
The Gracie jiu-jitsu story - fezz
http://grantland.com/one-hundred-years-arm-bars-gracie-jiu-jitsu-mma/?ex_cid=GrantlandTW
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peatmoss
Fascinating history. It's strange to see what the various jujitsu-descended
arts choose as their comfort level with injury. The traditional jujitsu ryu
had lots of maming / killing techniques, which have been taken out and readded
depending on the art:

Judo focused on making a very safe art that could be applied full-intensity in
a sporting context. Aikido focussed on making a purely defensive art.

Then Gracie jujitsu decided to re-brutalize judo. And now we have MMA that is
a sport that tolerates fairly severe injury of combatants. I can't say I like
the direction MMA has gone here. Every time I see it, I kind of get a sick
feeling like I'm watching some kind of Roman spectacle.

I trained for a while in a style that taught techniques designed to kill. And,
as a pacifist, I was okay with that because they were taught as forms, and the
art is not practiced in competition. Clearly MMA had to decide on a tolerable
level of violence between "no competition" and "fight to the death." I just
wonder how that point of acceptable violence came to be what it is--from the
article, broken eye sockets and arms aren't enough to call a fight. I think I
know the answer: maximum injury that won't result in death / legal problems.
And I find that a bit troubling.

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sfjailbird
I will be the sole responder who agrees with you that promotions like the UFC
cross the line in terms of acceptable injury to fighters.

Most professional MMA fighters with a few years in have severe debilitating
injuries. I am not talking about a bad knee of slipped disc, I am talking
about severe chronic pain and brain damage, something that is the inevitable
result of the kind of punishment they deal with. Just look at someone like
George Saint-Pierre who suddenly forgets what he has been doing for the last
six hours.

It doesn't matter if fighters participate of their own free will, I could
probably go into the slums right now and get two people to fight to the death
over a $50 bill. There's a reason we have laws to prevent exploitation and
don't just leave it to people's "free will".

I very much like MMA as a sport, but I wish there was a way to protect the
fighters better. Headgear? Who can honestly say that they enjoy a fight where
the fighters are bathed in each other's blood, not to mention the health
implications (even the ref wears gloves).

~~~
codewithcheese
Can you link the info about GSP forgetting the last 6 months, didn't hear that
one.

~~~
Retozi
[http://fightland.vice.com/blog/joe-rogan-gsps-alien-
abductio...](http://fightland.vice.com/blog/joe-rogan-gsps-alien-abduction-
and-forced-retirement)

he mentioned it here originally:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmFsUV5ICKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmFsUV5ICKk)

his theory is that he was abducted by aliens, but it sounds like brain
damage...

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roel_v
For some reason, these stories always leave out that UFC 1 was organized by a
Gracie with pretty much the goal of showcasing Gracie JJ. UFC 2 (I think? or
was it 1 already?) even had a half-time 'ceremony' where Rickson gave Helio a
'lifetime award' of some sort - while booed by the audience; and rightfully -
that was clear self-promotion and put a shadow over the objectiveness of the
whole event. In that light, the line-up for the first couple of UFC's is
rather suspect. Kevin Rosier? Who came back from retirement especially for it?
All of them except Ken Shamrock being strikers? Objectively speaking, inviting
some Pancrase people (again, besides Ken Shamrock) would have made more sense.
Of course it was framed as 'style vs style', but still...

Of course Gracie JJ is very effective, but the truth is that early-days UFC
was a marketing scheme for the Gracies to export their JJ. It took very little
time for what was promoted as 'the perfected style, honed over 60 years' to
become just one aspect of a well-rounded fighter's skills. Look at the
training DVD's Carlos and Rickson made in the mid-1990's - they were laughable
just 5 years later.

Not sure I'm working towards one overarching point here; maybe it's that the
Gracie's real legacy is just as much in marketing as it is fighting.

~~~
sfjailbird
> For some reason, these stories always leave out that UFC 1 was organized by
> a Gracie with pretty much the goal of showcasing Gracie JJ

Second paragraph:

 _In 1993, Rórion Gracie founded the Ultimate Fighting Championship as a way
to spread Gracie jiu-jitsu to North America, inspiring the rise of mixed
martial arts._

~~~
roel_v
Fair enough, I did overlook that :) And indeed overall the OP is more nuanced
than many stories like it are.

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dbs
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is less about the show and more about a philosophy of
life.

Being trained in the arts many years ago, things like "a body is as strong as
its weakest link", have served me well in life and business.

I don't know of any other martial art where your formative years are spent
being kicked up in the ass. You learn how to survive under very harsh
conditions and how to be resilient.

You don't need to be the strongest, the faster... You just need to stay alive
and be aware. And you learn how to respect human life, because you come to
understand how fragile it is.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has been responsible for taking many people out of the
streets, giving them something to abide for. This will be the greatest legacy
of the Gracies.

~~~
romaniv
_> I don't know of any other martial art where_

I don't know any other martial art where so many practitioners claim that
their MA is, literally, the best.

From Gracie Academy website, which is the first one coming up in Google:
"[...]Gracie or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is the most effective martial art on the
planet[...]".

A little bit of modesty and camaraderie would go a long way here. A lot of
martial arts have formative/spiritual components that help people out in life.
Pretty much any real TMA which has proper training, beyond aggression and
handing out belts.

~~~
metamet
> I don't know any other martial art where so many practitioners claim that
> their MA is, literally, the best.

Eh. I'd say Aikido is the most proselytizing martial art out there. But they,
like most martial arts, don't have any actual sparring. BJJ gets away with it
because you can spar without much, if any, risk of injury.

I think this is where a lot of the mentality comes from--being one of the few
MA's where theory and technique get tested regularly. If you've done any form
of striking, you'd know how much different it is to practice against a bag
than it is another human. Same goes for grappling.

> A little bit of modesty and camaraderie would go a long way here.

I think you'd see a lot of modesty and camaraderie if you went to a BJJ gym.

You have to remember that martial arts has a history of "who's better than
who", which is what MMA grew out of. So of course there will be competition
between various martial arts, as it simply comes down to marketing.

But a ton of BJJ folks train multiple martial arts. It's incredibly common to
see Muay Thai taught in the same gym, and these places don't even market
themselves as MMA.

(But yes, I agree--the chest puffing marketing doesn't appeal to me either.)

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peteretep

        > Rickson ... Tokyo Dome on May 26, 2000 ... Funaki
    

If you've ever wondered what 12 minutes of sweaty men hugging each other,
standing up, and not moving much except to occasionally knee each other in the
crotch, followed by 3 minutes of violence looks like, this is the fight for
you.

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nabla9
How can one write a story about Gracie jiu-jitsu without mentioning Kazushi
Sakuraba?

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V-2
I wonder if there are any HN-ers actually practicing bjj? Purple belt here

~~~
atom-morgan
I did for about 6 months. By far one of the most humbling experiences I'd ever
had. I just wasn't a fan of the people at that gym.

~~~
Nicholas_C
A lot of practitioners really make the sport as a whole look bad. I'm not a
fan of some of the MMA culture that bleeds over into BJJ.

~~~
scott_s
Which is fair, but I give some credit to the MMA training I did for having a
"just deal with what's going on, keep moving forward" attitude in my jiu
jitsu. In work and life, even.

(I never had an MMA fight, but many of the guys I trained with did, and I
helped them prepare.)

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kristopolous
reinventing long-form journalism in a tolerable format. three cheers.

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lpsz
Was able to find a video of the fight discussed in the article:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXgE2SZBaUE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXgE2SZBaUE)

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jamestomasino
What a fantastically designed and executed site! I love the attention to
detail all the way across the responsive sizes. Great work.

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so0k
except if you are half way and resize the window, then maximize - it fails
(chrome on windows 10)

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repsilat
I couldn't read the article at all -- there was a big blue "title page" that I
couldn't get to go away by scrolling down or clicking anywhere.

It got better when I resized the page, though only somewhat -- some page
widths did "nice" things (like having a simple header at the top), but others
gave the awful expanding blue header thing. With that header I'd scroll down
to get to the content, then I'd have to scroll back up again to get to the
content that I'd scrolled past :-/

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Cacti
That is a really nicely designed article!

I don't think I've ever seen that scroll down action before.

