Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: From Maeda to the Gracies

Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) is the ground-fighting art that grew out of Kōdōkan judo in Brazil between the 1910s and the 1950s. A travelling judoka, Maeda Mitsuyo, taught a teenager named Carlos Gracie in the Amazon port of Belém around 1917; Carlos and his brothers, above all Hélio Gracie, built a family school in Rio de Janeiro that specialised in fighting on the ground and tested itself in open challenge matches for sixty years. On 12 November 1993 Royce Gracie won the first UFC with it, and BJJ became the grappling base of mixed martial arts and a sport of its own with world championships, a belt system and academies on every continent. This is how it happened, including the parts the family story leaves out.

Key facts

Root

Kōdōkan judo, brought to Brazil by Maeda Mitsuyo in 1914

First academy

Carlos Gracie, Rio de Janeiro, 1925

Key innovator

Hélio Gracie (1913–2009): leverage over strength

Turning point

UFC 1, Denver, 12 November 1993 – Royce Gracie wins

Sport body

IBJJF (founded 1994 as CBJJ); first Worlds 1996

Belts

White, blue, purple, brown, black; coral and red for veterans

A judoka leaves Japan

Maeda Mitsuyo was born on 18 November 1878 in Hirosaki, in the far north of Japan's main island. He came to Tokyo as a student, entered the Kōdōkan in the mid-1890s and became one of its outstanding competitors, trained by the senior instructors of Kanō Jigorō's school. He was not tall, about 1.64 metres, but he was strong, fast and, by the accounts of his contemporaries, unusually good on the ground.

In 1904 the Kōdōkan sent Tomita Tsunejirō, its first-ever student, to the United States to demonstrate judo, and Maeda went with him. The two gave exhibitions at West Point and Columbia University and before President Roosevelt's circle in Washington. The demonstrations went badly enough – Tomita, a teacher rather than a fighter, was pinned by a football player at West Point – that Maeda drew a conclusion that shaped the rest of his life: to make judo respected abroad he would have to fight for money against anyone who accepted, under any rules. Tomita went home. Maeda stayed.

Over the next decade Maeda fought hundreds of matches: in New York and Chicago, in London (where he took on wrestlers in 1907), in Belgium, in Spain, where in 1908 he adopted the ring name Conde Koma – koma from the Japanese for “trouble” – in Cuba and in Mexico. He fought wrestlers, boxers and strongmen, usually under catch-as-catch-can or mixed rules, and lost rarely. This is important for what came later: the grappling Maeda taught in Brazil was Kōdōkan judo tested in prize fights against people who did not know judo, which is a different thing from judo taught in a dōjō.

Belém, 1914: Maeda and the Gracies

Maeda arrived in Brazil in 1914 with a touring troupe of Japanese fighters and, after stops in several cities, settled in Belém, the port at the mouth of the Amazon, then rich from the rubber trade. He fought, taught at a local athletic club and, in the years that followed, worked for the Japanese government helping immigrants settle in the Amazon region. One of the local businessmen involved in that immigration scheme was Gastão Gracie, a Brazilian of Scottish descent with a large family.

Gastão's eldest son, Carlos Gracie, born in 1902, began learning from Maeda around 1917, when he was about fifteen. How much of his instruction came from Maeda personally and how much from Maeda's Brazilian students, above all Jacintho Ferro, is debated by historians; the family tradition says Maeda, the documents suggest a mixture. Either way, Carlos learned Kōdōkan judo as Maeda fought it, with a heavy emphasis on ne-waza, groundwork, and on finishing an opponent with a choke or a joint lock.

The Gracies moved to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1920s, and in 1925 Carlos opened the Academia Gracie de Jiu-Jitsu in the Flamengo district. The name matters: “jiu-jitsu” was the spelling under which Japanese grappling was known in the West, and Maeda's fights had been billed as jiu-jitsu, so the Brazilians kept it even though what they had learned was judo. Carlos taught his younger brothers – Oswaldo, Gastão Jr., George and Hélio – and made a policy of the family's schooling: fight anyone, from any style, to prove the method.

Hélio Gracie and the art of leverage

Hélio Gracie, born on 1 October 1913, was the youngest brother and, as a boy, small and frequently ill; the family story has him watching classes for years rather than taking part. When he began to teach and fight, at sixteen, he changed the techniques he had watched to suit a body that could not rely on strength: more hip movement, more use of the legs from underneath, chokes and locks applied with leverage rather than power. This is the version of jiu-jitsu that the Gracies have taught ever since, and Hélio's name is attached to the “gentle art” the way Kanō's is to judo.

Hélio fought in public from 1932. His most famous matches were against Japanese judoka: a draw and then a win against Katō Yukio in 1951, and, on 23 October 1951, a fight at the Maracanã stadium in Rio against Kimura Masahiko, the greatest judo competitor of his generation and around 35 kilograms heavier. Kimura threw Hélio repeatedly and won in the second round with a bent-arm shoulder lock, ude-garami, when Carlos threw in the towel. Hélio, who had refused to submit, gained more from the loss than a win would have given him; the technique is called the kimura in every BJJ academy on earth.

Two other fights fixed the Gracie tradition. In 1955 Hélio, aged 41, fought his former student Waldemar Santana for three hours and forty minutes and lost, which produced the family's next champion: Carlson Gracie, Carlos's son, beat Santana the following year and led the family's fighting team for the next two decades. And the Gracie challenge, an open invitation to fighters of any style to come to the academy and test themselves, kept the art honest and gave the family a reputation that television would later make global.

The lineages the family story leaves out

BJJ did not descend from Maeda through the Gracies alone. Maeda also taught Luiz França, and França taught Oswaldo Fadda, who opened an academy in the working-class suburb of Bento Ribeiro in 1950 and taught anyone who came, including disabled students. In 1955 Fadda's team beat the Gracie academy in a challenge, largely with foot locks, a family of techniques the Gracies had neglected; Fadda's line runs today through Nova União and other major teams. The Japanese immigrant Geo Omori taught judo and fought Gracies in São Paulo in the 1930s, and other Japanese teachers seeded schools across Brazil.

Inside the Gracie family the innovator of the 1970s was Rolls Gracie, who studied wrestling and sambo, opened the art to techniques from outside and shaped the sport version that competition would demand. Rolls died in a hang-gliding accident in 1982 at 31, and his students – Rickson Gracie, Carlos Gracie Jr., Romero “Jacaré” Cavalcanti and others – became the founders of the modern academies. In 1967 the Federação de Jiu-Jitsu da Guanabara had already written down rules and a belt sequence, so that by the 1980s BJJ was two things at once: a fighting method proved in challenge matches and a sport with points, positions and referees.

1993: one night in Denver

Rorion Gracie, Hélio's eldest son, moved to California in 1978 and taught out of his garage in Torrance, the “Gracie Garage”, where students paid by the class and were invited to test what they learned. He had a promoter's instinct. In 1989 he opened the Gracie Academy in Torrance, sold the Gracies in Action videotapes of family challenge matches, and with the advertising executive Art Davie and the producer Bob Meyrowitz designed a tournament to answer the question the tapes raised: which style wins when there are almost no rules?

The Ultimate Fighting Championship debuted in Denver on 12 November 1993, eight fighters, single elimination, no weight classes, no rounds, no gloves required. Rorion chose not the family's strongest fighter, Rickson, but his slighter younger brother Royce, 1.83 metres and about 79 kilograms, in a gi, precisely so that the audience would see technique beating size. Royce submitted the boxer Art Jimmerson, the shootfighter Ken Shamrock and the savate champion Gérard Gordeau in a total of under five minutes of fighting. He won UFC 2 and UFC 4 as well.

The effect on martial arts was immediate. Every fighter who wanted to compete in the new sport of mixed martial arts had to learn to grapple, and BJJ was the grappling they learned; within a few years it was also the fastest-growing martial art in the United States and then in Europe. The style that had spent sixty years fighting in Brazilian gyms and on beaches had been proved on pay-per-view.

The sport: IBJJF, ADCC and the modern game

The competition side organised at the same time. In 1994 Carlos Gracie Jr. founded the Confederação Brasileira de Jiu-Jitsu, which became the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation (IBJJF); it held the first World Championship, the Mundial, in Rio in 1996 and moved it to California in 2007. IBJJF rules score points for positions – takedown, sweep, guard pass, mount, back control – and end the match by submission, with a rule set that has shaped how the art is trained: the guard, the sweep and the pass are the centre of the game, and the closed guard that Hélio fought from has become a dozen open-guard systems.

In 1998 Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, a BJJ student, founded the ADCC Submission Fighting World Championship, a no-gi event with a different rule set that became the peak of submission grappling. The no-gi game, driven by MMA, grew in the 2000s alongside the traditional gi sport, and in the 2010s submission-only formats and athletes such as Gordon Ryan changed the emphasis again, towards leg locks that the Gracies had once considered dishonourable.

The belt system is the sport's spine. Adults progress from white through blue, purple and brown to black, with the IBJJF setting minimum periods at each grade; a black belt typically takes eight to twelve years, and the red-and-black coral belt and the red belt mark decades beyond it. Hélio Gracie died on 29 January 2009, aged 95, still teaching. The art he shaped has been carried on by more than a hundred of his descendants and by tens of thousands of academies that trace their lineage, one teacher at a time, back to a room in Belém.

Where to go next

• The BJJ discipline hub collects everything on the site about the art.
• The Japanese half of the story: Judo: Kanō Jigorō and the Gentle Way.
• Glossary: ne-waza, kumi-kata.
• Grappling needs grip and posture strength: see Kettlebell Strength for Fighters.