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The Gracie Clan
I COME FROM A LONG LINE OF PROUD AND PUGNACIOUS PEOPLE that I can trace back to Scotland, home of one of the worldâs great warrior cultures. The Romans invaded Scotland (Caledonia) several times in the first three centuries AD, but the fiercely independent clans fought back with a fury that impressed even the mighty legions. When there were no Romans or British left to fight, the clans fought each other. Their leaders were willing to lead from the front and die in the face of overwhelming odds and certain defeat.
Even though I grew up centuries later and a continent away, these values were not too different from the ones that my family lived by and tried to pass on to me, my brothers, and my cousins. Like our Scottish ancestors, it was only through fighting that one became a respected member of the Gracie clan. If one fought especially well, as I did, you became a favorite son, and after your martial arts odyssey, a respected leader.
Gracies began to leave Dumfries, Scotland, in the 1700s to seek their fortunes in the Americas. My distant relative Archibald Gracie filled a ship with precious cargo, sailed it to New York City, made a small fortune, and started a shipping business with American founding father Alexander Hamilton.
Gracie Mansion, Archibald Gracieâs country house on New York Cityâs East River, sounded to me like a colonial American version of my familyâs ranch in TeresĂłpolis, Brazil. It was a place where future American presidents, titans of commerce, and European dignitaries gathered on the weekends to relax and escape the heat and squalor of the city. Since 1942 it has served as the home of New York Cityâs mayors.
Archibaldâs son, Archibald Jr., was a very successful New York merchant, but his grandson Archibald III was a warrior. At West Point, he earned superintendent Robert E. Leeâs respect after he got beaten up in a fight on the parade grounds. When Gracie was called into Leeâs office, he refused to give up the name of the man he was fighting. After his opponent turned himself in, Lee did not punish either of them.
When Americaâs Civil War broke out, Archibald Gracie III sided with the Confederacy. He started the war as a major, but after fighting heroically in some of the conflictâs fiercest battles, Gracie was a brigadier general at the age of twenty-nine. During the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864, he constructed the Gracie Salient, a defensive masterpiece full of trenches, bunkers, obstacles, and mortar pits designed to keep the Union Army at bay.
During the nine-month siege of Petersburg, Robert E. Lee came to inspect Gracieâs position. It was only a few hundred yards away from the Union lines, and when Lee tried to peek over the wall to survey the enemy soldiers, Gracie climbed up onto the wall and stood like a human shield in front of the astonished commander of the Confederate Army. âWhy, Gracie, you will certainly be killed,â said Lee.
âIt is better, General, that I be killed than you. When you get down, I will.â
Robert E. Lee survived the Civil War, but Archibald Gracie III did not. When Lee received the news that Gracie had been killed by a mortar shell at Petersburg, he wrote, âIt was a great grief to me. I do not know how to replace him.â
The Brazilian side of the Gracie family was also full of bold and dynamic people. My great-great-grandfather, George Gracie, left Dumfries and arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1826. Initially, he worked in the import-export business, but he married into an upper-class Brazilian family and became a director at the Bank of Brazil. His son, my great-grandfather Pedro, also became a prominent banker.
Pedroâs son, my grandfather GastĂŁo Gracie, was educated in Germany, where he received a degree in chemistry. After he finished his education in Europe, GastĂŁo moved to the port city of BelĂ©m, Brazil, near the mouth of the Amazon River. Although he was trained to be a diplomat, my grandfatherâs nature was anything but diplomatic. He had a bad temper, was impulsive, and spent money faster than he could make it. Too late to cash in on the rubber boom, he gambled, manufactured dynamite, and managed a circus instead.
The American Circus brought fighters from all over the world for bouts with Brazilian challengers in BelĂ©m. One of those who made his way to Amazonia was a Japanese fighter named Hideyo Maeda. Trained in both traditional Jiu Jitsu and the more sporting art of Judo, Maeda was one of Japanâs greatest judokas before he became a prize fighter. Traditional Japanese Jiu Jitsu was developed for armed combat on the battlefield, but Judo was created in the late 1880s by JigarĆ KanĆ as a safer, more sporting, weaponless alternative.
Maeda left Japan in 1904 to conduct public Judo demonstrations in the United States at Columbia University, Princeton, and West Point. Afterwards, he remained in America, where he fought and won prize fights in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama before moving on to fight in Europe. Fighting under the name Conde Koma, or Count Combat, Maeda won hundreds of bouts against boxers, champion wrestlers, and giant brawlers all over the world. By the time he settled in Brazil, he had been outside Japan for a decade and would never return.
The necessities of real fighting forced the Japanese fighter to modify his traditional Judo and Jiu Jitsu techniques in order to make them more effective. Maeda fought both grappling matches and no-holds-barred fights that were called vale tudo (âanything goesâ) in Brazil. Much closer to a street fight than modern MMA, in vale tudo there were no gloves, no weight divisions, and no time limits. A small fighter like Maeda, often heavily outweighed by his opponents, had to adopt a strategic and patient approach to fighting.
In 1917, my grandfather, GastĂŁo Gracie, took his fifteen-year-old son Carlos to watch a fight at BelĂ©mâs Theatro da Paz. Because of his blond hair and bright blue eyes, people called my uncle Carlos the Little Gringo, and according to my family, he was hyperactive and always in trouble. After Carlos watched the five-four, 145-pound Japanese man control and dominate much larger opponents, he had a revelation: a fighter who used technique, strategy, and intelligence could defeat a fighter who had only size and strength.
Maeda settled in BelĂ©m with his wife and daughter. GastĂŁo introduced him to some of the regionâs leaders and helped him get land for Japanese immigrants to build farms in the rain forest. Maeda opened a martial arts school in BelĂ©m, where he and an assistant taught my uncles Carlos, Oswaldo, George, GastĂŁo Jr., and a handful of others his modified style of Jiu Jitsu.
After GastĂŁo Gracie went bankrupt in the 1920s, the brothers moved to Rio and opened their first Jiu Jitsu academy. They were confident enough in their abilities to invite fighters from any style to test their skills in a match against Jiu Jitsu. A âGracie challengeâ could be a sporting match that a tap on the ground could end at any time, but my uncles also fought vale tudo matches. Because my father, HĂ©lio, was the youngest of the brothers, Carlos was almost a father figure to him. My father would later say that he owed his life to Uncle Carlos because he educated him and gave him a set of philosophical principles to live by.
When all of your brothers are fighters, there are bound to be fights. Even though the Gracies would close ranks against outsiders, there was always tension between family members that sometimes boiled over. While HĂ©lio followed his eldest brotherâs orders like gospel, Uncle George âthe Red Catâ Gracie had his own ideas. George was an excellent fighter and the most athletic of the brothers. But he was also a bohemian who liked to gamble and party, which meant he was often at odds with his more austere older brother, Carlos. Eventually the brothers went their separate ways, and the only one who stuck with Carlos through thick and thin was my father, HĂ©lio. Some said that their relationship was so close that they were like a finger and its nail.
My father was far from the best athlete in the family. When he was a child, a doctor told him not to exercise because of his vertigo. My dad used to say, âI was born weak, Iâll die weak. I pass for strong because of Jiu Jitsu.â Because HĂ©lio did not have the option of using power, he had to rely on leverage, sensitivity, and timing to compensate for his lack of strength. I know this might sound like an exaggeration, but HĂ©lio Gracie was to Jiu Jitsu what Albert Einstein was to physics. He greatly improved the martial art by further developing a position called the guard that was both defensive and offensive, which allowed him to fight off his back with his opponent between his legs. Not only was he able to defend himself from punches, but he could also control and submit his opponents with an arsenal of chokes and joint locks. Although the position had existed previously in Judo, because of my dadâs size and the violent nature of vale tudo fights, he modified and modernized it.
Slight and physically unimposing, HĂ©lio Gracie was a perfect poster child for a martial art that claimed to be the triumph of intelligence over brute strength. An early commercial for Gracie Jiu Jitsu featured a skinny guy with an attractive woman on a Rio beach. In it, a muscle-bound bully slaps the skinny guy to the ground and leaves with his girlfriend. In the next scene, the skinny guy is shown signing up for classes at the Gracie Academy, training in Jiu Jitsu, and then returning to the same beach a few weeks later to confront the bully. This time, he blocks the musclemanâs punch, throws him to the ground, breaks his arm, and leaves with the girl. They really donât make commercials like they used to.
To Carlos Gracie, Jiu Jitsu was as much about psychology as it was about martial arts. He believed that because the martial art had cured his male insecurity and given him confidence and peace of mind, it could do the same for others. He used to say that he used Jiu Jitsu to turn chickens into stallions. My uncle Carlos was a very eccentric guy. He almost always wore white linen, walked around barefoot, and claimed that he had a direct, personal relationship with a benevolent spirit who gave him extrasensory perception (ESP). He often rose before dawn to meditate under the sunâs first rays, and he sunbathed naked because he believed doing so would help him sire strong children. My uncle talked about biorhythms, nutrition, digestion, food combining, but rarely traditional religion. He believed that the letters R, K, and C were powerful ones, which is why so many of my familyâs names begin with them.
Carlos Gracie attracted a number of followers who shared his unique worldview. One of them was a prominent businessman named Oscar Santa Maria, who became his greatest patron. He helped Carlos invest his money and run his day-to-day affairs so that my uncle was free to devote all of his time to Gracie Jiu Jitsu. Their relationship got more complicated after Carlos married Oscarâs fiancĂ©e and had three children with her. After three decades as his disciple, Santa Maria became my uncleâs archenemy and sued him for fraud.
I believe that my uncle Carlos was deeply affected by two deaths that occurred early in his life. When he was a young man, a previous fiancĂ©e contracted typhoid and, while suffering from a very high fever, jumped out of a window to her death. Carlos was so distraught that he, too, considered suicide. A decade later, his first wife, Carmen, the mother of six of his children, got tuberculosis. When she went to a sanatorium, Carlos ignored the doctorsâ warnings about this highly contagious disease and moved into the sanatorium with her. Although he exposed himself to the disease, he refused to leave her side until Carmen died in 1940. Miraculously, Carlos never contracted the disease.
After the two loves of his life died, Carlos Gracie decided to father as many children, preferably boys, as possible, and he encouraged my father to do the same. Their goal was to create a clan of fighters. Between 1932 and 1967, Carlos and HĂ©lio fathered thirty children with eight different women; twenty-one of them were boys. When Margarida, my fatherâs first wife, the woman I consider my mother, was unable to get pregnant, my uncle came up with a plan. My father, with my motherâs knowledge and consent, would impregnate our African Brazilian babysitter, Belinha, who gave birth to me and my older brothers Rorion and Relson. The whole thing was an elaborate ruse. Margarida wore a fake belly during Belindhaâs pregnancies and when the time came for her to give birth, she went to the hospital and came home with a baby. Not even her best friends knew! When I was young and looked at myself in the mirror and saw my freckles, I thought they were from my Scottish blood. Little did I know that I was half African Brazilian!
My mother, Margarida, was a well-educated, upper-class girl whose father was a millionaire who owned a huge import/export company and lots of property. After she divorced her first husband, which was very uncommon in Brazil at that time, she fell madly in love with HĂ©lio, who was a rough guy. Not only did she polish him, she also introduced him to Rioâs high society. Even though Margarida was passionately in love with him, their relationship was one-sided. HĂ©lio was ice cold and didnât care how anyone felt other than my uncle Carlos. He was old-fashioned Brazilian macho and believed that women belonged in the nursery and the kitchen. He even went so far as to say that he never loved a woman, because love was a manifestation of weakness, and that he had sex only for the sake of procreation. In his mind, his mission was bigger than these kinds of sensitivities.
Even though Carlos and HĂ©lio were a team bound by their mission to create a clan of fighters, they had very different roles. When I was born, in 1958, Carlos was well into his fifties and played no role in my martial-arts training. He was our familyâs nutritionist and philosopher. My uncle was also responsible for the Gracie diet. Carlos believed disease was the bodyâs form of protest, the way it told you that something was wrong with you. Food causes alkaline or acidic reactions in the blood, he told us, and he attempted to eliminate acidity. My father did not eat meat. While I grew up eating beef, chicken, and fish, we ate it in moderation. As important as what you eat is when you eat and what foods you combine together. Typically, Gracies would eat one starch, one protein, and then a salad. I would never eat rice and beans at the same time. Meals were spaced five hours apart to allow the body to absorb the nutrients from the food.
Sweets to us were not cookies and ice cream. They were papayas, mangoes, figs, or watermelon juice. Sugar, processed foods, alcohol, and coffee were all strictly prohibited. I grew up thinking that eating chocolate was like drinking rat poison! Coca-Cola? Poison! Cake and cookies? Poison! As kids, we were amazed by how much longer Uncle Carlos took to finish his meals; he would chew each bite for over a minute, and it would take him more than an hour to eat a small plate of food.
If Carlos Gracie was our philosopher, HĂ©lio Gracie was our general. We were all supposed to fight, eat, and hav...
