David Samuels is an American, Harvard-educated, non-fiction writer, known for brilliant, long-form journalism. “Mr. Samuels has written some of the best long-form literary journalism of the past decade,” said New York Observer, critic Matt Haber. Now he Samuels turns his extraordinary eye on the Gracie family, for Grantland.
The piece contains a remarkable level of detail and some weird errors, and is a must read. For example, the Mayor’s residence in New York, Gracie Mansion, is named for Archibald Gracie; his brother George is the Scotsman who went to Brazil and began the clan. And Rickson Gracie according to the author is “widely considered to be the greatest champion of any style of martial arts in the past 50 years.”
In an exchange that took place several years ago on the FightWorks podcast, Relson repeated the version of the Gracie family story in which Hélio plays the central role, the same version Rórion popularized in America with the birth of UFC. Everything I am doing, everything I learned, I only had one instructor: Hélio Gracie, Relson said. Nothing is better than to be Hélio Gracie’s son.
The next week, Renzo, a once-prominent MMA fighter whose career wound down with a series of embarrassing defeats*, appeared on the podcast to contest Relson’s remarks and launch a withering attack on Rórion and his sons. The ‘pure jiu-jitsu’ — it’s doing nothing but selling products on the Internet, Renzo said, adding that the art had long ago moved on from Hélio’s teachings. One thing I feel sorry about is Rórion’s kids, he added. They are very good kids, but their father feeds them nonsense. So, they could be unbelievable fighters, but they are going to end up as mediocre fighters, mediocre people.
When I asked Rórion about Renzo’s attacks, he merely shrugged. If nothing else, they should acknowledge that if it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t have the easy lives they have, he said. They should light a candle for Rórion every f—ing Christmas.
—
The Gracies’ greatest deception of all may have been perpetrated against the spiritualist banker Oscar Santa Maria, Carlos’s business partner who also helped to develop the Gracie diet. That collaboration led to a particularly comic interlude during World War II. Because telephone use was restricted in wartime Brazil, Carlos and Oscar were forced to maintain an intense correspondence totaling some 2,000 letters, some of which contained passages elucidating Carlos’s system of combining foods. The master warned his disciple that rice doesn’t go with beans and “bananas don’t go with honey. In a twist that would be entirely at home in a Peter Sellers Pink Panther movie, Brazilian intelligence agents intercepted the letters and concluded they were coded messages between Nazi spies.
Carlos’s financial success, reinforced by the popularity of Gracie jiu-jitsu, added to his credibility as a spiritual guide, which attained such heights that Carlos made Santa Maria’s fiancée Layr his third wife without significantly harming his reputation or disrupting the relationship between the men. However, in 1963, perhaps in response to additional requests for money, the bond between Carlos and Santa Maria finally snapped, and the banker sued Carlos and Hélio for larceny. In his lawsuit, Santa Maria accused Carlos of having made a fortune at his expense by taking advantage of his profound sentiments of religious belief and deceiving him into believing he had spiritual powers. A month later, Santa Maria filed another suit, claiming that Hélio and Carlos had stolen almost the totality of his belongings through religious fraud.
—
John Danaher believes jiu-jitsu attained its highest degree of evolution once it left Brazil in the 1970s, thanks to the influence of Rolls.
There is almost no similarity between the footage we have of Hélio and modern Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Danaher told me. Describing its recent evolution as a Precambrian explosion of knowledge, he credited Rolls with creating the foundation of the martial art as it’s practiced today, thanks to Rolls’s openness to other fighting styles. The greatest practitioner of Gracie jiu-jitsu, he said, was probably Rickson. Despite all the rivalries and contradictory viewpoints, Danaher told me, everyone seems to agree that Rickson was f—ing unbelievably good, and was better than anyone inside or outside the family.
—
If Rickson represents the most perfect version of the Gracies’ art, then the family member who represents its aesthetic degeneration is Carlos Jr., one of Carlos’s 13 sons, who controls the global apparatus that regulates Gracie jiu-jitsu — which he calls Brazilian jiu-jitsu. A short list of the tributaries of Carlos Jr.’s empire include Gracie Barra, the foremost jiu-jitsu academy in Brazil, which has branches in the United States; the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation, which sets the rules of the sport and sponsors its most prestigious tournaments; and Gracie Magazine, a widely read jiu-jitsu publication that appears in Portuguese and English.
Hélio’s sons and their children generally agree that Carlos Jr.’s technical knowledge of the sport is poor, and they hold him responsible for watering down the family art while organizing poorly run tournaments for his own enrichment. It’s ridiculous to see where it’s at now, Rickson’s son Kron told me. To see jiu-jitsu with such a big base of competitors, with such a big base of fans, and with such a big base of media — I don’t feel like he’s giving back at all to the sport. All he’s doing is making it easier for him to make money.
—
Behind the scenes, Royce Gracie said, the war between the Gracies can escalate to the edge of violence. He nodded to confirm a story I heard of a recent conflict between him and Rórion’s sons. It was three of his sons, Royce said. They came over to confront me about me talking to one of their students.
I asked how he had responded. You come to my house to confront me? he said, looking every inch the former champion. Excuse me? Get the f— out. He said that Rórion’s sons suggested, ‘Maybe we should train someday,’ which he took as a suggestion that he would shy away from a physical confrontation with his younger nephews. His eyes went wide at the memory: Whoa whoa whoa whoa! It’s midnight! You want to train? Let’s f—ing do it right now. Either on the grass, the cement; gloves, no gloves; grappling-style, MMA-style? With a gi? How the f— do you want to do it?
Then Royce returned to his Zen-like state. Wrong person, man, he chuckled. All this calmness, all this smile goes from zero to a hundred in a second. I am a Gracie. I am Royce Gracie, man. Don’t f— with me.
*Samuels’ description of Renzo’s career as “wound down with a series of embarrassing defeats” is just one of a series of inexplicable errors in the piece. In fact, in Renzo’s last four fights he beat three former UFC world champions in a row, before losing to Matt Hughes, arguably the greatest welterweight in the sport’s history. That is not embarrassing, it is the stuff legends are made of.
How does a smart guy like Samuels get so many things so wrong? Who fact checked for him, Rorion? Who knows; it is still a remarkable read. Do yourself a favor when you have a free 30 minutes, and click the link below.
