To the untrained eye, Silveira's classes do not look much like street-fighting lessons in progress. His students pair off and spend most of their time rolling around on the ground, trying to get into or break specific holds or locks. The takedown marks the only truly exciting part of the jujitsu fighter's repertoire, and it is usually accomplished in the wink of an eye. The rest of the time, they engage in a lot of clinching and clenching, grabbing, gripping, and grappling. You'll see the occasional flip or somersault, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Often Silveira's students look as if they're tenderly embracing. Only the sweat soaking their gis and the labored huffing and puffing give them away.
Glamorous it ain't. In fact, to the uninitiated, Brazilian jujitsu is downright boring to watch. Small wonder it was largely unknown outside of Brazil until the Gracie clan started proving their mettle on worldwide pay-per-view and videotape.
But don't let the absence of flying kicks or multiple-brick-bashing exhibitions fool you. Even lowly blue belts (white belts are for beginners, followed, in ascending order, by blue, purple, brown, and black) can defend themselves handily. Forget to tuck an elbow or extend a leg properly, and even a relative newcomer will make you pay. Silveira, clearly proud of his charges, revels in the tale of a 280-pound cop who dropped in on his class recently, intent on throwing his weight around. The instructor matched him up with a 160-pound blue belt and let them have at it.
"Everybody says, 'Hell, man, 280 pounds against 160? Is too much,'" Silveira fondly recalls. "I told the guy to punch, slap, squeeze, whatever. Thirty seconds later, the 160-pound guy was squeezing his neck, getting his arm, toying with him." Silveira's younger brother Marcello, who is smaller than Marcus but mongoose-quick and a black belt in Gracie jujitsu as well, has been known to humble an outsized opponent or two.
For all his cocksure confidence in Gracie jujitsu's dominance, however, Silveira is surprisingly low-key and soft-spoken when he talks about anything else. He may have served a three-year stretch as a paratrooper in the Brazilian special forces, during which time he had his brawny arms and legs embroidered with a patchwork of ferocious-looking tattoos, but Silveira is all soft coos and proud papa smiles when he cradles his infant son, Jeiko, in his beefy hands. The contradiction is striking; the conflicting images hard to reconcile. The doting family man (in addition to three-month-old Jeiko, Silveira and his wife, Grace, live with their two-year-old son, Joshua, and nine-year-old daughter, Jessica, in North Miami Beach) gently rocks his baby while he dispassionately discusses his prospects for participating in a no-holds-barred cage match to be staged by national cable network ESPN.
"When people try to be nasty with me, I try to avoid problems," he notes. "I don't mess with nobody. I'm so quiet. I don't look for any problems. Thank God I never had any problem with anyone with my family, because that kind of point I don't even talk to you. I'm gonna send you straight to Jackson." Silveira never has had to put his knowledge to use to defend himself in a street fight or barroom brawl, although it did come in handy during his stint as a bouncer at the Kitchen Club on Miami Beach from 1990 to 1992.
"It was my first job in the United States," Silveira recalls. "I didn't hit people over there, but sometimes I had to put people to sleep. Is much better than punching. When you wake up, you gonna feel much better than if I punched you. Of course, I gotta know how to do it, because I can kill you. I can just cut your air, and you gonna die in about 30 seconds. But most of the time you just say, 'Hey, it's time to leave. No talk. Let's go.' And it works."
The toughest man in Florida turns reflective for a moment. "You gotta make some kind of agreement with God, you know? Like he let you have something in your life that if you gonna use it against people, you gonna have to pay back. I know the things I can do, so I try to avoid all the ways that I can. To take me to the other step like I'm gonna fight, you gotta really piss me off. You gotta give me a good reason. Otherwise I don't cut your face. I don't break your nose. I just put you to sleep. I got tools in my hands that I can be so bad to you or I can treat you nice. With the knowledge I have acquired I can do whatever I want."
Mortal Contact premieres tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 at the Astor Art Cinema, 4120 Laguna St, Coral Gables; 443-6777.
