Caio Borralho sat in the corner of a São Paulo gym and glanced up at the clock on the wall. The time for the meetup was near, but there was no sign of his man yet.
Fighters filed in, ready for their training sessions. Behind them entered a smaller man. He didn’t strike Borralho as a fighter. Borralho wasn’t sure exactly who he was looking for, but this couldn’t be the guy.
“Are you Caio? Are you here to train?” he asked.
Borralho nodded and replied, “Yeah, I came to train.”
“Oh, yeah,” the man responded without hesitation. “Let’s go. You’re going to train with me.”
Borralho followed the man, questioning the decision making that led him to this point.
“With this guy?” Borralho thought to himself.
It was 2014 and a few weeks prior to the meetup with the man who would change the course of his life, Borralho asked friend and fellow fighter Bruno Murata how he could fast-track his striking game.
At that time, Borralho was solely a grappler. His standup game was novice, so Murata recommended a mutual friend, Pablo Sucupira, a muay Thai competitor and boxing specialist.
“What the f*ck? OK, I’m not going to go hard with this thin guy. I’m not going to hurt him his first day,” Borralho remembers thinking.
Wrong.
What surprised Borralho more than Sucupira’s unassuming appearance was the beatdown he dished out during their first training session. Borralho remembers peeling himself up off the mat, depleted after just a few minutes.
“Man, that was the biggest ass beating I’ve ever gotten in my life,” Borralho recalled.
Nerds unite
The hard training session that day marked the start of a beautiful bond between teacher and pupil. Initially, Sucupira had one foot in the boxing world and Borralho cross-training with Demian Maia’s team. But as time passed, Sucupira became Borralho’s go-to coach, and Borralho became Sucupira’s star student. Eventually, Sucupira turned his full attention to MMA and decided to start his own gym. Borralho, of course, went with him.
The Fighting Nerds team now consists of one dozen coaches and dozens more fighters. But at the start, there was just two men.
“The name of the fighter who started all of this was Caio Borralho,” Sucupira told MMA Junkie. “When he arrived in the team, he was very raw, yes. I started to work with him. I always had a different vision of the fight. He was one of the guys who truly believed in myself and my vision. He paid the price doing the different things that I proposed to him and the different way of fighting. Then things started to pay off.”
Their gym, formally named Combat Club São Paulo, was literally built with a hammer and a nail by Sucupira.
“I painted the walls,” Borralho told MMA Junkie, laughing. “We built a big ring. We put a big octagon, the same size as the UFC octagon. We built that inside the gym. We actually built that together.”
The team slowly gained more members. Maia’s grappling coach, Wagner Mota, jumped on board, but Sucupira wanted an MMA-centric mind too. So he sought out Flavio Alvaro, a Brazilian legend with more than 70 fights.
“He said, ‘Oh, Pablo. I don’t know. Maybe if you pay me a lot,'” Sucupira recalls. “I didn’t have any money. I said, ‘No, no, no, brother.’ I don’t have money. If you want to come, you have to believe in what we’re doing here. Because it’s going to be a bet. I promise you’ll have something. But now, we just have the athletes.’
“He went to our gym, and I spoke with him a lot about my vision. He met Caio and the other guys. By the end, he said, ‘Hey, I’m here for free. I don’t want any money. Let’s make those guys big stars and then I get some money.'”
Classroom mentality
The MMA landscape is full of “Pitbulls” and “Lionhearts.” Sucupira and Borralho refused trying to fabricate faux street cred. They were unapologetically nerdy.
Growing up, Borralho loved school. He taught math and chemistry to peers for money. Sucupira worked a desk job as a copywriter.
“Nobody (at work) gave me credit,” Sucupira said. “They said, ‘You’re too crazy. Your ideas are too wild.’ This hurt me a lot. I quit the marketing and just started fighting. But one day I needed to use that.”
One day he did use that marketing background in a monumental way. Brainstorming team names, he blurted out “The Fighting Nerds.” It was an instant selection.
“I was (immediately) like, ‘That’s the name. That’s the name that consumes everything,'” Borralho remembers.
Of all the Fighting Nerd branding angles, none is more distinct than the signature glasses sported by the fighters and corners, and even occasionally in-cage interviewers Joe Rogan and Daniel Cormier. Even the UFC, with its generally restrictive policy against props, approved the glasses after some convincing by Sucupira.
“In the beginning, they said no,” Sucupira said. “But what I told them is I’m not making any money. I’m not selling glasses. I don’t have a sponsorship with glasses. It’s just the logo of our team. It’s the wig of Paddy Pimblett or Khabib. It’s the same as the big wig that they use. So it’s the same. I just put the glasses on.”
Unanimously, the glasses were a hit.
“This is an easy gift to give to people and attach people to our team,” Sucupira said. “So The Fighting Nerd glasses show to the world that the fighters are smart, because they think when nobody can think. When you’re inside a fight, inside a cage, with another fighter trying to kill you, it’s hard to think inside there. The adrenaline is too strong. If you’re able to think in that situation, you are one of the smartest guys in the world. This is what the glasses represent, that we think when nobody can think. We think when bullets are being fired.
“The Fighting Nerds are the most intelligent guys in the world, because they think when they are throwing kicks, throwing punches inside the cage.”
Sucupira buys hundreds of pairs of lens-less black plastic glasses at a time. The signature piece of tape on each pair, Sucupira adds by hand.
“Just for this fight, I brought 350,” Sucupira said with a big grin. “… We make them. I bought just the glasses and then put the tape here. We keep the whole day doing it. It’s like therapy.”
The best thing about the glasses, explained Borralho (who admits he wore taped glasses in high school), is how it’s shown them how much they are respected across the globe after years being ridiculed for their name and appearance on the Brazilian regional scene.
“When I am in the (UFC Performance Institute), guys from other teams go, ‘Oh, give me a glasses,’ and they put the glasses on,” Sucupira said. “The most impressive thing, in Brazil, we had a fight. We fought, and our fighter won the fight, but the other guy went to our locker room and asked for a glasses, a Fighting Nerd glasses. He said, ‘I lost the fight, but can I have a Fighting Nerd glasses?’
“I thought, ‘This is bigger than the team.'”
Not f*cking leaving
The Fighting Nerds breakthrough moment finally came in 2021. Seven years after the journey began, Borralho received an offer to compete for a UFC contract on Dana White’s Contender Series.
In Sucupira’s coaching methodology, fighting is a problem needing to be solved. A proponent of formulating game plans specific to individual opponents, Sucupira instilled in Borralho a mentality of fighting smarter, not tougher.
“You have to find the best way to solve any problem,” Sucupira explained. “A fight is a big problem to solve.”
When Borralho fought Aaron Jeffery on the series, he solved the equation … but only part of it. The fight wasn’t exciting enough for Dana White, who passed on extending a contract offer.
The shuttle ride back to the hotel was quiet until Borralho perked up.
“Pablo, I’m not coming back,” Borralho said.
Sucupira replied, “How’s that, Caio? You have to come back.”
“No, I’m not coming back. I’m just coming back with the contract,” Borralho argued back. “I’m just going to train here.”
Sucupira texted Mick Maynard to inform him of the impromptu decision.
The response dots appeared. Maynard was typing.
“Awesome,” Maynard wrote back.
The gamble paid off. Maynard circled back a few weeks later and offered Borralho a short notice fill-in spot, up a weight class vs. Jesse Murray.
It was an easy yes. This time, however, the approach needed tweaking. Excitement was a necessary part of the equation.
“We knew that we needed to put on a show,” Sucupira said. “That was the way to solve that problem – and he did that. He put on a show.”
Borralho finished Murray in Round 1, and the UFC contract came, a massive moment for the entire squad of Nerds.
“I felt it was really hard to burst onto the scene,” Sucupira said. “But when we did that, it was a takeover.”
Nerd World Order
Three years later, it’s another milestone. Saturday’s UFC on ESPN 62 headliner between Borralho and Jared Cannonier will mark the team’s first main event.
The Nerds enter with a tremendous amount of momentum. Although Borralho is the unofficial captain, other clubhouse leaders have emerged. Fans have become attached to the fighters – and their personalities.
“Everyone is different,” Borralho said. “We see Carlos Prates. He smokes cigarettes and all this sh*t. He drinks a lot and other stuff. But when it comes about fighting, about studying, about putting a serious thing on the line, he’s one of the best. He trains his ass off. He’s very into it. Then we have Jean Silva, who is a crazy motherf*cker that barks, that talks sh*t a lot and other stuff. But when it comes about training, about fighting, about studying, he’s one of the hardest workers that I’ve ever seen.”
More than the glasses or their in-cage success, the team is tied by the message they want to send. It’s time for nerds to get their revenge – and inspire.
“When you think about a nerd guy, you always see a guy who wants to be the best in the class room,” Borralho said. “The nerd, if he’s going into a test and he took a B+, he would be upset. Like, ‘I wanted my A+.’ …We have a big message to inspire people. We’ve seen a lot of bully things happening in the world. A lot of this sh*t happening, it’s bully payback time.
“… Imagine a guy who suffers bullying all the time for being a nerd or wearing glasses or anything like that, and he sees big nerds fighting on the biggest stages of the world, fighting the baddest guys in the world and beating their ass. It’s really bully payback, so that really inspires them, not just to fight but just to be whoever they want. They have this powerful thing inside of them, just to overcome everything that happens in their life about bullying and other sh*t.”
Sucupira echoed, “We prove that you don’t need to be a bully to win fights. You don’t need to be angry to beat a guy. You don’t need to vibe in a bad way. We knock people out. We do bonus performances. But we do it in a love vibe. We do it liking each other.”
Beyond Borralho and the cigarette-smoking sniper Prates and the barking Silva, there’s Mauricio Ruffy, a powerful striker who already has fans buzzing after just one UFC appearance. There’s Bruna Brasil, who recently beat Molly McCann. There’s veteran Thiago Moises, who joined the team after years at American Top Team. There’s UFC lightweight Kaynan Kruschewsky.
Sucupira and Borralho say to also keep an eye out for unsigned prospects Icaro Brito, Geovanis Palacios, Natalia Alves, Felipe Douglas, and Fabricio Azevedo, who could make a splash in years to come.
“I’m more hungry. I’m more pumped,” Sucupira said. “I like to be the best that I can. Now we are in the UFC, I think we have the structure to go one step ahead also. You can expect a better Fighting Nerds each year, more guys, more performances, and you can count on that. In one or two years, you can count on a Fighting Nerd champion.”
Sucupira and Borralho constructed a gym. They crafted a mentality. They formed a team around them and built a culture. Borralho gets emotional reflecting on the journey now that it’s paying off.
“I’m always thankful because when we started this sh*t, we were like, ‘Maybe we’re just crazy guys who believe a lot in ourselves. Let’s see if this works.’ We didn’t know. We already knew, but we didn’t know,” Borralho said. “To see it all the way through and all that we have already accomplished and to see all that we will accomplish, because it’s just the beginning of the takeover.
“… Seeing everything changing: money perspective, fame perspective, sparring perspective. It’s crazy. It’s weird to think about how far we’ve come and how far we’re still going. It’s the first headliner, the first of many. I’m top 12 in the world, soon to be top five.”
And perhaps someday, Sucupira and Borralho will break out the hammers and nails once more – to hang up something special.
“We’ll put a big belt on the wall for sure,” Borralho said.
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC on ESPN 62.
