I had noticed that many jiu-jitsu players had some kind of special relationship to pit bulls, to fighting dogs. They would often have tattoos of a favorite dog, and many gyms and gis had a cartoon of a pit bull on them; it was the old symbol for Gracie jiu-jitsu. I asked Scotty about it one day, and he put me onto a friend of his, Escorrega. A small, slender Gracie Barra black belt with excellent English, Escorrega had been Scotty’s original connection in Brazil. He had spent a lot of time in the United States and was working on his “extraordinary person” visa. He was also an expert on cockfighting and dogfighting. Escorrega’s family was from Minas, a farm town to the south, and for five generations they had been breeding cocks; Escorrega himself had been in dogs for ten years. There are two basic types of cocks, just as there are two types of dogs (although there are endless bloodlines and families): One hits harder and tires more quickly; the other has endless stamina but doesn’t strike as hard. Escorrega, in dogs and cocks, always preferred the ones that hit harder. Escorrega’s real love is not the cocks but dogfighting, and he educated me for hours, his English fluent and filled with “dudes.” He got angry with how fighting dogs are demonized: “Fighting dogs are not dangerous to humans, dude.” When a dog fights, he explained, there are usually three people in the pit, the two trainers and the referee; and if the dog wants to bite a person, it will leave itself open to the other dog and get killed, or the handler will kill it. Fighting dogs who bite people are not bred on. Of course, there are always assholes and drug dealers who get good fighting dogs and torture them and teach them bad habits, but that’s not a true fighting dog, and those dogs don’t fight well. “Anything in a bad person’s hands can be a weapon,” he said. But the trainers, the real ones, are good people, and have regular lives and kids in college and baseball practice and church. The international centers for dogfighting are in North America, in the southern United States and in Mexico. Escorrega was careful about using real names, but he told me that he lived with one of the greatest dog breeders in the world in the United States. The dogs are bred in attempts to find that perfect balance of hard biting and stamina—but the most important trait for a fighting dog, a trait that can breed true, is gameness. Gameness is a critical term to dogfighters, jiu-jitsu players, and fighters. It can be described as heart, as willingness to fight—a love of the fight stronger than a love of life. Some dogs don’t last for ten minutes in a fight before they want to quit, and some dogs will die before they quit. I mentioned an acquaintance whose family in Louisiana had been in fighting dogs when he was a boy. This person said that he was always looking for a dog that would fight past forty-five minutes. Escorrega nodded enthusiastically. “Not only heart, not just big lungs—what your friend was trying to say. People think we force the dogs to fight, but that’s not true. The dogs are not created in laboratories—they are bred from dogs who love to fight. They train and run and swim in a pool, work on a treadmill, bite rawhide pull toys to develop the neck and bite and shoulders. They have a good diet, good carbohydrates, good fats, protein, creatine, vitamins, massage.” He smiled knowingly. “What your friend was talking about? All this care, you must love the animal, and if the animal loves you back, you will get a dog that fights past forty-five minutes, an animal with gameness. If there is love, the dog will fight to the death. Like everything, dude. Without it, the dog will not show heart. That’s why the crazy assholes, the bastards that mistreat their dogs, don’t have good fighting dogs. They have no love for their animals and no mercy for what they do. If you are fighting for something, you have to fight for what you love. If he doesn’t love you, he’s gonna quit. No one, no dog in the world, will fight for more than forty-five minutes without love and heart.” That’s the secret: It’s about love. ⸺ Sam Sheridan (2007), “A Fighter's Heart” (1st edition), The River Of January.