The stories few people know
Oswaldo Fadda, Mitsuyo Maeda, the challenges that gave birth to the UFC: jiu-jitsu history told with the sources usually left out.
The stories few people know
Almost everything you read about the history of jiu-jitsu comes from the people who won that history. That does not make it false: it means you have to read it knowing as much.
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Oswaldo Fadda, the jiu-jitsu that was taught in the favelas
He taught in the Zona Norte to people who could not pay, and he attacked the legs — which at the time was considered poor men's stuff. Then he challenged the Gracies.
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Why Maeda called himself “Count”
It was not a title of nobility. It was a self-deprecating joke about his own poverty — and a Japanese institutional source is what tells us so.
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The director of the first Gracie academy was not a Gracie
The advertisement that ran in a Rio newspaper in 1930 carries three names. The director is the first one, and he is not called Gracie.
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Three hours and forty-five minutes: Hélio Gracie against Waldemar Santana
On 24 May 1955 they fought for three hours and forty-five minutes. It is still the longest match ever contested — and the man who told it best was not a sports journalist.
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How the guard changed in forty years
Until the Eighties you did not attack from closed guard: you survived there. The rest happened in forty years, and it can be dated.
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Why ADCC and IBJJF look like two different sports
Same technical base, two competitions that look nothing alike. The difference is not cultural: it sits in a few lines of the rulebook, and you can read it.
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The UFC began as the biggest Gracie Challenge ever
A videotape, a magazine article and a marketing decision that was stated openly. And the reason why it was Royce and not Rickson who fought in Denver in 1993.
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Rickson Gracie and the 400-0 myth
It is the most famous record in the history of jiu-jitsu, repeated for thirty years. No document supporting it has ever existed — and the person who denied it most clearly is the man himself.
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The women who built jiu-jitsu, and why nobody knows them
The history of BJJ is told as a history of men, and largely it has been one — but not because the women were not there. Because they were not let in.
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