The story of grandmaster Carlos Gracie, the first Gracie to ever learn Jiu-Jitsu:
The Gracies’ first archenemy was no Japanese, but one tough native. In the early 1900s, little Carlos, grandson of a Scottish immigrant who had set up his home in Para, Belem’s capital, didn’t think twice before challenging a wide-eyed, sharp-nailed opponent. One would often see the kid play catch with an alligator that lived in the river nearby. Gracie would always take the edge: curious and owner of a keen sense of observation, Carlos had noticed the reptile couldn’t see under water, only swam in a straight line, and had to stick its head out in order to make turns. By simply getting out of the direction of the animal’s teeth, Carlos would always win.
This and many stories were rescued by daughter Reyla
Gracie and will for the first time appear on the book where
she wishes to tell the story of the man born September 14th,
1902, and the first family member to make contact with the
martial art that, in all of the blooming century, would be
bound to the name Gracie. Jiu-Jitsu, thus, was Carlos’s life
(and vice versa) ever since his father, Gastao, trying to
canalize the energy of the boy who seemed limitless, made
him learn a new fight style with a Japanese friend of his,
Mitsuyo Maeda, a.k.a. Count Koma. At 14, thus, Carlos began
a saga that, to the whole world’s surprise, would pervade
academies and rings across the planet. Or could anyone
guess? “Out of all pupils Koma taught, and they weren’t few,
as he used to travel the world teaching, only one fully
understood the grandeur of that knowledge, adopting Jiu-Jitsu
as a profession. I believe my father had, since the very
beginning, a good idea of the thing he was learning. No
wonder he created a school that’s been lasting 80 years,”
says Reyla, who has been working on the book since 1999
gathering interviews, press clippings, books and documents
on the subject.
Indeed, when Carlos became acquainted with Count Koma’s techniques, in 1916, theCarlos Gracie Sr. young Gracie was still a developing personality, much like Belem, which worked as an entrance to Brazil, with influence of European and Japanese cultures, and on the other hand was nearly wild, with Indians, woods and rivers where the fearless would play. “Jiu-Jitsu gave my life a direction”, Carlos used to say. Dedicated to the trainings and interested in the techniques, it didn’t take long for Carlos to stand out among the students. “Once, Count Koma needed a volunteer to demonstrate a type of choke, and Carlos offered himself. The professor declined and asked for another pupil, and afterwards told dad: ‘You are going to be a champion, and are not here to be choked,’” says black-belt Rilion, one of the 21 children of the patriarch. Despite Maeda’s constant travels, Carlos kept his training rhythm stable, by beginning to practise with another one of the count’s students, local entrepreneur Jacinto Ferro. “The astonishing thing is neither Ferro nor Loma set up an academy there, no pupil kept it up, and Jiu-Jitsu pretty much vanished from the state of Para. The person who took it back there, decades later, was someone who had learned at the Gracies’ school in South-Eastern Brazil,” Reyla recalls. With the family’s increasingly hard economic situation, the father took Carlos, along with younger brothers Osvaldo, Gastao, Jorge and Helio (the latter, 11 years younger than Carlos), to try and make a living in Rio de Janeiro, then Sao Paulo and then Belo Horizonte. At age 22, Carlos Gracie started to make a living out of Jiu-Jitsu. It was the time of challenges published on newspapers (“Want a broken rib? Look for Carlos Gracie,” one of them
