The term "martial arts" appeared in the Western consciousness around a century ago, when Japanese jiu-jitsu (which bore very little resemblance to today's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) made its first inroads into the world outside Eastern Asia. President Teddy Roosevelt was an avid sportsman, who trained in boxing and wrestling regularly, and we have written records that confirm that he took some jiu-jitsu classes as well while in office (1901 to 1909). Hungarian readers familiar with the famous fight scene in the novel Piszkos Fred Közbelép (1940) might recall the protagonist wondering in anticipation of the "big surprise"-defense promised by the Malaysian giant:
"...Fülig Jimmy was curious about the technique. It's probably jiu-jitsu...". In one novel of Edgar Rice Burroughs' famous series, Tarzan challenges and defeats the leader of a Mangani (giant ape) troupe with a jiu-jitsu throw he had learned in the world of humans.
Yet in the coming decades, jiu-jitsu faded into semi-obscurity, and thanks to international sport and Hollywood movies from the 70s, its place has been taken over by Karate, Judo, and Kung-fu (which few casual movie-goers could tell apart). Besides Steven Seagal's popularization of Aikido in his short spell of fame in the early 90s, no other martial art appeared on the horizon since the movies of Bruce Lee, who died in 1972. And then, out of nowhere, at the turn of the millennium, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu came, conquered, and started to become a household name, maybe on the road to becoming the most practiced martial art around the globe.
I've recently finished Robert Drysdale's doorstopper of a book on the history of BJJ which prompted this post. Drysdale is a two-time heavyweight BJJ world champion and a former UFC fighter, with a BSc in and a lifelong fascination with history. Which makes him as close to a real-life version of a warrior-scholar from a fantasy realm as it gets. Drysdale's book made ripples in the BJJ world as it traced not only the history of the art from its inception to its current state but also challenged the official version of it. At first, I wanted to simply condense his book into a post, but upon starting it I realized that the history of BJJ cannot be fully explained without being familiar with that of Judo (which Drysdale explored in more detail in his previous book, Opening Closed Guard). So let's start with Judo.
The History of Judo
At the end of the 19th century, Japan was in the midst of an aggressive top-down modernization. The samurai class had been dissolved and the Kenjutsu (sword-fighting) schools were slowly being replaced by Kendo dojos. Unarmed martial arts - referred to commonly as jiu-jitsu - were also on their way out of Japanese society. The students and masters had often the reputation of common thugs engaging in brutal and low-brow prestige fights on the street. Martial skills were no longer exclusively the source of pride but were often perceived as a sign of a bad character. Interestingly enough, this mirrored Western attitudes towards fencing on the other side of the world many times in the last centuries.
If not for one man, Jigoro Kano, Japanese martial arts perhaps would have remained a local eccentricity with a diminishing number of adherents. Kano was an unlikely martial arts founding father. The diminutive schoolteacher was not a warrior either by look or by behavior. He was a teacher, education organizer, and bureaucrat influenced heavily by Western ideas of sport, education, and humanism, who nevertheless saw something valuable in jiu-jitsu. He decided that this obsolete vestige of a more barbaric age could become a tool of education and a builder of national spirit. With just 4 years of jiu-jitsu education under his belt he created his own school with lofty ideas in mind.
He was also a practical man. He realized that to transform jiu-jitsu from a martial art to a sport, he had to create a corpus of techniques that the students could practice to perfection without the constant danger of getting injured during training. Before Kano, the different jiu-jitsu schools did not have coherent frameworks of techniques but taught a rather arbitrary bunch of moves and tricks. The descriptions of a master's trademark techniques were not displayed publicly but ceremonially passed on in scrolls from the master to his successor. The techniques were often lethal or at least supposed to be.
Kano drew upon the techniques of his former school but also from others. He pruned them down to keep only the ones that could be practiced safely against resisting opponents. Traditional jiu-jitsu techniques encompass almost everything. Strikes, kicks, throws, ground-fight techniques, joint-locks, eye-gouging, etc. Kano disposed of kicks and strikes completely and built up his system predominantly of takedowns and a limited number of ground-fighting elements. Dangerous throws went out on the way of eye-gouging and strikes to the throat.
The reaction from the contemporary martial arts community was the same as it would be from most laymen nowadays. They derided Kano's misguided philosophy and claimed that making the art safe was actually neutralizing it and the process produced something good for sport but weak for self-defense. They got this exactly backwards as Kano proved by organizing tournaments where his students decisively and literally wiped the floor with their rivals.
Kano's success was based on the realization that you can only really learn a technique if you practiced it thousands of times against resisting opponents. The shoulder throw cannot be mastered just by doing it a couple of times with cooperating training partners, which will give you a false sense of confidence, then expecting that you can do the same in a high-stake, high-adrenaline situation at the spur of the moment. Which is exactly how supposedly lethal techniques are still being practiced in thousands of traditional martial art dojos, for the obvious reason that doing them in sparring situations would leave you or your partner dead, crippled, or at least seriously injured. The correct angle, distance, timing of a move, the adequate mixture of speed and strength, and the anticipation of the opponent's reactions and defense attempts against it require practicing thousands of times until the move becomes muscle memory. Though this is just trivia in Western combat sports like wrestling and boxing, Kano's approach was a radical novelty in the Japanese martial arts world.
Kano in his lifetime enjoyed great success and appreciation, and the expansion of Judo continued beyond the borders of Japan already in his lifetime. After establishing a firm place in the national sport and education, the Kodokan, the organization he created, sent its sturdy missionaries out to the world to spread the "gentle way". Judo for the first time was measured up against its foreign rivals.
It's interesting to view the history of Judo in contrast with the evolution of its Western equivalent, wrestling. Wrestling, and to some degree boxing, has been around for millennia virtually in every corner of the world, both as part of military training and as sport and entertainment. Although in its current, Olympic form, the focus is on winning by scores for pinning the opponent and achieving dominant positions, different styles of submission wrestling had once been widespread. Wrestling moves are even featured in European fencing manuals hundreds of years ago.
American folk style or catch-as-catch-can wrestling of the late nineteenth century evolved directly from England's Lancashire-style wrestling which resembled a very rough form of jiu-jitsu. Until the early twentieth century wrestlers who accepted challenges from local toughs were regular parts of traveling funfaires. They developed a wide repertoire of submission holds - chokes and join-locks -, to which they referred as "hooks". Hence their contemporary name, "hookers".
The Japanese judo experts in the first years of the twentieth century found a spirited audience in America and immediately faced challenges from local catch wrestlers. The encounters were frequent and mutually beneficial. The Japanese were as keen to learn wrestling moves as the Westerners were curious and impressed by oriental ways that were perceived as more refined and more high-brow than their local counterparts.
But even though Ad Santel and other American catch wrestlers were more than able to give the judo experts a run for their money, the development of wrestling took a different direction, somewhat mirroring Judo's earlier evolution from jiu-jitsu. It has been similarly tamed but to a greater degree by the complete removal of submission holds. Catch wrestling conceded its place to modern Olympic Wrestling, only to be brought to the forefront almost a hundred years later spurred by the changes unleashed by the appearance of Judo's offspring, BJJ.
To summarize it, Kano's contribution to martial arts was nothing short of revolutionary. He completely changed the methodology of teaching them, he transformed a brutal set of survival tactics into a sport, he made the sport part of public education and a source of national pride in Japan, and he managed to create one of the most robust international sport organizations in the world.
His achievement regarding the change of methodology seems trivial for the Western eyes. Free-sparring in a relatively safe manner as part of the everyday training is not some great idea, just basic common sense. It wasn't a complete novelty even in Japan. There must have been hand-to-hand combat schools with more pragmatic masters, and traditional sword-fighting had already given up its place to Kendo, where the students fight with bokkens and in protective gear. But the idea that this type of training produces fighters that are superior to the ones from the old schools that supposedly taught lethal martial skills, was groundbreaking.
The next revolution came almost a century later.
Ultimate Fighting Championship
In 1993, an obscure Brazilian family practicing their obscure variant of Judo, organized the first Ultimate Fighting Championship which developed into a million-dollar industry in the coming decades.
The Gracies touted it as the first-ever worldwide no-holds-barred tournament open for all combat styles. The American martial arts world, always open to new and violent spectacles, was thrilled. One of the favorite pastimes of every practitioner is imagining how different styles would square up against each other, and which one would prove to be the best. Almost invariably, the imaginary contests are won by the martial arts the imaginer happens to practice. And here was a chance to decide the matter in front of the world for good.
To everyone's (but the Gracies') surprise, the matches were decisively won by Royce Gracie, an unassuming, not particularly athletic-looking guy, who easily dispatched one opponent after another, mostly larger than him. His fighting style was shockingly different from anything a Westerner has seen before. He quickly closed the distance between himself and his opponent, clinched, dragged him to the ground, and finished him with a choke or a joint lock. It wasn't very nice, but it was demonstratively effective. The difference in aesthetics between BJJ and the martial arts in the movies was as big as the surprise its success invoked. The martial arts community was immensely curious about the Gracies and their fighting style, and they were all too happy to satisfy.
The official BJJ history
The turn of the 19th century brought hardships to Japan. The economic recession and an earthquake in Tokyo inspired many Japanese to leave the island in search of a better life. Many of them ended up in southern Brazil and some of those were practicing Judokas. The emissaries of the Kodokan found a receptive culture, and seeds of Judo fell on fertile ground in Brazil, where prize-fighting (both cocks and humans) was one of the natives popular pastimes.
Among the legendary Japanese Judo masters who became a prizefighter and a teacher, was one named Mitsuyo Maeda. One of Maeda's students was a young man called Carlos Gracie. Gracie opened his own school in the early 30s. One of his students was his brother, Helio, a skinny, physically weak boy, who realized that he needed to modify his approach to fighting if he wanted to compete against physically stronger opponents. He developed a style that, moving away from the traditional throw-oriented style of Judo, concentrated on ground-fighting techniques, where the knowledge of joint locks and the principle of leverage could counterbalance the opponent's greater strength.
The brothers participated in many of the local prize-fights. Even though the patriarch of the family and the business was Carlos, Helio became the champion representing the family in the prizefighting scene in the coming decades. His most famous match was against a world-renowned Judo master, Masahiko Kimura. Helio was around 65kg, while Kimura was roughly 25 kg his superior, and generally considered the greatest judoka ever lived. During the fight, Kimura repeatedly threw Helio to the ground, but thanks to the soft tatami they were fighting on, didn't manage to render him unconscious, which was his original plan. He took the fight to the ground, where he caught Helio's arm in a lock, that since is named after him in BJJ. He broke Helios's arm, who still refused to concede the fight. Kimura broke another bone, and Carlos Gracie threw in the towel. After the match, Helio admitted that he never thought he could defeat Kimura. Actually, he thought Kimura was simply invincible. He wanted to prove that even with the huge difference in weight and experience, his style could stand this ground against the best judoka in the world.
Another famous fight ended as well with Helio's defeat under the hands of his former Student, Waldemar Santana. Santana and Helio had a long public dispute which they decided to settle in a match. Santana was 26 years old whereas Helio 42, with around a 25 kg difference in weight in Santana's favour. The younger and bigger man won the no-holds-barred fight with a soccer kick to Helio's head, but only after a grueling 3-hour struggle. Helio emerged again physically beaten, but morally victorious.
Carlos and Helio had 20 and 10 children, respectively, and fortunately for their mentality and plans, the majority were boys. The Gracies had an army to raise. In the coming decades they dominated Brazil's prizefighting scene, then in the early nineties, they set their eyes on a bigger prize.
In 1993, Helio's son, Rorion organized the first UFC where the family's champion was his brother, Royce. The rest is, as they say, history.
The more realistic BJJ history
And this is where we return to Drysdale's book, which looks at BJJ history with a historian's eyes. This story is far more nuanced and much more interesting than the simple and widely spread one above. Drysdale examines how the technical repertoire of BJJ evolved over the years, how the Gracies accomplished the impossible task of carving out a niche for themselves in the homogenous world of Judo, and how family feuds and competition rules formed the art.
Below, for the sake of simplicity, I eschew the constant "in Drysdale's interpretation"-caveat, and simply convey his narrative as factual history. The major takeaways from Drysdale's book are the evolution of BJJ from Judo to a ground-fight-focused style, the way the competition rules devised by the Gracies both reflected and influenced that process, the evolution of the training culture from the original militaristic Gracie Academy to todays "surfer"-attitude, and the role of different members of the Gracie family in the story.
Let's start at the beginning. Beyond his word, there is no proof that Carlos Gracie was a student of Maeda, but there are multiple different facts that make it improbable. The more likely explanation is that Carlos "invented" this connection to give his fledging school legitimacy, which at the beginning it needed. The Gracies belonged to the Brazilian upper-class society but they had fallen on hard times financially. They still retained their social connections despite the loss of their wealth and hoped to reverse their fortunes using their martial arts school. Which at that time followed a very different teaching model than the one we see nowadays. The Gracies almost explicitly catered to an affluent clientele who they taught one-on-one. The teaching was focused on self-defense.
If they regarded Maeda as their master, it's unclear why they referred to their art as jiu-jitsu instead of simply judo. Probably at the time the distinction between the terms "Judo" and "Jiu-jitsu" wasn't as sharp as now. Perhaps it was simply that they wanted to claim to be different and avoid being absorbed by the expanding Judo-sphere. The Gracies also often disparaged Judo as a form of watered-down jiu-jitsu.
The story of Helio, this Einstein of martial arts (as his son Rickson referred to him later), the weak boy, observing his brother's training classes and devising a superior fighting system is an age-old martial art pseudo-history cliche. In reality, Helio had been a swimmer and a competitive rower, hardly the weakling he was described. The idea that he came up with a completely new fighting system just by observing others fighting is plain ridiculous. Techniques are born from constant experimentation, not from divine inspiration. The fact that even the Gracies' official stories changed over time (first it was Carlos who created BJJ, then it was Helio further improving Carlos's system, then later in Helio's old age he retrospectively became the single originator excluding even Carlos) is telling.
Nevertheless, the Gracies were renowned fighters and the clientele of their school was growing. Carlos, as the oldest male member of the family, controlled it as a patriarch. He laid down strict rules in his academy, which covered not only the training regiment but a code of general conduct, business approach, and nutrition as well. Carlos was a committed vegetarian who followed the nutritional guidance of an obscure doctor but claimed the invention of the diet for himself.
Interestingly, even though the official history puts Helio in the role of the family's undisputed champion, he and Carlos had a third brother, George Gracie, the "Red Cat". George was also a fighter and an incredibly prolific one who probably fought more than Carlos and Helio combined, often against much heavier opponents. His erasure from history was due to his feud with his brothers. While Helio followed Carlos's instructions almost religiously, the "Red Cat" refused to toe the lines his elder brother devised and to live his life under the strict rules of the academy.
George's fight against a Judo expert Geo Omori was probably the first official vale-tudo fight in Brazil. The vale-tudo scene between the 30s and 70s in Brazil was a precursor of modern mixed-martial-arts competitions. Judokas, Capoeira masters, boxers, and wrestlers fought under almost anything-goes rules that would look brutal even by current UFC standards. A lot of those fights were fixed, which the audience rarely minded. It was tacitly accepted that for some fighters, the meager payment for those fights was the main source of income, and risking injuries in real contests month-in, month-out was not acceptable. George's involvement in fixed fights was one of the reasons he fell out with his brother's Academy which strictly banned this to its students. However, a lot of fights were real contests and Gracies were well-known actors on the scene.
The feuds did not always stay in the arena. The Gracie brothers were notorious street fighters who were even arrested after assaulting rivals and at least once were spared from prison only thanks to their political connections.
Inside the ring, the Gracies issued many challenges to Japanese judokas, but always under their own rules. The fights were to be won by submissions. As the Gracies prudently arranged for soft tatamis, the Japanese superiority in stand-up fights and takedowns wasn't decisive. Helio Gracie was thrown 27 times in his 1936 fight with Yasuichi Ono who controlled the match decisively, and yet as as he failed to submit Helio, the match was declared a draw. Draws were not losses, thus the Gracies' carefully curated aura of invincibility was undented. When they occasionally still lost, like Helio in his famous fight against Kimura in 1951, they claimed the moral victory.
The fact that Helio was thrown so many times also indicates that today's BJJ trademark of quickly pulling the opponent in guard and thus taking the fight to the ground was not how the Gracies fought at the time. It was rather something they eventually started moving to in an attempt to find a niche where they could beat Judokas of the Kodokan. Drysdale brilliantly documents the process by examining the first rule set of BJJ tournaments devised by the Gracies in 1954 and contrasting it with the revised rule set from 1967 and with the further modified one in 1975.
The first rule set is almost interchangeable with Judo's. Points are assigned for takedowns and dominant positions. In the 1967 ruleset, slightly more emphasis is put on controlling positions on the ground, whereas in the 1975 version, the balance is tipped completely over to favor ground-fighting at the expense of takedowns.
An argument can be made that this change in emphasis did not exclusively aim to neutralize the strength of Japanese Judo but also to reflect the reality of actual fights. As the Gracies learned during their vale-tudo careers, getting in a dominant position (e.g. mounting your opponent) where you can pound your opponent with strikes was crucial in a fight.
Nevertheless, this bastard child of Judo, in the span of three decades, evolved into a predominantly ground-fighting style. But contrary to the Gracie narrative, they were not the first ones to arrive there. Koshen Judo, a virtually unknown Japanese judo school in the shadow of the Kodokan specialized in ne-waza (the judo term for ground techniques) decades before the Brazilians. Fascinatingly, the Gracies in their almost complete isolation from the rest of the world, developed many of the same techniques as their Japanese counterparts had been practicing for a very long time. Koshen Judo's technical repertoire was, if anything, even more sophisticated than the Gracie's.
During this time, changes occurred in the Gracie Academy. Carlson Gracie gradually withdrew from the teaching and business to get deeper into his own spiritualistic cult and Helios took his place at the helm. Besides being the leading teacher and boss of business, at the age of 40, he was still the poster boy of the academy.
But in 1955 Helio lost a fight against his erstwhile student, Waldemar Santana. The fact that Santana was sixteen years younger and much heavier than him, and the fight still lasted three hours wasn't as relevant to the audience as the fact the Gracies were proved to be defatable after all. The family quickly avenged its loss by Carlson Gracie, Carlos's son. Carlson fought six times against Santana, winning two of their bouts and having four draws. Carlson has become the champion of the next generation. Over his career, he won 18 of his 19 vale-tudo matches. However, instead of feeling vindicated, Helio became jealous of his nephew. If he ever wanted to pass the helm, he wanted his successor to be one of his own sons. Eventually, Carlson left the Academy and created his own. And thus, like the best fighter of the previous generation, his uncle the "Red Cat", Carlson was erased from the Gracie history.
The Carlson Gracie Academy
But Carlson didn't actually disappear. He opened his own academy that churned out the best fighters of the next generation, regularly beating the Gracie Academy students (his own cousins) in competitions. Drysdale contends that it was actually Carlson who created the BJJ culture we know today in contrast with almost every aspect of the Gracie Academy.
The Academy maintained and militaristic hierarchy, with a business model of teaching one-on-one lessons to wealthy clients. The session focused on self-defense, and in a conscious effort to retain their superiority, the real advanced training sessions were kept for family members only.
Carlson instead taught in group classes, and he taught anyone, sometimes for free. His answer to his cousins' objections to sharing family "trade secrets" with outsiders was: "You want to be better than my students? Train harder."
Despite being fiercely competitive (he was an inveterate cock-fight enthusiast), the atmosphere of Carlson's classes reflected the location where he set up his academy - the Copacabana. Surfer ethos, fist-bumps, flip-flops, rambunctious parties, and no hierarchy apart from the one naturally created by merit.
Other grapplers and local feuds
Even before the opening of Carlos's own dojo, the Grace Academy wasn't the only martial arts school specializing in grappling in Brazil. Oswaldo Fadda, whose master trained under Maeda (the supposed master of Carlos Gracie) also opened his school in the 40s. While the Gracies catered to upper-class students, Fadda opened his door to the working-class who couldn't afford the Gracies' tuition fees. Fadda even challenged the Gracies to a friendly tournament between students in 1955 which they accepted. The results are still a matter of dispute, but according to any report, the Fadda students didn't do badly. But the Gracie PR machine has steamrolled over the Fadda school, and today they are, although existing, only little known.
The relations were not so amicable with other rivals. As mentioned earlier, the Gracie brothers were not above duking out their differences with their rivals on the street. The bad blood between them and the practitioners of Luta Livre, another early Brazilian MMA-variant, started in the 30s and came to a peak in the late eighties when they mutually raided each others' academies, on at least one occasion with knives and guns.
The UFC - from the insider's eye
In 1993, the Gracies set their eyes on the US. It wasn't the first time. In the late 70s, Helio's eldest Rorion tried to establish a BJJ stronghold in North America with little success. They founded some dojos, recruited students by spreading flyers in parks, and raided traditional martial arts dojos. That is, they turned up at other dojos, challenged the master, and beat him up in front of the students to demonstrate their product's superiority. In short, they behaved like their fathers did a generation ago. A little better than thugs, if at all.
They even tried to set foot in Hollywood and convince producers that the popular Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris-type martial arts are all fake and they are selling the genuine article. From a bunch of nobodies from Brazil, that was audacious. But they had some gigs as fight choreographers and stuntmen. Rorion Gracie choreographed the final fight scene between Mel Gibson and Gary Busy in Lethal Weapon. Beyond that, the venture didn't seem to go anywhere.
But, by the early nineties, Rorion came up with a much more grandiose idea, maybe inspired by his spell in Hollywood. The idea of an international "clashing of styles" tournament, like in the movies, but for real.
In hindsight, the Gracies duped the world's martial arts community. At the time there were no full-contact martial arts competitions that enjoyed a wide audience (that was started by UFC). People's perceptions of the effectiveness of martial arts against other styles were largely based on assumptions. That includes practicing martial artists, too. For the Gracies, no-holds-barred competitions were the sea where they had been raised for two generations. The other contestant couldn't swim, and they didn't even know it.
The Gracies were so confident, that in order to increase the shock effect, they intentionally avoided putting their best fighter in the ring, who at that time was Rickson Gracie, one of Helio's many sons, brother to Rorion. Instead, another brother, Royce Gracie represented the family, who next to Rickson looked like an accountant. They also preventively opened a bunch of dojos prior to the event, anticipating the surge of interest in BJJ Royce's predicted victory will win for them. They were more right than they could imagine.
Carlos Gracie, who was completely sidelined by his uncle and cousins, watched the spectacle from the outside with mixed feelings. He wanted jiu-jitsu to rise but he also knew that the Gracie Academy's fighters were inferior to his own. In later years, his students were the ones that dominated UFC until BJJ's decline.
The spread of BJJ
BJJ took the world by storm. Dojos opened left and right from Canada to Japan. Movie stars from Ashton Kutcher to Tom Hardy brandish their belts on social media. The number of practitioners around the world is estimated to be around 3 million. Quite a jump from the couple of hundreds only 30 years ago.
What makes BJJ so enormously popular? I see a couple of semi-independent factors.
Reputation matters. Most people still start training martial arts with self-defense in mind. UFC and MMA have dented the prestige of traditional martial arts whereas BJJ has proved to be a brutally effective fighting style.
Efficacy. The reputation of jiu-jitsu's effectiveness is based on facts. Unlike in most martial arts, where the emphasis is on forms and solitary repetition of techniques, and free sparring is often rare and sometimes non-existent, half of an average jiu-jitsu class is free rolling. Students get real skills very quickly.
Quick progress. I wrote about this earlier, but in a nutshell, grappling is a style of fighting where a layman has much less chance against a trained one than in the case of let's say box. There is a thing called puncher's chance. Everyone can throw a haymaker, and sometimes a complete idiot can land it. No one can accidentally execute an arm-lock or a perfect rare naked choke. Because of this, students with merely 2 months of training under their belt can feel the progress by sparring against and defeating considerably bigger newcomers.
Fun. Rolling on the ground like kids is fun. Almost by definition, almost for everybody. Also, the surfer culture fits the current age much better than the rigid hierarchy of Eastern martial arts. The almost religious reverence for the master and the obedience to higher-ranking students that has always been the defining characteristic of traditional martial arts has lost its appeal and aura of mystique that ruled the 70s and 80s.
Agelessness. Ground fighting is much less damaging to a body than any other combat sport. Judo and especially wrestling requires of high level of athleticism. It's very rare that someone starts these sports at 30 with no previous experience and manages to stick to them. If you are over fifty, the body regenerates much slower than it used to. Hoisting people in the air and getting smashed to the floor is dangerous and can cause long-term damage. Striking-based sports are less strenuous, but getting hit on the head long enough can cause brain damage. BJJ, you can start at 4 (as a rough-and-tumble game) and with a measured pace and a healthy body, it can be practiced literally into your eighties. A teenager who wants to defend himself against bullies, an average joe who simply wants to work out and have fun, a CEO who wants to feel like a beast without getting concussions, everyone can find what they look for.
Smart marketing. IBJJF competitions have different categories for different belts. You can be a BJJ world champion in....white belt category. Stupid as it sounds, it gives people incentives.
IBJJF, the world's leading BJJ organization was founded by Carlinhos Gracie. Helio's nephew, taking the initiative his UFC-founding cousins did not, transformed with years of hard work going against the prevailing culture and decades-old behavioral habits a violent, ubermacho prizefighting combat system into a modern, respectable, international sport. As he said, they "tamed the ogres". The visionary businessman has the explicit aim to make jiu-jitsu the most practiced martial art on the planet. In his mindset, there are 8 billion potential students.
BJJ in the 21st century. Evolution? Devolution? Both?
The technical evolution of jiu-jitsu is an interesting phenomenon, as one can observe two opposing trends in it. Since the first international BJJ competitions, the more technically sophisticated competitors get in pure jiu-jitsu competitions, the less it proved successful in MMA. How is that possible?
As Drysdale points out, competition rules influence the direction of how a martial art evolves. In BJJ, they are the single most important factor. In contrast to Eastern martial arts, BJJ has no Katas or set moves which have been passed down intact from master to student. It's a competitive sport, where the technical repertoire adapts constantly to the reigning ruleset. What doesn't work is pruned out, and effective new techniques emerge.
In a BJJ match, the competitor's aim is to submit the opponent or win by points by getting into controlling positions. It's perfectly rational to just sit down to the floor at the start of the match, and try to pull the opponent into your guard. Strikes are not allowed, so positions in which you'd expose yourself to them in a real fight are also ok. This made BJJ a butt of jokes in MMA circles, and not entirely undeservedly.
In the last decades, tens of thousands of competitors have been poured into this framework. The rules of natural selection produced a result that Drysdale calls a Cambrian explosion of techniques. Modern BJJ is lightyears ahead of what Helio Gracie or even Koshen Judokas practiced. The techniques are sophisticated and hyper-specialized to maximize the effectiveness in the current rule set and to the detriment to the self-defense aspect BJJ was once focused on.
Jiu-jitsu's standing in UFC reflects this. The world might have been clueless at the beginning when a family of grapplers upended shared misconceptions about the nature of martial arts, but it was eager to learn. Royce Gracie won three of the four first UFC tournaments, but since then no Gracie has ever risen to prominence inside the cage. BJJ has become the victim of its own success. Today everyone incorporates BJJ practice in their training. Even when someone just defends against an arm-bar or triangle joke, they apply BJJ. But the new stars of the MMA world are predominantly wrestlers. Wrestlers possess unsurpassable athleticism and excellent fundamentals for grappling. Learning submission techniques for them is the easy part, and the forgotten art of catch wrestling experiences its renaissance.
What's the future of BJJ? Will it let go of its self-defense side for good and continue to evolve into an ever more sophisticated semi-realistic combat sport? Or will the IBJJF change the ruleset to steer it back to its original path? Future will tell. The Gracies' unwavering stance athwart the expanse of Judo and their adherence to their own style for seventy years before it turned gold for them was a unique historical event and an incredible testament of will. This is unlikely to happen again. There are close to three million people training today worldwide. The evolution of jiu-jitsu, like of any product, will be largely decided by the customers. What is sure to stay is BJJ's main contribution to the martial arts world: bringing submission grappling to the forefront and making it an inalienable part of a fighter's repertoire.
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