Gracie Humaita

By Roberto Pedreira

My first stop in Brazil had been São Paulo. It didn't take long to realize that Rio was the place to be. São Paulo was another big city like the cities where I had just spent the last twelve years—Seoul, Tokyo, Bangkok. São Paulo was Brazil, for sure, but to me, it didn’t seem like Brazil. At least not enough like the Brazil I had in mind. After Seoul, Tokyo, and Bangkok, where going anywhere is either difficult or expensive or both, if not altogether impossible, getting from São Paulo to Rio seemed suspiciously simple. I kept expecting complications to arise. None did. It really is simple. You hop an air-conditioned bus at Tiéte terminal and six hours later you’re in Rio. A local bus and 30 minutes more and you’re strolling along the beach in Copacabana checking out the moças and garotas in their dental floss bikinis.

I arrived in Rio during the afternoon and rented the cheapest room in the cheapest hotel I could find. It was on the 8^th fl., of the Hotel San Marco in Ipanema. The elevators only went to the 7^th. There weren’t any fire alarms or sprinklers or fire escapes and the stairway was treacherous even when the building was not ablaze. I had a bad feeling about those two elevators, too.

One of Royler's students in São Paulo had given me Royler's phone number. I called the Academia. Someone answered and I realized the standard Brazilian Portuguese I had been learning wasn’t going to be enough. Cariocas (Rio residents) speak a unique kind of Portuguese. Royler came to the phone. He spoke English well and invited me to come over that evening.

The academy wasn't easy to find. Somehow I was expecting a huge sign and the Gracie logo. This after all was the very school Helio established in 1968 when the big academy he ran with his brother Carlos and cousins Carlson and Robson shut down. Nothing of the sort. But I had the address--Rua Humaita, 52, in Botafogo--on the other side of the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, if, as I was, you are coming from Ipanema. Not far really, but at that time of the day it seemed like it. It was the address of the Colegio Padre Antonio Vieira--a private Catholic elementary school, it looked like. The guard directed me toward the rear and up the stairs. I didn't see anything resembling an academy so far. I cautiously made my way up. Finally a door, and the words “academia de jiu-jitsu”. I was there.

I went in. The academy is small. There is a small office area—actually, a desk with a computer on it, a short hallway leading to two mat-covered training rooms, and a very cramped dressing room with clothes and kimonos piled up everywhere. On the walls, along with hundreds of photos of now famous faces, a list of prices. One month of unlimited group instruction and training for 110 Brazilian reais (currently $1.00 = 190 reais). For 200 reais you can take a half-hour private lesson with O Dottore Helio Gracie himself.

One hundred and ten reais doesn’t sound like much and for about ten percent of the Brazilian population it’s not. For the other ninety percent it is a lot—too much in fact. Most of the guys in a jiu-jitsu academy can speak English. If they or their parents can afford 110 reais a month for jiu-jitsu, then they also had enough money to get a decent education, which isn’t cheap (elementary school education is free, but it isn’t decent, people say). Many of them will have already traveled to, and lived and possibly studied in the United States.

The slightly smaller of the training rooms was used for iniciantes (beginners) classes. Royler suggested I train with them. The class was being taught by his brother Robin, the youngest of Helio’s seven sons and the only one with only a brown belt. This proved that the Gracie boys, though born in kimonos, as Sergio Malibu said, were not born with black belts. They have to earn them the same way everyone else does. I watched Robin earning his, rolling with bigger and better guys, getting thoroughly dominated. No one in the school thought there was anything strange about one of the instructors, a Gracie no less, getting slapped around. It’s the way you learn. It’s the way it is. And it provided a good example for the students.

Robin covered slightly more material than most instructors do, five techniques rather than the usual three or four. First he taught the basic ude garami elbow and shoulder-lock (which the Brazilians call Kimura in honor of the Japanese champion who defeated Helio with one in 1951) and guillotine (front naked choke) from guard (legs around, bottom position). After that, he taught one of the basic escapes from kesa gatame (headlock on the ground) and finally, two sweeps from open guard. The first was one the X sweep, allegedly invented by Craig Kukuk when he trained at Gracie Humaita. It is widely taught but I’ve only seen it actually used once in over four years of observation. The second sweep must have been to whet the students’ appetite for the more tricky moves. It is taught by Mario Sperry on his video series as a “ state-of-the-art “ black belt technique.

In any jiu-jitsu class, after the “positions” segment, “rolling” begins. Sometimes there are intermediate forms of training, usually for white belts. Standard, ordinary rolling starts with both guys on their knees (possibly with one or both knees up) facing each other. When the instructor (or whoever is doing it) calls “vai” (go) they look for position or submission, and continue until he calls “tempo” (time), which can range from 2 to 10 minutes. You may or may not know in advance how long it will be, but it is usually as long as a regulation match in your own belt division would be: 5 minutes for white belts, 6 minutes for blue belts, 7 minutes for purple belts, 8 minutes for brown belts, and 10 minutes for black belts. Once they begin, either one can do whatever he wants to. It’s just training, it’s not the Mundial, someone said.

But many guys treat each rolling session as though it were the Mundial. They of course avoid bad positions from which they would have to escape. Consequently, they don’t get enough practice escaping. But escaping is an essential skill. So from time to time the instructor will have them start from a deliberately bad position. The guy’s ego isn’t on the line. Even if he can’t escape, he can at least tell himself that in a real match he would never have been in that bad position in the first place.

The most common form of modified rolling is to begin from the guard. Either they start from the guard and continue until “tempo”, or they go until either one guy passes the guard or is sweeped or “tapped”. Even advanced guys practice like this from time to time. However, it tends to be unnecessary because their escaping skills are good. They can play from the guard whenever they want, knowing that if their guard gets passed they can (probably) recover it (it will be easier to recover it if your opponent is trying to tap you than if he is merely trying to pin you. But pinning is a wrestler’s mentality and the jiu-jitsu guys find it pointless and boring to pin people).

The first jiu-jitsu experience I ever had was in the academy of Royler’s big brother Rickson in Los Angeles. When the rolling started, no one asked me if I wanted to participate—on my first day—but just lined everyone up and said “go”. With not a single day of previous grappling experience, I survived, and I tapped three of my four opponents using the techniques I had just learned. That impressed and amazed me.

I had practiced non-contact karate for about five years and trained (but not competed) in English boxing and Muay Thai for about three or four more (not to mention several years of kali and hapkido). I had no idea whether or not my skills would actually work. I didn’t want to find out the hard way that they didn’t. This Gracie jiu-jitsu thing was quite a sea change. I successfully applied the three techniques I had just learned 30 minutes before. I didn’t have to take anyone’s word for it. That other guy frantically tapping told me what I needed to know. This “rolling” business was obviously a crucial element in the jiu-jitsu equation. Hence, I never avoided opportunities to roll, although I hated being tapped as much as anyone else, if not more so. Being tapped occasionally (or frequently, as the case may be), is just the cost of doing business.

So I was disappointed when Robin called me over, along with another iniciante, to teach or maybe to evaluate my grasp of, the most basic of the basic moves. He demonstrated the uupah escape from the mount, the simplest (but also riskiest) way to pass the guard, the gyaku jime collar choke, the scissora shear sweep, the shin sweep, the juji gatame arm lock (which they describe merely as a chave de braço), and finally the ude garami elbow and shoulder-lock (which they call Kimura in honor of the Japanese champion who defeated Helio with one in 1951). After demonstrating each, he gestured for me to do it on him, rather than on the other beginner there (apparently so that he could feel, rather than see what I was doing). He seemed satisfied and gave me a thumb-up after each one.

He didn’t smile. Royler smiles a lot. So do Rickson and Royce. Robin doesn’t. Maybe it’s the fact that he started jiu-jitsu late, that he is small (about 140 lbs.), and gets dominated by a lot of the better guys there. Or maybe it’s just his personality. Robin and Royler’s older brother Rolker doesn’t smile much either, at least he didn’t during the week that I spent at their academy in Botafogo.

One of the things that struck me at Gracie Humaita was the advertising on many of the guys’ kimonos. In a judo dojo, one is accustomed to seeing all white gis. The Japanese do not want to appear to be standing out or calling attention to themselves. This is standard behavior in a group--oriented collectivistic culture (such as Japan has historically been, while becoming less so). When Americans learned judo, they adopted the culture of the dojo, which is a microcosm of the culture of Japan. It is only recently that makers have been putting their logos on gis in places where they can be seen. Blue gis are now being worn in competitions, but that is a matter of regulation—one competitor wears white, the other blue—to make it easier for the judges and spectators to see the action.

Brazilians are also wearing blue kimonos, but not for the same reason. They simply like blue kimonos. Sometimes, both fighters in a competition are wearing blue kimonos, which makes it even harder to observe than with white (because the dark belt isn’t relatively dark enough to provide useful contrast).

There are a number of kimono manufacturers in Brazil. Krugans and Machado are the best known and most widely worn. (Others are Torah, Senki, Berzek, Hunter, Koral, Shizen, Torvik, and Atama, all of which advertise in the principle magazines devoted to jiu-jitsu, such as Otatame, Gracie Magazine, and Arena). They are all endorsed by the top fighters just as star athletes everywhere endorse sportswear. Having a patronicador (sponsor) means you are good, good enough that the sponsor wants his name associated with yours in the public’s mind. Consequently, being able to wear a sponsor’s logo is part of the reward the sponsor offers. Sometimes the kimono itself is the only compensation offered. Some of the kimono makers cash in on this, making their own logo resemble a sponsor’s logo.

A sponsor’s logo can be a symbol in a way that a belt can’t be. A belt is a device for matching competitors based on skill. In the academy it can be a burden as well, since there are inevitably people with lower belts whose combination of skills and physical elements means that they could tap you if your attention wanders for even an instant. A sponsor’s logo doesn’t create this pressure. It just implies that you are good within your belt and weight division. If that weren’t true, the sponsor wouldn’t be sponsoring you. The logo merely calls attention to that truth.

Not only kimonos of course, but just about anything that is available for a price can be endorsed. Thus, the kimonos of top champions are covered with logos for sandals, sunglasses, fruit juice, and dietary supplements, sportswear, training equipment, and most obviously, academies.

I didn’t have a chance to talk a lot with the Gracie brothers. Robin didn’t speak English, Rolker didn’t seem approachable—I didn’t have anything to ask or say anyway. Royler seemed to have a finely honed sense for public relations. Rorion’s genius for it may have rubbed off on him. Royler was always willing to talk—to be “interviewed”—when he was free, but he wasn’t free much. Almost every second I saw him in the academy, he was suited up, on the mat, rolling or getting ready to roll. Maybe that’s why he’s won his division in the Mundial every year since its inception.

I wanted a lembrança, a souvenir. I expected every school to have plenty of t-shirts with their logo on it for students to buy and then wear on the beaches, advertising the school and paying for the privilege. What a brilliant concept. Would it be too cynical to think that it originated with Rorion? The endorser pays the sponsor to endorse his product (in some case, it makes sense to do this. For a guitarist to endorse a Fender guitar is a way of promoting himself as well as the guitar, and it might be worth his while to pay to do it.) A t-shirt worn by an average guy would be a different case, I thought. But they were sold out in my size. Nowhere in the academy could a t-shirt my size be found that someone wasn’t already wearing. It later turned out to be true at every academy I visited. The boom had hit so fast and so big that schools couldn’t keep up with the demand for t-shirts. Eventually, Royler did find a purple tank top that fit me, after digging through a pile of loose clothes in a corner behind a rolled up mat.

Roberto Traven bounded into the room carrying the belt he had just won in the Russian Absolute Fighting Vale Tudo. Traven is a member of the Alliance, Gracie Humaita’s most formidable rivals in team competition (the big four in Brazil are Gracie Humaita, Gracie Barra, Carlson Gracie, and Alliance). But he seemed thoroughly among friends. Understandably, because all Brazilian jiu-jitsu emanates from the same source—the Gracie family, in fact, Royler’s father and uncle. Everyone admired his belt but they had seen many before. The walls were lined with trophies, plaques, and medals. The Brazilians compete among themselves, but they are always delighted when one of them does well overseas.

It’s almost hard to believe, but many Brazilians have a sort of national inferiority complex. I was once astounded to hear someone say, “futebol is the only thing we are good at”. He was a jiu-jitsu instructor!!!

I wasn’t the only American visiting Gracie Humaita at the time. Blaine, an attorney from San Francisco was there. He was also a white belt and had studied with Royler’s uncle Carley in California. I liked the notion of a high priced lawyer jetting down to Rio for the weekend to roll with the Gracies. He wasn’t any better than I was, which made me feel less pitiful. Blaine asked me if I had ever studied any other martial arts. I lied and said no. Those martial arts did me no good at all on the tatame, and I had been thinking that there’s something sad about a supposed martial arts expert (or at least, someone with multiple “black belts”) who is dominated on the mat by people with virtually no martial arts background whatsoever—other than maybe a few weeks of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Rather than being the advantage that some naïve people seemed to think it was, the baggage of previous martial arts expertise was just another obstacle to overcome.

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Revised Dezembro 2001