“All In: Lessons On and Off the Mat”
By Mexchele Deuxlemarr with Alberto Crane
$9.99 Kindle, $16.73 paperback, Amazon.com
Please don’t do this, Santa Fe teenager Alberto Crane was advised. It doesn’t make sense.
This urgent counsel came not from cynics or naysayers but from friends and family, those who cared about him the most. And young Alberto was forced to admit they were right; it really didn’t make sense.
He did it anyway.
Regrets, 30 years later? Not even a few.
“There’s that quote … that most people lead lives of quiet desperation,” Crane said in a recent phone interview from his home in Los Angeles, “because they never go for their dreams. You have a choice. You can risk it. You can risk it all.
“… I’m grateful I chose to take that risk, because it didn’t make sense but I followed my heart.”
Today, Crane, 49, is an accomplished martial artist, fighter, businessman and instructor who has lived with multiple sclerosis the past 14 years. He’s the subject of a book, entitled “All In: Lessons On and Off the Mat,” about his life’s journey.
It has been a journey and then some.
Crane, as related by “All In” author Mexhele Deuxlemarr, was introduced to jiujitsu by a fellow employee — Amal Easton, who would become a lifelong friend and mentor — at Santa Fe’s Coyote Cafe.
Quickly, bussing tables became a lot less interesting.
So, at 19, Crane parlayed his savings from the restaurant into a plane ticket to Rio de Janeiro. Thoughts of joining the Navy or following his mother into formal education were left behind.
Brazilian jiujitsu would become his life. His career as a fighter and in the business of martial arts, his marriage to Edit, parenthood, all flowed from that giant leap he’d taken in 1995.
Both in business and athletic competition, he’s far won more than he lost. But in both pursuits, he’s been taken to the mat plenty of times. He’s never given up.
Crane’s many medals and trophies won in jiujitsu are not listed on tapology.com, but his 20 MMA fights are there. He retired with a 15-5 record, the King of the Cage title he won at Santa Ana Star Casino in 2003 and an 0-2 mark in the UFC.
Of the UFC losses to Roger Huerta and Kurt Pellegrino in 2007-08, Crane said he viewed those fights in the entire context of his career.
“Who knows what’s good and what’s bad?” he said. “Maybe it was for the best. You know, I had a full career.”
In 1999, after two stints in Brazil, Crane had come home to Santa Fe and set up shop as a BJJ instructor. Making a living thus, he found, was going to be a challenge — whether in New Mexico or, later, in Southern California.
“Business is never easy,” he said. “But I was able to have the right tools in my toolbox to do well and keep that same mindset, master-minding with the right people.”
None of his success could have happened, he wrote in an acknowledgment at the beginning of “All In,” without the blessing of his mother, Virginia — despite her early misgivings about his career path — and that of his late maternal grandfather, Albert Gonzalez — who lost his eyesight in a freak diving accident in 1929 yet graduated from New Mexico State and became an attorney and a state congressman.
Talk about never giving up.
Crane recently visited his mother in Santa Fe on the occasion of her 80th birthday.
Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2012, Crane continues to teach daily at his gym, Legacy Burbank. He attributes his strength and vigor to TacFit, a fitness system he endorses, and a mind-over-matter approach to life.
“It’s my choice, right?” he said. “I’m not going to be a victim. I’m not, ‘poor me.’ No, I’m going to do my best no matter what life gives me.”
Though he’s traveled the world as a fighter and lived in California for decades, Crane said he’ll always call New Mexico home.
“I love New Mexico,” he said. “I love the 505. It’s my family, my people.”
