Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: From Maeda to the Gracies

In 1904, at West Point, the first student the Kōdōkan had ever enrolled was pinned by a football player. Tomita Tsunejirō was a teacher rather than a fighter, and he had been sent to the United States to show Americans what judo was. The young man beside him, Maeda Mitsuyo, drew a conclusion from that afternoon and spent the rest of his life acting on it: judo would not earn respect abroad by demonstration. It would have to fight, for money, against anyone who accepted, under any rules. Tomita went home. Maeda did not.

The short answer to how Brazilian jiu-jitsu came to exist is three names. Maeda, who took Kōdōkan judo into the prize rings of three continents and settled in the Amazon port of Belém. Carlos Gracie, the teenager he taught there around 1917, together with Carlos's small, sickly brother Hélio, who rebuilt the techniques around leverage and tested them in public for sixty years. And Royce Gracie, who on 12 November 1993 in Denver submitted three larger men in one night and made the family's method the grappling base of mixed martial arts. That is the family story. This is the fuller one, 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, and came to Tokyo as a student. He entered the Kōdōkan in the mid-1890s, trained under the senior instructors of Kanō Jigorō's school and became one of its outstanding competitors. He stood about 1.64 metres. What he had instead of height, by the accounts of the people who trained with him, was strength, speed and an unusual gift for fighting on the ground.

The 1904 tour was meant to be a lecture with illustrations. The Kōdōkan sent Tomita Tsunejirō, its first-ever student, to give exhibitions at West Point, at Columbia University and before President Roosevelt's circle in Washington, and Maeda went with him. Then the football player happened. Maeda stayed on.

Over the next decade he fought hundreds of matches: in New York and Chicago, in London, where he took on wrestlers in 1907, in Belgium, in Cuba and Mexico, and in Spain, where in 1908 he adopted the ring name that followed him for the rest of his life, Conde Koma. Koma comes from the Japanese for “trouble”. The Count of Trouble fought wrestlers, boxers and strongmen, usually under catch-as-catch-can or mixed rules, and lost rarely. That decade matters more than any single match in it. The grappling Maeda would eventually teach in Brazil was Kōdōkan judo that had been tested in prize fights against people who did not know judo, and that is a different thing from judo taught in a dōjō.

Belém, 1914: a port, a businessman and a teenager

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 on rubber. 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 scheme was Gastão Gracie, a Brazilian of Scottish descent with a large family.

Gastão's eldest son, Carlos Gracie, born in 1902, began learning around 1917, when he was about fifteen. How much he learned from Maeda in person and how much from Maeda's Brazilian students, above all Jacintho Ferro, is a question historians still argue over; the family tradition says Maeda, the documents suggest a mixture. Either way, what Carlos learned was Kōdōkan judo as Maeda fought it: heavy on ne-waza, the groundwork, and aimed at 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. Look at the name. “Jiu-jitsu” was the spelling under which Japanese grappling was known in the West, Maeda's fights had been billed under it, and 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 set the policy that has defined the family ever since: fight anyone, from any style, to prove the method.

Hélio, the brother who watched

Hélio Gracie, born on 1 October 1913, was the youngest of the brothers and, as a boy, small and frequently ill. The family story has him watching the classes for years rather than taking part. When he did begin to teach and fight, at sixteen, he changed what 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. In 1932, the year of his first professional fights, he weighed around 64 kilograms. This is the jiu-jitsu the Gracies have taught ever since, and Hélio's name is attached to the “gentle art” the way Kanō's is to judo.

His most famous fights were against Japanese judoka. In 1951 he drew with and then beat Katō Yukio. Then, on 23 October 1951, in the Maracanã stadium in Rio, he faced 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 had refused to submit. He gained more from that loss than a win would have given him, and the technique is called the kimura in every BJJ academy on earth.

Two more fights fixed the tradition. In 1955 Hélio, aged 41, fought his former student Waldemar Santana for three hours and forty minutes and lost. Out of that loss came 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 there was the Gracie challenge, the standing invitation to fighters of any style to come to the academy and test themselves, which kept the art honest and gave the family a reputation that television would later make global.

The lineages the family story leaves out

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

Inside the family, the innovator of the 1970s was Rolls Gracie. He 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, aged 31, and his students, Rickson Gracie, Carlos Gracie Jr., Romero “Jacaré” Cavalcanti and others, became the founders of the modern academies. By then the Federação de Jiu-Jitsu da Guanabara had already, in 1967, 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. What it did not yet have was an audience.

1993: one night in Denver

Rorion Gracie, Hélio's eldest son, moved to California in 1978 and taught out of his garage in Torrance. Students paid by the class and were invited to test what they learned; people called it the “Gracie Garage”. Rorion had a promoter's instinct. In 1989 he opened the Gracie Academy in Torrance and sold the Gracies in Action videotapes of family challenge matches, and with the advertising executive Art Davie and the producer Bob Meyrowitz he 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 did not send the family's strongest fighter, Rickson. He sent 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 was immediate. Anyone who wanted to compete in the new sport of mixed martial arts now had to learn to grapple, and BJJ was the grappling they learned; within a few years it was the fastest-growing martial art in the United States, and then in Europe. Sixty years of fighting in Brazilian gyms and on beaches had been settled on pay-per-view.

The sport: IBJJF, ADCC and the modern game

The competition side organised in the same years. 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 award points for positions, takedown, sweep, guard pass, mount, back control, and end the match by submission, and that rule set 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, himself a BJJ student, founded the ADCC Submission Fighting World Championship, a no-gi event under a different rule set that became the peak of submission grappling. The no-gi game, driven by MMA, grew through the 2000s alongside the traditional gi sport, and in the 2010s submission-only formats and athletes such as Gordon Ryan shifted the emphasis again, towards leg locks. The Gracies had once considered those dishonourable. Fadda's team had beaten them with foot locks in 1955.

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. More than a hundred of his descendants carry the art on, along with 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.