The story of grandmaster Carlos Gracie, the
first Gracie to ever learn Jiu-Jitsu:
The Gracies' first archenemy was no Japanese,
but one tough native. In the early 1900s, little
Carlos, grandson of a Scottish immigrant who had
set up his home in Para, Belem's capital, didn't
think twice before challenging a wide-eyed,
sharp-nailed opponent. One would often see the
kid play catch with an alligator that lived in
the river nearby. Gracie would always take the
edge: curious and owner of a keen sense of
observation, Carlos had noticed the reptile
couldn't see under water, only swam in a
straight line, and had to stick its head out in
order to make turns. By simply getting out of
the direction of the animal's teeth, Carlos
would always win.
This and many stories were rescued by
daughter Reyla Gracie and will for the first
time appear on the book where she wishes to tell
the story of the man born September 14th, 1902,
and the first family member to make contact with
the martial art that, in all of the blooming
century, would be bound to the name Gracie.
Jiu-Jitsu, thus, was Carlos's life (and vice
versa) ever since his father, Gastao, trying to
canalize the energy of the boy who seemed
limitless, made him learn a new fight style with
a Japanese friend of his, Mitsuyo Maeda, a.k.a.
Count Koma. At 14, thus, Carlos began a saga
that, to the whole world's surprise, would
pervade academies and rings across the planet.
Or could anyone guess? "Out of all pupils Koma
taught, and they weren't few, as he used to
travel the world teaching, only one fully
understood the grandeur of that knowledge,
adopting Jiu-Jitsu as a profession. I believe my
father had, since the very beginning, a good
idea of the thing he was learning. No wonder he
created a school that's been lasting 80 years,"
says Reyla, who has been working on the book
since 1999 gathering interviews, press
clippings, books and documents on the subject.
Indeed, when Carlos became acquainted with
Count Koma's techniques, in 1916, the
young Gracie was still a developing personality,
much like Belem, which worked as an entrance to
Brazil, with influence of European and Japanese
cultures, and on the other hand was nearly wild,
with Indians, woods and rivers where the
fearless would play. "Jiu-Jitsu gave my life a
direction", Carlos used to say. Dedicated to the
trainings and interested in the techniques, it
didn't take long for Carlos to stand out among
the students. "Once, Count Koma needed a
volunteer to demonstrate a type of choke, and
Carlos offered himself. The professor declined
and asked for another pupil, and afterwards told
dad: 'You are going to be a champion, and are
not here to be choked,'" says black-belt Rilion,
one of the 21 children of the patriarch. Despite
Maeda's constant travels, Carlos kept his
training rhythm stable, by beginning to practise
with another one of the count's students, local
entrepreneur Jacinto Ferro. "The astonishing
thing is neither Ferro nor Loma set up an
academy there, no pupil kept it up, and
Jiu-Jitsu pretty much vanished from the state of
Para. The person who took it back there, decades
later, was someone who had learned at the Gracies'
school in South-Eastern Brazil," Reyla
recalls. With the family's increasingly hard
economic situation, the father took Carlos,
along with younger brothers Osvaldo, Gastao,
Jorge and Helio (the latter, 11 years younger
than Carlos), to try and make a living in Rio de
Janeiro, then Sao Paulo and then Belo Horizonte.
At age 22, Carlos Gracie started to make a
living out of Jiu-Jitsu. It was the time of
challenges published on newspapers ("Want a
broken rib? Look for Carlos Gracie," one of them
read), of the search for opponents, of the birth
of mixed martial arts and of the suspicion by
practitioners of other styles. "He didn't look
like a fighter, but like a chess player. He'd go
to training in police academies. As they thought
nothing of him, he had to demonstrate the
efficiency of the art he believed in, that
Jiu-Jitsu could do miracles and that he himself
was a good fighter," says Rilion. Sister Reyla
adds: "Carlos was always against associating
Jiu-Jitsu with violence. Of course, in the
beginning Carlos would place the ads and
challenge those huge stevedores because, in the
1930's, there was the need of establishing an
identity. That was when such comments began:
"'The Gracies are invincible.' 'The Gracies
settle businesses with their bare hands,'' she
says amongst laughs. "But each historical moment
is different. When, in the seventies, Jiu-Jitsu
became a sport, there was no more need to prove
anything. It's like today, when fighting or not
fighting m.m.a. starts being a personal choice;
there is no longer the need there was in the
times of my father and Helio, when they had to
prove Jiu-Jitsu's efficiency in the ring," she
concludes.
The influence Carlos had over his children
and siblings was, therefore, much greater than
fans can imagine nowadays. The old Gracie was a
teacher, a strategist, a promoter, an idealizer
and the clan's creator - which Reylar intends to
show in her book. "There is the man and the
work. My father's work was Jiu-Jitsu, family and
nutrition, intertwined by his life story. The
family is also a legacy he idealized, a product
of his mind. Simply because the very project of
making Jiu-Jitsu what it is today depended on
the family, so that it would be possible to
perpetuate the art," says Reyla.
To Rilion Gracie, the ten years without
Carlos indeed left a few gaps and many
heritages: "One of the greatest heritages he
left was the power of discipline and will. I
never saw my father go by a day without
exercising, and once he spent six months going
every day to see the sunrise at Cristo Redentor
[the gigantic statue of Christ atop a hill in
Rio de Janeiro], where he'd meditate. Every day,
never missed it," the son recollects. "He was
the family's reference point, the nucleus, and
in the 80's, at the end of each tournament,
everyone gathered to evaluate each person's
performance, the rights and wrongs. I felt when
he died that changed a little. And he never hit
a child, nor said 'Go, motherf., kick his ass,'
in front of opponents. He only let good things
through. That's priceless," he says
Nothing, however, deserved the family's
gratitude more than the nutrition method
elaborated by Carlos Gracie, for years, based on
studies and thousand of experiments. After
making his children, nephews and grandchildren
listen to their bodies and eat exclusively what
is beneficial to the organism, it's no
exaggeration today to say that the last half
decade meant 50 years of success of the Gracie
Diet, whose basic principle is to avoid the
excessive acidity in the nutrition, which to its
creator was the main cause of the organism's
deterioration and consequent malfunction of
organs. Thus the diet endeavours to keep the
meals' PH as neutral as possible, balancing
substances by using the right combination.
Notwithstanding, reducing Carlos' science to
this would be disregarding much of his work -
one of the things Reyla most worries about in
preparing her father's story: "He anticipated
many of the much-divulged discoveries of today,
like carotene"s beneficial role, a substance
found in the papaya and the carrot, the concept
of free radicals and orthomolecular medicine,
not mentioning his pioneering role regarding the
habit of consuming acai, watermelon juice,
coconut water, vitamins," she stresses. "And,
when nobody spoke of nutrition, he noticed how
useful it was to cut off red meat before Helio's
fights, since meat gives you explosion power,
but not long term resistance. The proof of the
efficient didn't take long to ensue: didn't
uncle Helio fight a much younger Valdemar
Santana for 3h40m in 1955?"
The interest for life and nutrition, like
everything else in the descendant of Scottish,
was not random. Together with growing suspicion
toward traditional medicine, the specialist of
the blooming art noticed the need to, with the
diet, look after the main work tool, the body.
Carlos Gracie, indeed, made four or five famous
fights, the last of which against Rufino, in
1931, whose picture Reyla keeps with her life,
and another one - pure vale tudo (or 'no rules,'
if you will) - in Rio de Janeiro, against capoeira practitioner Samuel.
"At one point
Samuel saw himself with no choice but to grab
dad's testicles," Rilion recollects. The most
famous one, nevertheless, was another Japan vs.
Brazil classic, held in Sao Paulo, in 1924.
Against Geo Omori, self-proclaimed Japanese
Jiu-Jitsu representative, Carlos made his most
memorable fight. Nearing the end of the third
three-minute round, Gracie gave the foe's arm an
inexorable lock and looked at the referee, who
told him to go on. Carlos broke the opponent's
arm, but the latter paid no heed and gave an
unfocused Carlos a takedown, before the end of
the fight, which ended with a draw and mutual
respect by the contenders, in a time when
fighters only lost bouts by tapping or passing
out.
Legend has it, however, that the most
unforgettable scene was played by rooters from
Sao Paulo, who threw their hats into the ring as
soon as the Brazilian broke the foe's limb. "He
excelled at the armbar," says a proud Rilion.
"For one thing is to apply it when the other guy
is unfocused, but Carlos would warn beforehand,
'I'm going to beat you by armbar,' and the
opponent would shrink their arm. Then he
developed a technique of getting to the arm when
the adversary knew they were gonna be armbarred.
The way I see it, that was the beginning of the
perfecting of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, characterized
by leading the foe to erring, where the weaker
can defeat the stronger."
