Gracie's All The Way Down

At the Budo Journeyman blog, is a series of articles about martial arts dynasties. There was a recent post about the celebrated Gracie family of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu fame. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

Still looking at the three-generation rule I want to carousel through other family dynasties.

In this third piece, I will look at:

Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.

I always liked the simple historical fact that the Gracie’s originally came from Scotland. It made me think of ‘The Clans of the Highlands’, you couldn’t get more tribal than that.1

In reading around the subject (another one which I have zero practical experience of) I found myself going down a whole Brazilian rabbit hole, and really had to discipline myself to stick with the ‘three-generation rule’.

This is going to be a lightning tour and I do hope the GJJ and the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu community will forgive me.

First impressions: the Gracie family really do go for huge families (yet the ‘Mrs Gracie’s’ never seem to get a mention. They must have been heroes in themselves. Incidentally, Carlos Gracie is said to have fathered 21 children, most of them became black belts in Jiu-Jitsu; I wonder if that’s some kind of record?).

So, this leads me to the second observation; patriarchal family structures. I would posit that this particular dynamic promotes a strong brand of masculine-based family loyalty and pride, a distinct kind of energy. Possibly here we see some of the ingredients for success.

Gracie’s triumphant.

I found myself looking for some references on a kind of Gracie family business model. What did the clan get right? Before I fully get into the whole brand identity thing, let me dip into the origins story.

Early decades of the 20^th century. The Gracie family have already worked to develop an entrepreneurial spirit; but this needs a little background.

The beginnings.

It all really starts with a Brazilian chance encounter for one of the early family patriarchs, Gastão Gracie, who in 1916 went into the circus business and came across a Japanese ex-pat called Maeda Mitsuyo who used to be a rising judo star in Kano’s Kodokan from 1895 to 1904. In that same year, 1916, Maeda travel to the Americas and barnstormed his way through open fighting circuits all the way through to his arrival in Brazil. Read up on Maeda’s life; it’s a hell of a story.

 

First generation.

As I understand it, Gastão Gracie did not train under Maeda, but two of his sons did; the elder, Carlos Gracie and younger brother Helio. Both of these are generally considered as first generation of what was to become Gracie Jiu-Jitsu.

This was the founding of the generations.

The impression I get is that this form of fighting, so far removed from Japan, does not deserve the name its detractors give it, i.e. ‘Pseudo-judo’. It has Japanese origins but developed its own distinct identity that suited the environment it was later to flourish in.

Some people say that the Gracie/Maeda style came out of a Kodokan project intended to break the ground impasse; hence the emphasis on the ground game. I am not qualified to comment, but it sort of makes sense.