How the guard changed in forty years

In the Gracie household they used to say: “*the arm lock is only obtained with the open guard*”. Otávio “Peixotinho” recalls it, and it says everything about what closed guard was before the Eighties — a place where you held out, not one you won from.

1. The guard learns to attack (late '70s)

The leap does not happen at the Gracie Academy, but at Osvaldo Alves's course at the Clube Olímpico in Copacabana. Alves came from judo and acted as a bridge between the two worlds. Out of it come the arm locks that can be done from closed guard and the triangle with the arm crossed over the neck, that is the triangle as we know it.

It is worth pausing for a second: the technical leap that defines modern BJJ comes out of a judo environment and out of Carlson's students, not out of the branch the official history puts at the centre.

2. De La Riva guard (1980-1986)

Ricardo De La Riva joins the Carlson Gracie Academy in January 1980, at fifteen, and is the smallest of the lot. He builds himself an outside hook to survive the house passers: in the gym they call it “guarda pudim”, pudding guard. The official name comes from the newspapers after the win over Royler Gracie at the Copa Cantão.

The hook already existed in judo — footage of it can be found from competitions in the late Seventies. De La Riva did not invent it: he turned it into a system. It is a distinction that holds for almost everything that follows. The story of the name is here.

3. Marcelo Garcia and the X-guard (2003-2011)

Four ADCC titles and five world titles between 2003 and 2011. Arm drag, butterfly guard, X-guard: the way of attacking from underneath in no-gi becomes his.

4. The berimbolo (2002-2012)

The received version credits it all to the Mendes brothers, and is eight years out. Samuel Braga shows the position in the purple belt final at the 2002 Worlds; the Mendes brothers take it to the top and make it an international trademark around 2010; the Miyao brothers, between 2011 and 2012, add the crab ride and the twister hook.

The name, on the other hand, is American and came late — the full story is here.

5. Leg locks become a system (2014-2021)

Leg attacks had always existed: sambo, catch wrestling, shooto, and individual specialists. What changes with John Danaher and the group that forms at the Renzo Gracie Academy in New York is not technical, it is conceptual: applying “position before submission” below the belt too.

That is: giving up on hunting the surprise lock and building a system of leg control. In 2018 Danaher releases the instructional that makes that system public, and it goes from team secret to worldwide syllabus. The group breaks up in July 2021.

6. Stand-up wrestling comes back (2015 → today)

Here there are numbers. Across 190 matches from the 2015 and 2017 ADCC, the takedowns-per-match ratio is 41% at the ADCC against 14% at the IBJJF. In the 66 kg it is 22% against 5%. And of 282 successful offensive actions, 116 were wrestling-derived.

It is not a fashion: it is the consequence of two different rulebooks, and it can be explained in three lines.

What we do not know

• The exact date of the De La Riva-Royler match: 1985 or 1986, and the two dates appear in the same publication.
• The history of leg locks before Danaher. It certainly exists, but the sources we have found are not good enough to date it. Better a hole than a reconstruction done by eye.
• How much Braga's testimony on the berimbolo really weighs: it is his own claim to authorship, and the Mendes brothers' voice is missing.

The rule that holds all six phases together is always the same: “who made it work” is almost always documentable, “who invented it” almost never.