The director of the first Gracie academy was not a Gracie

8 September 1930, Rio de Janeiro. *O Globo* runs the opening advertisement for a school at Rua Marques de Abrantes 106. It is called “Academia Carioca para o Cultivo do Esporte Científico”, and the advertisement lists who runs it:

director Donato Pires dos Reis; instructors Carlos and George Gracie.

This is the one remembered as the first Gracie academy. And the document says somebody else was running it.

Who Donato Pires dos Reis was

A student of Maeda's academy in Belém, trained under Jacyntho Ferro — Maeda's “right-hand man” — and documented as such by June 1921. He stayed in charge for only a few months: he leaves by December 1930, probably because of work obligations, he was a tax collector.

Then he disappears from the story. In the version of that academy that gets handed down, his name no longer appears.

The bigger question

This is where the question that really divides the researchers starts: did Carlos Gracie learn from Maeda in person?

The traditional version says yes: in 1917 his father Gastão takes his fourteen-year-old son to see a demonstration in Belém, and Carlos becomes the Japanese man's student. The revisionist reconstruction says instead that Carlos's teacher was Jacyntho Ferro, that is a student of Maeda's and not Maeda — a name that has vanished completely from the official narrative.

Drysdale has reconstructed the list of the first five Brazilians promoted by Maeda: Waldemar Lopes, Raphael Gomes, Jacyntho Ferro, Matheus Pereira, Guilherme de la Rocque. Carlos Gracie is not on it. And Pires dos Reis himself told the press that Carlos had never even met Maeda.

What we do not know

• How long the teaching lasted, assuming it happened at all. No source — traditional or revisionist — gives a documented figure. “Five years”, “a few months” and “none” all circulate, all without paperwork.
• Which document proves the list of the five men promoted. Drysdale states it; in the interview we read he does not cite the source.
• What exactly the rank Maeda promoted people to meant. Drysdale says so himself: how it maps onto today's grades is not clear.

What it changes, in the end

Less than it looks, and that is why it is worth telling calmly. Whether Carlos learned from Maeda or from a student of his takes nothing away from what the Gracies built afterwards: the method, the school, the worldwide spread are their work, and no archival research casts doubt on that.

What changes is something else: the story gets more crowded. In one version there is a master and a destined student; in the other there is a port city full of Japanese and Brazilians training together, and more branches come out of it than we have counted. The second is less tidy — and it is easier to believe.