izes (but a similar overall powerful shape) are grappling and sweating in the tropical heat. The mats swim with sweat as bodies flow and twist against one another, sinuous as snakes. Everyone has orelha estourada, the wickedly cauliflowered ears of lifelong jiu-jitsu enthusiasts, and most wear multiple tattoos and knee braces. They are all training for vale tudo fights, but a select few are also training for Pride, the biggest MMA event in the world, held in Japan.
Martial arts have always been rife with mythology; warriors will boast, and men will make legends of their heroes, teachers, and fathers. Every martial art has its own path to victory, to invulnerability, to freedom from fear. If you study with this teacher, and practice the moves ten thousand times, no one can defeat you; you will never need to be afraid again. The secrets of the ancients, the death touch, the one-inch punch; stories of mystical teachers who can move people without touching them. It’s hard not to walk out of a Bruce Lee film feeling as if you could fight fifteen guys at once. Mysticism and martial arts go hand in hand, and every school mythologizes its instructors.
Modern MMA has been a testing ground for those myths, a stepping-off point for thousand-year-old traditions; as Pat Miletich said, “Everything gets better, cars get better, watches get better, computers…. Why should fighting be stuck in the Middle Ages?”
In the United States, before the inception of MMA, karate and tae kwon do had been dominant—fueled by the “karate boom” in the sixties and seventies, itself fueled by the chop-socky tradition of Chinese filmmaking. The highly stylized kung fu movies from China were cult fads that influenced mainstream ideas of fighting and martial arts. The Olympics had developed judo (since the turn of the century) and tae kwon do into very sporty forms and distanced them from “real” fighting. Boxing had evolved into a beautiful, elegant war of attrition.
In 1993 Ultimate Fighting, with its “no rules” cachet and promise of blood, was a pay-per-view hit in the niche market between boxing and pro wrestling. The contests were organized in part by Rorion Gracie, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu expert who was intent on bringing his family’s art and style of fighting to the United States. These vale tudo fights had been happening in Brazil for nearly a century, and Rorion’s slender young brother Royce Gracie, with the benefit of all that experience, won three of the first four UFCs. He won those fights by bringing his opponents to the ground and submitting them off his back—something the American audiences had never seen. The achievement was real. Royce was a tremendous fighter, and the point was not lost on the U.S. viewers: Ignore ground fighting at your peril.
Ultimate Fighting was pretty much an extension of the “Gracie challenge” that had already existed in Brazil: Bring all comers and the Gracies will defeat them. Carlos Gracie, to promote his fledgling school in the twenties, took out an ad in O Globo, the major national newspaper: “If you want your face smashed and your arms broken, contact the nearest Gracie jiu-jitsu school.”
When Commodore Perry opened Japan in the 1850s, Americans and Europeans were exposed to both jiu-jitsu* and sumo wrestling, and competition between European boxers and Japanese fighters must have existed. From the turn of the century on, Japanese wrestlers would travel to fight exhibition matches, sometimes against other wrestlers and sometimes against boxers.
“Let us link the start of vale tudo with the entertainment industry typical of the early industrialized world, in contexts such as Victorian London or the Belle époque of Paris. In all these venues there were for decades challenging activities, but all that gave place to purely theatrical fights, while in Brazil real fights were practiced for all of the twentieth century, with the accompanying development of technical sophistication,” says Carlos Loddo (who is writing his own book on the history of vale tudo), addressing this early phenomenon.
We have all heard of those old circuses that would travel around and invite local farm boys to fight the veteran strongman (who would know all the tricks and work them over): It’s the same atmosphere in which John L. Sullivan would travel to a new town, walk into a bar, and announce, “I can lick any man in the place.” In the rest of the world, these exhibitions split into prizefighting (boxing) and professional wrestling (meaning “worked,” or fixed, fights). In Brazil, that never happened.
Mitsuyo Maeda, a Japanese fighter and ambassador for judo, came to New York in 1904 and lectured under his master, Tomita, at West Point; he had some success and continued to travel and put on exhibitions. Eventually Maeda turned to professional wrestling, “muscular theater,” in which the outcome was rarely in doubt, for money. He wrestled all over the world, in London, Belgium, Scotland, and Spain. He wrestled in Cuba and in 1909 in the bullfighting rings in Mexico City. Finally, he ended up in Brazil, with its large Japanese immigrant population, and it was there that he met the Gracie family and began teaching the young Carlos Gracie jujitsu.
Maeda taught Carlos for about five years, then left him to his own devices. That was for the best, for Carlos had grasped the ideas behind Maeda’s technique, and after being left alone, without the rigid Japanese structure, he and his brothers started to create. Carlos brought in his younger brother Helio, who was small and skinny (Carlos at first thought him too frail to train). Helio was forced to turn away from power and look for other ways to win—by attacking an opponent’s arm with his whole body, instead of pitting arm against arm. With his drive he became the chief innovator of the family. Together Carlos and Helio began Gracie jiu-jitsu, a martial art in its own right. Carlos also became interested in the connection between food and well-being, and nutrition was a pillar of his family’s success.
Ironically, it was Helio who became the big fighter out of their school, and he began achieving notoriety as he fought Americans, Japanese, and other Brazilians all through the thirties. In 1948, Helio and Carlos started their famous school in Rio, on the Avenida Rio Branca. Rio’s richest playboys trained there, and Helio’s celebrity continued to flourish. In 1950 he challenged Joe Louis to fight for a million cruzeiros, but Joe never accepted. Helio continued to fight, and in 1951 he fought a Japanese fighter in Maracana Stadium, the largest soccer stadium in the world. The Gracie school consisted of lawyers, judges, and the crème de la crème of Brazilian society. The Gracies were also fiercely protective of their sphere. Loddo writes that “anyone who would teach fighting in Rio, if claiming too loud that such practice was an efficient method for self-defense purposes…would end up, sooner or later, having to put the practice to test against the Gracies’ jiu-jitsu.”
Brazilian Top Team was born under Carlson Gracie, a famous fighter and teacher, and became arguably the most successful MMA team in history.
I had decided to go to Brazil to learn jiu-jitsu and meet the greatest ground fighters in the world. It was a logical step; the biggest influence on MMA in the States was without a doubt Brazilian jiu-jitsu and vale tudo. I would try to fill the gaping hole in my fighting; I had a little tiny bit, a glimpse of the ground game, but I needed more.
When I thought back to my cage fight, it seemed ridiculous that I had gone in there without a ground game at all. Just stupid. If I had had any kind of confidence in my ground game, I could have tried to take my opponent down when the stand-up was going all his way. It’s what Pat would have done; if you’re getting shelled standing, put him on the ground. I had gone into that fight without knowing a single takedown. Now, my stand-up was okay, good enough to spar with decent people and not come out too badly, but it wasn’t anywhere near good enough to be my only thing. I needed options; it was just foolishness not to have a complete game. If I went to Brazil, the home of jiu-jitsu, and I stayed and trained for four months at Top Team, I would force myself to have at least the basis for a ground game.
I also needed a way to finance it, so I somehow sold a proposal for the book you are reading. This had the added benefit of access: Now that I was a writer, I had an in with the fighters.
Brazilians fight in vale tudo, but the big time for them is Pride in Japan. Pride fighting, a promotion like the UFC, is big money and giant stadiums with ninety thousand people. The fighters get the respect and treatment that top professional athletes in the United States receive. Bob Sapp, an American ex-NFL lineman who fought in the K-1 (a huge kickboxing event that has branched out into MMA) and who also has competed in MMA, made millions a year and appeared on the cover of Time’s Asian edition and in countless Japanese advertisements. He was not a technical fighter but a monster at something like 355 pounds and 10 percent body fat—a black Godzilla—and the Japanese love him. Japan is one of the only places where MMA fighters can make serious money. The UFC, by far the dominant promotion in the United States, takes care of the top guys, but the undercard payment is brutally low.
I knew the fighters of Brazil Top Team from