This golden oldie footage shows a team of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu practitioners taking on a Karate team in a series of no holds barred fights in Brazil.
This was common practice for the Gracie family, who were so confident in the effectiveness of their Jiu-Jitsu that they famously extended an open invitation to other martial artists to compete against them in Vale Tudo (Anything Goes) fights in order to prove which martial arts style was the best.
The ‘Gracie Invitation’ actually dates back as far as the 1920’s when Carlos Gracie first introduced the idea, but the footage shown in this video took place in 1975, still many years before the birth of the UFC and the explosion of mixed martial arts as a sport.
For the purpose of this contest the bouts were set at 10 minutes, and curiously the Karate team had stipulated before-hand that the fights should take place on tiles since they believed that would make it easier for them to stop takedowns.
As it turned out, the entire series of fights lasted less than 10 minutes, and no one from the Karate team was able to stay on their feet, or indeed avoid being submitted.
Remarkably, the first Gracie Jiu-Jitsu competitor in the video was just 13 years old, yet he was fighting in a NHB match against a grown man.
Nevertheless, the young student was easily able to take down his opponent and submit him by rear-naked choke.
That blueprint would continue throughout the remainder of the match-ups, which saw the likes of the video’s narrator, Rorion, Relson and Rolls Gracie all comfortably finish their opponents by submission.
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Of course almost two decades later the entire world would see remarkably similar results when Royce Gracie entered as a competitor at the first ever UFC event in 1993 and won the first tournament by submitting three opponents in a single night. In total he’d rack up 11 wins in a row in the early years of the organization on his way to becoming the promotion’s first ever ‘Hall Of Famer’.
To this day Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu remains one of martial arts most tried and tested disciplines, as well as being one the key components of the sport of MMA where the moves seen in this video, such as the rear-naked choke and arm bar, are just as relevant now as they were back then.
