| Ultimate Fighter: Team Mir Profile - Vinny Magalhaes |
As far as defining moments go, February 24, 2007 was an important one for 23-year-old Vinny Magalhaes. That was the night he
watched his training partner Dan Henderson avenge a loss against PRIDE middleweight champion Wanderlei Silva to claim the organization’s 205-pound title. He remembers that famous left hook that Hendo threw, and the cathedral hush that came over the crowd as it landed, followed by the subsequent roar.
More pointedly, he remembered there was a crowd. That alone was something he wasn’t accustomed to.
“After watching that show live I wanted to be in the cage or in the ring,” says Team Mir’s second overall pick on the Ultimate Fighter. “When you’re a Jiu-Jitsu competitor there are like six rings, six matches going at the same time—no one knows where you are. Sometimes you end up in the Worlds, and people come up and ask ‘were you in the Worlds?’ So, when you’re fighting MMA, it has all that tension and everyone knows where you are.”
And now people are zeroing in on just what the young “Pezao”—Vinny’s nickname, which means “Big Foot” in Portuguese—is capable of.
Though Magalhaes had already fought Chris Larkin in a Gracie Proving Ground contest (ending in a no contest), his catharsis to be more than just a mere Jiu-Jitsu champion came alive that night. It was time to expand into a well-rounded fighter. And besides, when he saw Nick Diaz submit Takanori Gomi by way of a perfectly executed gogoplata that same night—a submission move he knew all too well—he had a hunch that this was more than a pipe dream.
Magalhaes, who was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, moved to the United States in 2005 to work as an instructor at Cesar Gracie’s in San Francisco. He came down from there expressedly to help Henderson train for his second fight with Kazuo Misaki.
Well, one week with Team Quest led to two, which led to three. Before Vinny knew it, he was living in Southern California, combing the beaches with his shirt off and training with guys like Jesse Taylor, Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou and Team Mir teammate, Krysztof Soszynski.
But, his primary thing was helping prep Henderson for his upcoming fights the way a hungry young Larry Holmes readied Muhammad Ali for his big bouts in the early 1970s.
Just as Holmes did, Magalhaes relished the opportunity to stand in against—if even in the shadows of—the future Hall of Famer while picking up some wrestling and striking techniques along the way.
“Ryan Parsons, who was then the head coach at Team Quest, asked me if I wanted to move down and train and become a professional fighter,” he says. “So I decided to move because with Cesar I was just an instructor, and I was too young at 21—I didn’t want to be a full-time instructor. It was a great chance for me to teach fewer Jiu-Jitsu classes and train more.”
When the BJJ black belt Vinny says Jiu-Jitsu it sounds more like jeesoo—“when I started with jeesoo, I wanted to be a champion in jeesoo.” That’s because his English is still a little bashful behind that native Portuguese tongue. But there’s nothing bashful about his Plastic Man grappling ability, which he displayed in his first-round submission (gogoplata-turned-armbar) of Jules Bruchez on the show.
“It looks uncomfortable to bend that way, but it’s really not,” he says. For him anyway; for Bruchez it looked like it hurt.
If nothing else, that little showcase was to prove his ground game was as good as advertised. After all, four gold medals, three world championships including the Pan Am in 2002, the Brazil Nationals in 2005, and the No Gi in 2007 can’t be wrong.
“Yeah, I have a big resume in Jiu-Jitsu,” he says, adding that Royce Gracie and Vitor Belfort inspired him into that world. “But my record in MMA isn’t good at all (2-2). Most of the guys in the house thought ‘he’s good at Jiu-Jitsu and nothing else.’ The consensus was ‘just don’t take Vinny to the ground and you can beat him up.’”
Whether that is true or not remains to be seen, but as far as Vinny’s concerned, go with what works, and make yourself ready for anything.
“I want to keep my Jiu-Jitsu sharp, that’s why I train with great guys,” he says. “These days I train with Forrest Griffin, he has great Jiu-Jitsu. I train with guys like Robert Drysdale, and Demian Maia when he comes to the States. I just train with top-notch guys. So my BJJ will always be my strong point, but I want to get stronger in other aspects too. I want to get my wrestling better, and I want to get my boxing better.”
But besides expanding the all-around
arsenal, he’s always looking to heighten—some would say fancify—his already expansive grappling.
“I’ve been working a lot on the rubber guard,” he says. “I learned it from watching Eddie Bravo videos. He may not have been a great competitor, but he’s a great instructor.”
Oh yeah, that’s another thing—Vinny isn’t afraid to speak his mind. Though he refutes ever saying his Jiu-Jitsu was superior than Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira’s on the show—“there were cameras on us 24/7, if I’d said that they’d have caught it”—he is pretty quick to point a finger at the one man he thinks started the rumor about him having a soft chin.
“Krysztof,” he says flatly, indicting his Team Mir teammate. “I’m pretty sure that he started that rumor. Nobody else ever saw me fight before that. It had to be him.”
And having made it to the semi-finals on TUF 8, Vinny’s chin will be accessible again for the next guy to test it. It’s all part of the sport, he says, and he hopes his exposure on the show ends up giving him a shot like the one Dan Henderson got against the Axe Murderer nearly two years ago. A big title fight under the lights with the world watching.
“That’s the thing—I don’t want to be another 205er. If I’m fighting, I’m fighting to be a champion, not just another guy in the game just to make money at it. That’s my goal in MMA.”
| " | “I’ve been working a lot on the rubber guard,” he says. “I learned it from watching Eddie Bravo videos. He may not have been a great competitor, but he’s a great instructor.” |
