That jiu-jitsu really is like solving an ever-shifting puzzle-calculating your opponent’s potential next moves and trying to trap him in a choice between, say, getting shoulder-locked or choked-also helps account for its incongruous acolytes. This brains-over-brawn emphasis is a large part of the appeal for someone like me, who, at 5 foot 3, spent years loving the wrong sport (basketball).
In Breathe, Rickson goes all in on the art’s David-beats-Goliath theme of tactical mastery over physical attributes. Sidelining the dramatic throws of judo, he experimented with new ways of fighting while seated or on one’s back. “I simply adapted the use of a ‘jack’ to every position of jiu-jitsu.” Leverage, tension, and timing were the secret to his techniques, rather than speed or strength. “You can’t lift a car, but when you use a jack you can easily lift it,” Hélio explained in a family history called The Gracie Way. When Hélio finally began training in the late 1920s, his approach to jiu-jitsu, a martial art first developed in 15th-century Japan and then modified into judo, had to be strategic. “I know this might sound like an exaggeration,” he writes of his father, “but Hélio Gracie was to Jiu Jitsu what Albert Einstein was to physics.”įrail and prone to fainting (he suffered from vertigo), Hélio started out as a spectator at his family’s academy in Brazil, run by his more athletic brother, Carlos.
Rickson leans into the elevated rhetoric around jiu-jitsu in his new memoir, Breathe: A Life in Flow, the latest installment in the family’s long promotional campaign. Another of Royce’s brothers-he has six, each with the first initial R-is the legendary Rickson Gracie, considered by many to be the greatest jiu-jitsu practitioner of all time. In the decades since, Brazilian jiu-jitsu has exploded in the United States, and not just under Gracie leadership every day, thousands of devotees head into humid, rank basement academies across the country, hoping to … well, what are we looking for?įor a discipline that involves getting sat on, sweated on, and uncomfortably entangled with another person-your knee torqued, your arm hyperextended, your carotid artery crushed in a choke hold-Brazilian jiu-jitsu elicits surprisingly cerebral comparisons: to chess, philosophy, even psychoanalysis. Within months of UFC 1, which both critics and fans saw as a Gracie infomercial, membership quadrupled at the California academy that Rorion Gracie, one of Royce’s brothers, had started a few years earlier. The ground-fighting art honed in Brazil over generations by an entire Gracie dynasty was virtually unknown here. Up until then, martial arts in the American popular imagination had featured fighters in cartoonish striking mode-a bare-chested Bruce Lee sending men flying with a single kick or punch, or Ralph Macchio, as the Karate Kid, raising his limbs like a praying mantis. The audience at the inaugural Ultimate Fighting Championship event went wild. Gordeau tapped frantically on the mat to signal his submission. In less than two minutes, the jiu-jitsu black belt brought Gordeau to the ground, got behind him, and wrapped an arm beneath his chin to secure a rear naked choke. His opponent, a dead-eyed Dutch karate champion named Gerard Gordeau, had already beaten two other men that night, including a 420-pound Samoan sumo wrestler he’d kicked so hard that bits of tooth got lodged in his foot. There were no weight classes or judges, and very few rules.
O n November 12, 1993, in a sports arena in Denver, a lean Brazilian man in an outfit resembling a pair of pajamas stepped into an octagon to fight. Sources: Miljan Živković / Getty Vm / Getty