Hélio Gracie: The Frail Brother Who Rebuilt Jiu-Jitsu

On 23 October 1951, in the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro, a man of about 64 kilograms is lying on his back with his right arm bent behind him at an angle arms are not built for. The man holding it, Kimura Masahiko, is the best judoka in the world and some 35 kilograms heavier. Kimura has the lock, and he waits for the tap. It does not come. The arm gives way, and still it does not come. Then a towel lands on the mat, thrown by the older brother in the corner, and the fight is over.

The short answer: the man on the mat was Hélio Gracie, and that refusal is his whole biography in one gesture. Born small and sick in 1913, he took a Japanese art built for strong bodies and rebuilt it for weak ones, then spent twenty-three years testing the result against anyone who would fight him. He lost the two fights everyone remembers, and lived to see his son win the first UFC. The story of the art is told in our history of Brazilian jiu-jitsu; this is the story of the man.

Key facts

Born

1 October 1913, Belém, Pará, Brazil

Died

29 January 2009, Itaipava, Rio de Janeiro state, aged 95

Art

Gracie jiu-jitsu, adapted from the judo taught by Maeda Mitsuyo

Fighting years

1932–1955, vale tudo and jiu-jitsu rules

Famous fights

Kimura Masahiko 1951 (loss), Waldemar Santana 1955 (loss, 3 h 40 min)

Legacy

Seven sons including Rickson and Royce; UFC 1 won by Royce in 1993

The boy on the bench

Hélio was born on 1 October 1913 in Belém, the rubber port at the mouth of the Amazon where his father, Gastão Gracie, did business with a Japanese judoka named Maeda Mitsuyo. He was the youngest of five brothers and the smallest, and by every account, including his own, he was ill for most of his childhood. The family story has doctors advising against exercise and the boy fainting on stairs. When the Gracies moved to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1920s and his eldest brother Carlos opened the Academia Gracie in 1925, Hélio's role was to sit on the side and watch.

He watched for years. A boy who cannot join in has nothing to do but think about what he is seeing, and what Hélio saw was Kōdōkan judo as Maeda had fought it: heavy on the ground, aimed at chokes and joint locks, and taught by brothers who were bigger and stronger than he would ever be. He learned it in his head before he learned it with his body. It is not the usual way to become a martial artist, but it is a good way to become one who questions every technique.

The day Carlos was late

The story of his first class is repeated in every Gracie biography and should be read as what it is: a family account. Hélio was sixteen, so around 1929. A student arrived for a private lesson, Carlos had not, and Hélio offered to fill in. By the end of the hour the student, by tradition a bank director named Mário Brant, asked to keep training with the younger brother. Hélio became a teacher before he had ever seriously been a student.

What he taught was not quite what Carlos taught. Techniques that relied on strength had to be finished some other way, and the other way was leverage: more movement of the hips, more use of the legs from underneath, chokes and locks applied by the whole body rather than the arms, and a patient closed guard from which a smaller man could wait, defend and attack. None of this was new to judo. What was new was a method built on the assumption that the practitioner would always be the weaker person in the fight. Hélio drew that line between Gracie jiu-jitsu and its Japanese parent; BJJ vs judo walks along it.

Thirty seconds with a boxer

He was eighteen when he turned professional in 1932, and his first opponent was a boxer, Antonio Portugal. Hélio took him down and armlocked him in about thirty seconds. That is the fight the family tells; the one worth knowing is the next, against the American wrestler Fred Ebert, which went fourteen rounds without a winner and showed what the method really was. It was not a knockout art. It was a way of surviving a stronger man for as long as it took.

The 1930s were spent proving it against everyone Rio could produce. In 1934 he drew with Wladek Zbyszko, the Polish heavyweight who had been world wrestling champion when Hélio was a child. In 1935 he choked the Japanese judoka Taro Miyake and began a series of fights with Yassuiti Ono, another Japanese immigrant, that ended in draws. The pattern is easy to see from a distance. Against strikers Hélio won. Against grapplers of his own quality he could not be beaten but could not always win, and the draw became a Gracie result: the small man is still standing, and the challenge stays open.

Maracanã, 23 October 1951

By 1951 Hélio was 38, running the academy and past the age at which most fighters stop. The Japanese came anyway. In September he fought the judoka Katō Yukio to a draw and then, in the rematch a few weeks later, choked him unconscious. Katō had been the warm-up. The man the Japanese team had really brought was Kimura Masahiko, All-Japan champion, in his prime, and by common estimate around 35 kilograms heavier than Hélio.

They fought at the Maracanã before a reported crowd of around 20,000. Kimura, by his own account, threw Hélio again and again and was surprised each time to find him back in guard. The fight was into its second round when Kimura secured the bent-arm lock the Japanese call ude-garami, cranked it, and heard the arm break. Hélio did not tap. Carlos threw in the towel. The lock has been called the kimura in every jiu-jitsu academy on earth ever since, which is a strange kind of immortality for the man who lost to it, and exactly the kind Hélio understood. The loss did more for the Gracie name than any of his wins.

Three hours and forty minutes

The other famous loss came four years later and was, in its way, worse. Waldemar Santana had been Hélio's student and an employee at the academy; they fell out, and on 24 May 1955 they met in Rio under vale tudo rules. Hélio was 41. Santana was 23, a strong athlete with a full jiu-jitsu education from the man he was fighting. There was no time limit. They fought for about three hours and forty minutes, most of it on the ground, until Hélio, exhausted, was caught with a kick to the head and could not continue. It is widely reported as the longest uninterrupted vale tudo fight on record, and nobody has been in a hurry to break it.

Hélio never fought a major vale tudo match again. Carlson Gracie, Carlos's son, beat Santana the following year and led the Gracie fighting team for two decades, and the old man went back to the mat as a teacher, which is where, on the evidence of the next fifty years, he had always been most dangerous.

Seven sons and a garage

Hélio had nine children, seven of them sons, every one with a name beginning with R: Rorion (born 1952), Relson, Rickson, Rolker, Royler, Royce and Robin. All were raised on the mat, and the family treated jiu-jitsu less as a sport than as a household system, complete with the Gracie diet Carlos had devised and a standing rule that any fighter of any style could walk into the academy and test himself. This was the Gracie challenge, and it kept the art honest for sixty years by the simplest method available: someone was always about to find out.

The challenge went abroad with Rorion, who moved to the United States in 1978 and taught from a garage in Southern California. Out of that garage came the Ultimate Fighting Championship, designed with the advertising man Art Davie to answer the question the Gracies had been asking since 1925. Rorion did not send Rickson, the family's best fighter, whose story is in our Rickson Gracie biography. He sent Royce, slighter and calmer, so the audience would see the method rather than the man. On 12 November 1993 in Denver, Royce beat a boxer, a shootfighter and a savate champion in one night, and Hélio, aged 80 and in a gi, was in his corner. It was the Kimura fight in reverse: the small man in the gi, the giants, and this time the towel stayed in the corner. What that night made of the sport is in our history of MMA.

A red belt and a blue one

He taught into his nineties, in the same white gi and with the same opinions. He disliked the sport version of the art, with its points and its time limits, and said so; he taught self-defence to beginners himself long after the academy had instructors to spare. The academy he and Carlos built was by then a diaspora. Gracie schools ran in California, Brazil and Europe, and the art they taught had become, through the UFC, the grappling base of mixed martial arts.

Then there is the question of rank. The Gracie family recognises Hélio as a 10th-degree red belt, the grade that the IBJJF's system reserves for the pioneers of the art, the Gracie brothers of the founding generation. The rank was conferred within the family lineage rather than by an outside body, which is the only way a founder's rank can be conferred, and some in the wider BJJ world have noted the circularity. Hélio's own last word on the subject was visual. In his final years he set the red belt aside and wore a plain navy-blue one on the mat, a choice the family has explained in his terms: the belt was his to wear, and he chose the one that made his point.

He died at home in Itaipava, in the hills above Rio, on 29 January 2009, aged 95. The family said he had taught until about ten days before. The papers called him the founder of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which is generous to one man and unfair to several others; what he unarguably founded was the idea that the weaker person in a fight has a method of their own. Every white belt who pulls guard on a bigger training partner is testing it.

Where to go next

• The art's full story, from Maeda's arrival in Belém to the IBJJF: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: From Maeda to the Gracies.
• The son the family called its best fighter: Rickson Gracie: The Family's Best Fighter.
• How the vale tudo fights became a regulated sport: The History of MMA and MMA rules explained.
• The parent art and where Hélio's version departs from it: BJJ vs judo and the judo hub.
• Starting on the mat yourself: the BJJ hub and BJJ white belt mistakes.