stormed through the division, taking first place and then making the finals of the open-weight division. He ended up bowing out to fellow Carlson Gracie teammate Amaury Bitetti.
“He was one of the strongest guys in the academy, and in the championships he executed the same way he trained — he was amazing,” said Bitetti, who is perhaps best-known to Americans for his matches in the UFC 9 and UFC 26. “But in competition back then, what prevailed was the law of Carlson Gracie, which was whoever had trained there longer takes it, so that was it.”
Having submitted nearly every opponent he faced that day, Liborio was selected for the Most Technical Black Belt award. Ironically, it was that consolation prize that launched him to real fame in the jiu-jitsu world.
Separate Ways
Not long afterward, with Carlson Gracie living in the United States and unable to train his senior students in Brazil, much of Gracie’s competition team — including Liborio and Sperry — broke off to form their own gym, which became known as the Brazilian Top Team.
Although the split led to some hard feelings, Liborio still credits his mentor for his own coaching success.
“He was always on top of everybody, motivating people, pushing the right buttons,” Liborio said. “Every personality requires a different motivation. Some people you push too much, and they drop out. Others, if you don’t push them enough, never achieve the higher levels. Carlson knew just the right buttons to push. One hundred percent I learned this from him, and it still motivates me to do what I do today.”
What Ricardo Liborio does today is coach, arguably, the most successful mixed-martial arts team in the world.
Jaw-Dropping Success
When his jaw injury curtailed his competitive career, Liborio initiated the transition from fighter to coach, working with Brazilian Top Team martial artists in Japan and America. In the United States, he met Florida businessman and MMA enthusiast Dan Lambert. Along with BTT members Marcelo Silveira and Marcus “Conan” Silveira, they decided to form their own fight team.
Liborio reached an amicable settlement with his old partners at BTT, giving them his share of the group in return for the right to use the “Top Team” name for the new and separate American Top Team.
The rest is history. The American Top Team gym has placed dozens of competitors in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. It now has more than 50 affiliate schools around the world, and its main facility in Coconut Creek, Florida, recently moved into a 30,000-square-foot building replete with dormitories where visiting fighters can live while prepping for matches. Most important, the American Top Team is the only MMA entity in the world to have two current UFC champions: welterweight Tyron Woodley and women’s bantamweight Amanda Nunes.
That success hasn’t come without controversy, though. Several notable American Top Team fighters have tested positive for banned substances in the past year. Liborio is quick to point out that he disapproves of such practices.
“In the end, it’s the fighter’s responsibility for what they put into their own body,” he said. “You ask them, and they say, ‘No, Coach, I’m not taking it.’ Then they test positive. Sometimes you feel like you’re wasting your words. But I believe the increased testing is going to save the health of fighters.”
Donations Welcome
Although his own approach to fighting is rooted in Carlson Gracie’s style of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Liborio has branched out to take an eclectic approach to martial arts.
“For someone who was a famous technician with a ton of credentials, he’s as open-minded as can be,” Brown said. “He will take information from anyone on the mat. Even if it’s a white belt who’s doing something good, he’ll stop and say, ‘Let’s go see what that guy’s doing.’”
Much of what Liborio teaches is based on the venue for which the athlete is training.
“The rules of jiu-jitsu are different from the rules of grappling, which are different from the rules of MMA, which differs from self-defense,” Liborio said. “You have to teach them what the main goal is for each one.
“However, with MMA, if I teach someone the main goal is simply to win, it would probably be the worst thing for his career because I’d make the guy a very boring fighter. With MMA, you have to turn heads and put people in the seats.”
In the early days of mixed-martial arts competition, there was the perception that head-turning techniques like high kicks were not effective because wrestlers and jiu-jitsu practitioners were dominating the game, frequently dragging strikers to the mat and submitting them. However, in recent years, MMA has seen a renaissance among strikers, with spectacular techniques like knockout head kicks becoming a staple of the fight sport.
Liborio credits this to natural evolution: Strikers were forced to learn grappling, and grapplers were forced to learn striking.
“It’s not that kicking wasn’t ever effective,” he said. “It’s just that fighters have now become more complete. They know how to kick fast and prepare their body to defend against the takedown afterward. When you know how to perform a takedown defense, you feel safer in executing your kick because you can reset yourself fast enough to not get caught by your opponent.”
Tech Talk
One thing that worries martial artists who train for self-defense, as well as the MMA fighters Liborio mentioned, is having their kicks nullified with a leg grab. To allay that concern, Liborio drew from the cross-training he’d done with wrestlers and developed effective defenses against the kick catch based on how the leg is being seized.
Should your opponent manage to catch your kick low on your leg — on the calf or near the ankle — Liborio said the best response is the “soccer-kick defense.” It entails placing one hand on the opponent’s neck to push him off so you can create space. Then you turn your back to him and thrust your leg away like you’re performing a soccer kick.
If the opponent catches your kick higher up near your knee, Liborio said you should consider the “motorcycle defense.” It involves overhooking the arm that’s grabbing your leg so you can loosen your foe’s grip, then pulling your trapped leg back and to the ground as if you’re kick-starting a motorcycle.
If it looks like neither option fits the situation, Liborio said you can always push your opponent’s head to the outside, then wrap an arm around his neck for a guillotine choke. (See the photo sequences for details.)
“Years ago, people didn’t know the whole game of fighting,” Liborio said. “But now you have to be willing to open your eyes and learn everything.” And while these kick defenses might not be part of your art, learning them can make your skill set more useful in self-defense.
Priorities in Life
While training for his comeback match against Sperry, Liborio placed his money where his mouth was with respect to learning new things. Knowing his opponent was a good wrestler with an excellent sprawl defense, Liborio spent time training with elite wrestlers.
An ace at analyzing top fighters, he also continued to update his ground game by familiarizing himself with the most current tactics. (Even if you’re unable to execute a certain technique like the rubber guard, he said, you still should learn it so you can defend against it more effectively.)
The match itself was almost anticlimactic. As per Liborio’s expectations, Sperry played a waiting game, looking to sprawl in response to a leg tackle so he could get behind his opponent. Liborio negated all Sperry’s attempts, ultimately earning the judges’ decision for superior aggressiveness.
“I knew he’d look to sprawl and go for a front head lock,” Liborio said. “I just kept pushing forward and applying pressure. I trained with so many high-level wrestlers to get ready for this [that] I got my butt kicked a lot of times, but I had so much pleasure training with my guys. I hadn’t taken time for myself like that since we started ATT.”
His own training wasn’t the only thing Liborio realized he needed to devote more time to. His daughter Bella, 9 years old at the time of this article, is visually impaired, and to provide her with better educational opportunities, Liborio decided to move to Orlando. Although he still maintains a hand in running the American Top Team, his priority is his daughter’s education — which, of course, includes Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
He’s also started programs to teach judo and jiu-jitsu to visually impaired children and is working with the Paralympics to make BJJ an official sport for the visually impaired.
If you have any doubts that Liborio is a master of time management, consider his current to-do list: seeing to the needs of his daughter, interfacing with the Paralympics, advising coaches and fighters at the Coconut Creek facility, and overseeing the opening of a new American Top Team center in Orlando.
Now add in preparing for another Superfight, this one at next year’s Abu Dhabi tournament.
“I’m always watching competition and doing research,” said Ricardo Liborio, perpetual student of self-defense.
“You can have set-in-stone principles that your martial art follows, but the techniques themselves will always be evolving. If you stop evolving in martial arts, you die.”
Photography by Cory Sorensen
