Oswaldo Fadda, the jiu-jitsu that was taught in the favelas

Oswaldo Baptista Fadda was a marine rifleman from Bento Ribeiro, a working-class suburb in Rio's Zona Norte — the exact opposite of the Copacabana where the Gracies operated. He starts in 1937, becomes an instructor in 1942 and on 27 January 1950 opens his academy.

His way of spreading jiu-jitsu looked like nothing else being done at the time: demonstrations in the squares, on the beaches, in front of churches, inside the favelas and in circuses. He taught people who would simply have been shut out of a downtown academy.

The leg locks nobody wanted

His school's speciality were footlocks, an area the Gracie academy of the day did not cultivate and openly looked down on. It is not a technical detail: it is a social one. Attacking the legs was seen as the fallback of somebody who could do nothing else.

The strongest image in this whole affair comes from there. During one of the meetings between the two teams, from the stands the Gracie students shouted “sapateiro!” to their team-mates — cobbler — every time the opponent went for the legs. A single word that packs both technical and class contempt.

The challenge

The text Fadda had published has stayed identical in every version, which is why it is believed to come from a printed original: “*We wish to challenge the Gracies; we respect them as the formidable opponents they are, but we do not fear them. We have twenty students ready for the contest.*”

Once the meeting had taken place, Fadda said something that explains well what he was really after: “*I want to make clear that I have no intention of belittling the Gracies. I am referring only to the myth that they and their students are unbeatable.*”

What we do not know

• When. The sources give either 1951 or 1955, and a second challenge in 1956. It cannot be settled with what is public.
• Who won. Three versions circulate: that Fadda won; that the Gracies won on the total number of matches (7-3 with 4 draws, according to a newspaper that has never been identified); and that Fadda won according to Carlos Gracie himself, who told his daughter Reila, and it then ended up in the biography she wrote about him. Pedreira's archival research is said to disprove Fadda's win — but that reaches us from a reviewer, not from the book.
• Who his teacher really learned from. Luiz França is said to have been a direct student of Maeda. Robert Drysdale argues that there is no evidence for it, and that a route through the Gracie circle is more likely.
• Whether he taught for free. The sources say “he opened his doors to the poor”, never “free of charge”. The free version is a simplification that gets passed around, not a fact.

Why this story matters

If Drysdale is right, the Fadda line is not an independent branch coming down from Maeda: it is a branch that goes through the Gracie circle anyway and then breaks off from it. And that makes it more interesting, not less — because the break is not genealogical, it is a matter of class.

In 1967 Fadda is one of the five founders of the Guanabara federation, sitting at the table with Hélio Gracie. And two of today's schools, Nova União and GFTeam, come from there. That suburban jiu-jitsu did not stay in the suburbs.

Hélio said it himself, to a Brazilian magazine in 1955: “*It is necessary that a Fadda exists, to show that jiu-jitsu is not a Gracie privilege.*”