The UFC Creation Con: Gracie Jiu-Jitsu
The Santa Claus of MMA was trying to pull a fast one and accidentally created a sport
History remembers UFC 1 as the birth of modern Mixed Martial Arts, but creating a new sport was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Promoter Art Davie wanted to make large dollars quick by holding a martial arts spectacle on pay-per-view. Co-creator Rorion Gracie was looking to market the family business, nothing more and nothing less.
Rorion Gracie: Martial Artist on the Make in Hollywood
He’d been at it for years, moving to California in the 1970s to promote the family style in Hollywood. The 1980s saw Rorion make some major breakthroughs, including doing the fight choreography for the Mel Gibson hit Lethal Weapon in 1987 and a 1989 feature interview in Playboy magazine.
But Gracie Jiu-Jitsu remained a relatively obscure martial compared to the various flavors of Karate and Kung Fu that dominated the pages of martial arts magazines like Black Belt and Inside Kung Fu.
Rorion advertised his Gracie Challenge video series in paid ads in those magazines — which were distributed at seemingly every convenience store in the nation at the time — and fought for any scrap of coverage while Wing Chun and Aikido “masters” like Emin Boztepe and Steven Seagal enjoyed regular cover stories.
For 18 months, the UFC served the interests of both Davie and Gracie brilliantly.
Davie sold several hundred thousand pay-per-views and Rorion’s younger brother Royce's undefeated run in The Octagon made Gracie Jiu-Jitsu a lucrative international cult.
The UFC Made Millions Buy the Gracie Legend
I know — because I was a convert.
The early UFC videos were a revelation for a one-eyed runt from the Texas Panhandle. Suddenly there seemed to be a solution to the problem of being a physically hapless punk in a world filled with violent rednecks and jocks.
Best of all, the revelation was presented in the form of lurid hardcore violence porn that stood up to repeated viewings.
The early UFC broadcasts not only presented a relentless sales pitch for Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, they also mixed in plenty of horrific beatdowns and complete mismatches featuring:
Local karate instructors getting wrecked by semi-pro kickboxers,
Refrigerator repairmen breaking their hands on the thick necks of the morbidly obese, and
But the overall narrative arc featured every-man hero Royce Gracie — selected because he was the least physically imposing member of the clan — overcoming an increasingly serious series of challenges presented by the likes of Ken Shamrock, Kimo Leopoldo, and Dan Severn.
Accidentally — and against all odds, the early UFCs produced at least half a dozen truly great prize fights, produced just as many stars, and accidentally birthed the most important new combat sport of the 21st Century.
Traditional Martial Arts Swept Aside by Gracie Jiu-Jitsu
Probably the most satisfying aspect for Rorion was the complete up-ending of the martial arts marketplace in America.
Virtually every issue of Black Belt and Inside Kung Fu featured traditional martial artists — many of whom had quietly declined invitations to participate in the UFC — writing defensive screeds explaining how their system had “the answer” to Gracie Jiu-Jitsu
Rorion particularly reveled in making Boztepe look foolish and desperate in an extended public correspondence involving Art Davie and Boztepe’s attorney that sure made it look like the vaunted Kung Fu master had nothing to offer but excuses and special pleading in the face of the Gracie Challenge®.
But the partnership of convenience between Davie and the Gracies fell apart after Ken Shamrock stalled his way into an interminable draw against Royce at UFC 5.
By the time I got to see a live UFC pay-per-view, Royce and Rorion had packed up their marbles and moved on.
Ironically, they spent the next five years doing an Emin Boztepe impression by sending “open letters” to people like Mike Tyson and demanding massive paydays and ridiculous rule sets from promoters for Royce to return to competition.
Meanwhile, the UFC and the nascent sport we had started calling No Holds Barred moved on without Rorion and Royce at a relentless pace, but because Royce had dropped out at the top, the Gracie reputation was only enhanced by Royce’s absence.
The UFC itself faced a relentless political backlash that forced the relocation of events and eventually pushed them off of pay-per-view in the U.S. but other promotions emerged, in the U.S., Brazil, Holland, Russia, and especially Japan.
Japan had been enjoying a pro wrestling boom for decades, one that had inexorably been pulled in the direction of “shoots” (ie matches without pre-determined outcomes) by visionaries like Antonio Inoki, Akira Maeda, Satoru “Tiger Mask” Sayama, Masakatsu Funaki, and Minoru Suzuki.
By the late 1990s, Japan began to exert a gravitational pull on global MMA because it was relatively mainstream there — it was seen as a variant on their beloved “Puroresu” — and aired on broadcast television networks like TV-Asahi and Nippon TV.
In the immediate aftermath of the UFC’s emergence in the U.S., Royce’s brother Rickson had fought impressively in Japan at Sayama’s 1994 and 1995 Vale Tudo Japan events. Rickson had absolutely battered UWF-International kingpin and Nobuhiko Takada loyalist, Yoji Anjo, into a bloody pulp during a horrible December 1994 dojo crash promotional stunt gone awry. Japanese fans wanted to see Takada get revenge. It didn’t play out as such.
By the end of the 1990s, Japanese fans had become accustomed to seeing puroresu stars like Nobuhiko Takada losing badly to members of the Gracie clan. But then Kazushi Sakuraba emerged.
Sakuraba had been a mid-tier performer in UWF International and Kingdom. He did have some exciting matches during the UWF-International series against New Japan — such as his match against Shinjiro Otani in June of 1996 at Nippon Budokan for the Skydiving J event. However, he was losing frequently in wrestling contests. It was when Sakuraba was thrown into the kakutougi fire that he starting breaking the mold.
First, there was the infamous UFC Ultimate Japan tournament at Yokohama Arena and the formation of the PRIDE series. Kazushi Sakuraba feasted on a string of highly regarded Carlson Gracie protégés, Marcus “Conan” Silveira, Allan Goes and breakout UFC star Vitor Belfort.
Then shit got crazy when Sakuraba broke Royler Gracie’s arm with a kimura at Pride 8 in 1999. That — and a lot of money — got Royce and Rorion’s attention.
But now the shoe was on the other foot. In the year 2000, Royce and Rorion were doing their best Emin Boztepe impression when they “demanded unprecedented rules changes. There would be no judge's decisions. There would be no time limits, only 15 minute rounds. It would be a battle to the finish, and old school Gracie-style challenge match. Sakuraba, normally an affable clown, was furious.”
Fortunately, Royce’s knack for putting on great fights continued, but this time he came out on the losing end.
My old colleague Jonathan Snowden wrote a great summary of the bout in 2011:
For 90 minutes the two waged a war of attrition. Gracie showed immediately that he was still a force to be reckoned with in the first round, demonstrating improved standup skills and impressive and aggressive grappling. As the fight went on, it took on the feel of an epic boxing match. The pace was often slow, but there was a certain grandeur to the display, a feeling that you didn't want to blink for fear of missing a pivotal moment.
"When you look back at a 90 minute fight that was televised, I don't think we'll ever see that again in our lifetime," Quadros said. "In the television age at least. Who knows what will happen 10 or 15 years down the line. But that, in itself, made it a special fight."
Gracie fought a conventional bout - looking to bring the action to the ground, competing valiantly on his feet when he couldn't. Sakuraba, per his nature as an entertainer, tried to keep things lively even as the action ground to a halt.
"You could write a book about that fight and most of it would be about the fight itself," Quadros said. "He was doing all kinds of crazy things. The double Mongolian chop, pulling the gi over Royce's head like a hockey fight, untying his gi pants - Royce had said no rules, so Sakuraba said 'Okay, check this out.' Sakuraba would turn his back to Royce, was looking out at the audience smirking. How many people had turned their back on Royce and survived?" Nobody. But Sakuraba did."
In the end, the battle between two superlative grapplers was decided by strikes. When Gracie would drop to his back after a standing exchange or a takedown, Sakuraba would punish him badly with leg kicks. Gracie switched to a southpaw stance to avoid the punishing kicks and looked helpless. Towards the end of the sixth round, Royce was limping and obviously hurt. On the Tokyo Dome's big screen, the crowd saw the Gracie family huddle and Rorion take a towel into his hand. More than 38,000 fans exploded in anticipation.
When the bell rang, the result seemed obvious. Sakuraba was still fresh, able to leap high into the air to land a jumping punch to Gracie's face. The proud Brazilian could barely return to his feet after each ground exchange. His leg, it would turn out, was cracked and badly damaged. All Gracie could do was go out and receive more punishment. He was willing to go, but his family had the courage to say 'no more.' Rorion Gracie threw the towel into the ring, signaling defeat.
It would be three more years before Royce Gracie returned to competition, but he would never again be the reigning king of what we now call Mixed Martial Arts.
This was the pinnacle of UFC & Japanese Mixed Martial Arts before Antonio Inoki created the New Year’s Eve era.
As for Rorion, the new sport he accidentally co-created, got him inducted into the Black Belt magazine Hall of Fame in 2006. But by that time, it was the Ultimate Fighting Championship that ruled the martial arts world.
Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw newsletter on Substack.
I've always been fascinated by the dichotomy of MMA's origins in the US and Japan. On the one hand, Japan's MMA scene largely came from a generation of wrestlers brought up to believe that wrestling (and catch in particular) was the "strongest style", and so they admirably set out to prove it. On the other, the juggernaut that is the UFC was essentially born out of a Hollywood-informed infomercial you had to pay to see. I'm sure there's some deeper themes that can be plumbed there, but on a superficial level, it's just fun and interesting how we all ended up with the same sport in the end.
Brought me back to Bill Superfoot Wallace getting max height on the cover of Black Belt !