Revised January 1, 2003

 

 

I took the elevator up to the cobertura of the building at 88 Rua Francisco Sá to the Corpo Quarto fitness center. Like most fitness centers, it had a jiu-jitsu academy contained within. This one, according to Warrior magazine, was where Carlson Gracie’s famous student Fernando Pinduka taught. The receptionist directed me to a room in the rear.  White, blue, and purple belt students were rolling. I didn’t see Pinduka. A younger, good-looking guy with a black belt was observing. "Pinduka don't teach here no more. I do”.  He was Sylvio Behring.

I knew of the Behring family. Sylvio’s older brother Marcello was Rickson's best student and a top vale tudo fighter who died in a drug deal gone sour. Their father Flavio was the man who established jiu-jitsu in São Paulo.

Sylvio introduced me to the owner of the school—Alvaro Barreto, an 8 grau (degree) black belt whose older brother João Alberto had been an associate of Carlos and Helio Gracie.

Sylvio and Alvaro both invited me to train.

I put on my kimono. Sylvio said, “just do the warm-up you need to do. You’ve been training long enough to know what you need to do”, and Alvaro nodded. I liked that. Too many teachers mistake warm-up for aerobic conditioning. They aren’t the same and serve different purposes. Spending more time on “warm up” than you actually need to get warm—which in Rio isn’t much—is a waste of training time. Most of the more advanced guys do not do a separate warm-up at all. They warm up by rolling, although at a much reduced level of intensity. 

I like to warm up by doing sub-movements that are needed in a range of techniques. Bridging, sitting-out, and “escaping the hip” (fugir de quadril), for examples.  Alvaro saw me doing this and nodded approvingly. Sylvio told me Alvaro wanted to see what I could do, and asked me to roll with a blue belt who was smaller than me but had won his division in a tournament the week before in São Paulo, Sylvio said. Roll five minutes with him, he told me. My closed guard sweeps that ordinarily worked so efficiently weren’t working. Five more, Sylvio suggested. Again I survived but I was getting tired faster than my opponent was. One more time, Sylvio said. “I wanna see how you roll when you’re tired”. “You’re seeing it now”, I thought. Five more minutes, same result. Alvaro offered to teach me whatever I wanted to learn and the experience I had just had made me realize that what I wanted and indeed needed to learn was a wider variety of open guard techniques.

Sylvio approved. “That’s smart, man. You need open guard sweeps to fight at blue belt level. Closed guard sweeps aren’t going to work on anyone with a good posture”—which of course, anyone at blue belt level should have. Alvaro showed me fourteen open guard sweeps, set-ups, sweep combinations and some drills for dialing them in. I mentioned to Sylvio that I felt I had taken a big step forward. "Yes", he replied,  “now you know the sweeps; it’ll take another 12 months before you can actually do them”. I practiced some of them on the other guys there. Everyone passed my guard easily. I guess he was right. I’d have to practice them. In the meantime, my guard was going to get passed a lot and I could look forward to some difficult times under someone’s side control. I guess my exits would need to get better too in that case.   

After the training, Alvaro invited me into his office. “If there’s anything you need, just ask,” he said. In fact, there was something. I wanted to know about the development of jiu-jitsu in Rio from the self-defense system that Carlos had learned to the sport that it had become. I had the feeling that jiu-jitsu before and after the first UFC in 1993 were very different.

The story begins with James Gracie, who immigrated to Brazil from Scotland in 1870 and established a bank in Rio to do business with British trading companies. His son Gastão joined the Brazilian diplomatic corps (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and moved to the Northeastern port city of Belem. There he met Maeda Mitsuo, aka Conde Koma, who had come in 1917 as a representative of the Japanese government to look after the interests of Japanese immigrant pepper farmers. Maeda was a 6-dan expert in jiu-jitsu and judo. Maeda began teaching the oldest of Gastão's five sons, Carlos, the basics of jiu-jitsu. Carlos in turn, when Maeda died, taught the youngest and weakest of his brothers. His name was Helio.

 This part of the story was well known. What happened next?

In 1940 Helio established an academy at no. 82/901 Praia do Flamengo in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro.  In 1948, Carlos and Helio together opened a big academy on the 17th floor of 151 Av. Rio Branco in the Central business district. (For more, see Robson.) Copacabana and Ipanema were just stretches of beach at the time.  Alvaro’s older brother João Alberto was one of the instructors along with Helio and his brothers Robson and Carlson (and non-family members Helio Vigio and Armando Wried). At that time, there was no such thing as a “Gracie black belt”. According to A História do Jiu Jitsu através dos tempos (mentioned below), students wore white belts, instructors wore dark blue belts, and the masters wore light blue belts (" o aluno era faixa branca, o instrutor era faixa azul escuro e o mestre azul clara"). In addition, there were no degrees ( Japanese dan, Portuguese grau) at each belt level, specifically in order to distinguish jiu-jitsu from judo ("para não se confundir com o judô, não haviam graduacões de faixa").

 

 Alvaro estimated that 2,000 people learned jiu-jitsu there during the twenty years it was open. Students included the future governor of Rio, Carlos Lacerda and future president João Figueiredo. If you wanted to learn jiu-jitsu, the options were few. The academy was conveniently located downtown, in the central business district. Two of Helio’s students, Haroldo Britto and Pedro Hemetrio opened their own schools, the former in Ipanema, the latter outside Rio in Ceara. A former student of George Gracie, named Fada, also opened a school in the suburbs of Rio. 

The academy closed in 1968. It was at about this time that the family spilt into factions—the Carlson faction and the Helio faction (there are also factions within the factions).  Helio opened a smaller academy on Rua Humaita in Botafogo (where Royler and Rolker now teach). Carlson opened his own on Rua Figueiredo Magalhães in Copacabana, where Rolls also taught until his delta wing accident in 1982. Other academies were founded at that time, some with and some without the Gracie seal of approval.

In 1967, Alvaro, Helio, João Alberto, and Helcio Leal Binda formed the first federation of jiu-jitsu in Brazil, the Federacão de Jiu-jitsu do Rio de Janeiro, Estado da Guanabara. (The name was changed in 1977 to Federacão do Jiu-Jitsu do Estado do Rio de Janeiro). They established the belt ranking progression of white, blue, purple, brown, and black belts for adults, and an intermediary sequence of yellow, orange, and green between white and blue for kids younger than 16. At this time they awarded themselves black belts and grau (dan) ratings, and established the rules for eventual competitions, with the aim of making jiu-jitsu into "um esporte e não uma arte de briga" [a sport rather than an art of brawling].

In 1988 Robson created a new Federation. His brother Carlos Jr. felt left out and created his own organization, the all-encompassing Confederacão Brasileira in 1993. This coincided with Rorion's first UFC, which touched off booms in both the USA and Brazil. The Confederation immediately sponsored two tournaments, the Campeonato Brasileiro and the Campeonatos Brasileiros de Equipes in 1994, which have become annual events. To link up with the academies of the many expat Brazilians, the Pan-Americano was staged for the first time in 1995. Thinking ahead to the 2004 Olympics, and hoping optimistically that Rio might be selected to host them, the Campeonato Mundial de Jiu-Jitsu (World Jiu-jitsu Championship) was put on in 1996.

The Mundial was created for the precise purpose of attracting foreign fighters, thereby establishing the sport's Olympic potential (visando a inclusão do jiu-jitsu como esporte olimpico o mais breve possivel). In 1999, fighters from The US, France, Japan, Finland, Germany and several other countries participated. 

There were matches between jiu-jitsu fighters and fighters representing other styles ever since the beginning. These were typically one-off challenge matches. They made money and aroused a certain amount of interest but did not stimulate great demand for jiu-jitsu lessons until 1991 when a vale tudo was held pitting jiu-jitsu and luta livre fighters (Wallid Ismail vs. Eugenio Tadeu, Murilo Bustamante vs. Mercelo Mendes, and Fabio Gurgel vs. Denilson Maia; you can see them on Gracie in Action 2.) A fourth fight, between Marcello Behring and Hugo Duarte, was scheduled but didn't come off. The jiu-jitsu fighters won and enrollments at their academies tripled. The boom in Brazil dates from this time. One reason luta livre did not benefit by the boom was that all of the luta livre fighters lost. History might have been very different had one or two of them won.

I was interested in whatever Sylvio and Alvaro knew about anything and anyone. They seemed to know everyone and everything, although they were vague about precise dates. That was understandable. No one in jiu-jitsu could have anticipated that twenty or thirty or forty years later their art would the hottest thing around and writers would be asking about the details of what they did on a particular day in a particular year. But they tried.

Alvaro gave me a monograph called Historia do Jiu-jitsu atraves dos Tempos, written by three of his students in the Escola de Educacão Fisica e Desportos at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, where he is a professor. I used the monograph to fill in some of the gaps in the story. Among other things, I learned that the fight between Rickson and Hugo Duarte on Gracie in Action was actually a rematch. Their first fight ended in a draw because Hugo grabbed Rickson’s rabo de cavalo [ponytail] and wouldn’t let go. Rickson don’t wear a rabo de cavalo anymore.

Mostly I talked with Sylvio. He was around most often and speaks English and likes to talk. He had ideas about everything as you’d expect of someone who has been training since he was four. In fact, Alvaro had been his first teacher. (Sylvio’s 11 year old son Ian sometimes trained with us. He wants to be a jiu-jitsu professor too, when he grows up).

The Internacional de Masters e Seniors was coming up in a week or two. I was planning to compete. Café and Leka, representing the Dojo team,  took one day off before the Mundial. I thought maybe several days would be better, not just to rest but to avoid getting injured without having time to recuperate. The kind of small injuries that happen all the time might not be much during ordinary training but in an elimination tournament, the biggest of the year, it could spell the difference between first and second place, and that’s a huge difference.

Sylvio didn’t think resting was necessary. "Tournaments are just another day of training”.  Everyone has his own reasons for training and for competing. If you enjoy competing, compete, If you don’t, don’t. Some guys who don't compete are better than some guys who do. Flavio Conte competes in judo but not jiu-jitsu but Sylvio thinks he would “win easy” if he did. Sylvio says that just a week or so ago, after the Mundial in any case, Flavio rolled with Vitor Shaolin, who won the gold medal, and tapped him six times. 

Competing can be good. It shows you what you can do under pressure. But it has a negative side too, because the original jiu-jitsu, which was for self-defense, tends to be neglected in many schools in favor of tournament techniques. Moreover, the pressure you feel waiting for a tournament match to begin isn’t the same as the pressure you feel in the middle of a street fight. A lot of black belts now don't know the traditional self-defense techniques and couldn't teach them correctly even if they tried, Sylvio says. What’s the point in being a champion if you can’t really defend yourself? And throwing has become a lost art. The only guys who can throw well are the ones who studied judo. Sylvio studied judo with George Mehdi a few blocks away in Ipanema “We practice throwing a lot here”.  In fact, they began every work-out with judo uchikomi to warm-up. When they were both younger, Sylvio told Rickson, “You should learn judo, man”. Rickson said, "You don't understand man, I am Rickson Gracie. I can't go to a judo academy and get thrown by white belts".  But a couple years later, Rickson did go. Rickson’s top student, Sylvio’s brother Marcello, went too. A lot of guys followed, in due course.

Mario Sperry was one of them. He studied judo with Mehdi for seven years, before he discovered jiu-jitsu. “That’s why he has good throws”, Sylvio said.

Mario Sperry is also a good example of the kind of tough guy that Carlson always looked for to train to be a champion and represent his kind of jiu-jitsu (Carlson says in an interview that Gracie Jiu-jitsu and Carlson Jiu-jitsu are completely different styles). Sylvio has misgivings about this brand of jiu-jitsu. “I want to see what he can do when he’s 55 “, referring to one tough (but excellent) fighter, Alexandre Café.  

Another tough fighter whose name often came up was Vitor Belfort. Sylvio's opinion was one that many people seemed to share. "He's a clown", Sylvio said, apparently speaking for the other guys there at the time too. "But we're fans", he quickly added.

The main thing is to relax and enjoy your training, Sylvio says. You won't stick with it long enough to get good if training is an ordeal. Don't think of tapping as losing but as part of learning new things. You can tap any time you want for any reason. It doesn’t mean you lost or the other guy is better than you. If you don't like your position, want to work on a different one, just tap and start over. Don’t worry about whether the other guy thinks he finished you. Every time you roll it isn't the Mundial.

Another important thing, Sylvio says, is to select who you roll with intelligently. You don’t have to roll with everyone every time. Don’t take it as a challenge. You can’t win and you can’t lose. You might think that you can, but if you do, you are thinking wrong. Rolling to get better and competing to win medals and trophies are two completely different things. If someone is doing nothing but trying to avoid getting sweeped or finished or whatever, and not trying to pass your guard or put you in danger, or whatever, like a lot of enormous bodybuilder types and wrestlers often do when they start out, then maybe you aren’t getting anything out of rolling with that guy. You don’t have to roll with him. Although the more different types of people you roll with, the better for you in the long run.

In a related way, you have to roll with weaker guys in such a way that you can improve from the experience. If you just use your superior strength and skills, what are you accomplishing? Nothing. Better to sit and watch. A long time ago, Pedro Carvalho joined the school. He was already a blue belt from Carlson and a good fighter. But he wasn’t training intelligently. He just abused the small guys, ended up hurting some of them. Sylvio told him, “man, we don’t need you here, find somewhere else to train”. Pedro got the message and started training more intelligently.

Sylvio believes jiu-jitsu should be part of your life, not just something you do because it’s the fad. What is the purpose of being a tough guy for a few years and then having no practical self-defense capabilities when you are no longer young and training like a maniac?  While listening to Sylvio expound on this subject one day I caught a guy from the corner of my eye sneaking up on me with a foam rubber covered practice stick. Somehow, I just knew he was going to whack me with it. (I had heard Sylvio say something to him parenthetically just before he picked up the stick—I put two and two together). He swung the stuck at my head. I wrapped his arm and secured the stick. Sylvio nodded approvingly. It was one of the two stick defenses that Dog Brothers founder Eric “Top Dog” Knaus says will actually work　(“Many are taught, few work”, he says). In fact, Sylvio brought up the subject of the Dog Brothers. Someone had shown him the Dog Brothers stick fighting & grappling video with Carlos and Rigan Machado. He thought it was funny that Rigan’s strategy in a stick fight with Eric Knaus was to drop the stick, cover his head, charge in and clinch, and of course take the fight to the ground and quickly finish it with jiu-jitsu. It was funny, he said, but it was also exactly what he would have done too.

I don’t know how much Sylvio knew about Jeet Kune Do. But in a sense, his jiu-jitsu was Jeet Kune Do in its purest form. I had over the past two weeks learned four or five versions of a particular inversion that everybody seemed to be doing lately. The variations were in the grip and everyone who taught it recommended a different grip. I asked Sylvio what the “correct” or “best” grip was. His answer expressed the essence of Jeet Kune Do: “You have to find what works for you”. “Find” entails exploring. “Works” entails testing against the criterion of effectiveness. The phrase “for you” captures the individuality that everyone brings to any art. The subject pronoun “you” places the primary responsibility with the student, rather than the teacher. Without intending to, Sylvio summed up the philosophy of Bruce Lee in eight words.

Like Aloisio’s Dojo Jiu-jitsu, Corpo Quatro is independent and small. Only about 35 people train there. “We like it like that”, Sylvio said. Both Sylvio and Alvaro have been in jiu-jitsu most of their lives. The current boom is just a blip on the screen and isn’t any reason to alter a curriculum that has already passed the tests of time and numerous vale tudos.  More likely than not, the fad will fade and what will remain will be the same jiu-jitsu that they learned and were teaching years before the boom began.   

The fundamentals are not going to change, but in the details, jiu-jitsu continues to evolve, driven by the quest for medals in tournaments and prize money in international competitions (especially in Japan and Abu Dhabi).  When I asked Sylvio if it was possible to execute a particular move from a particular position, he said, "if you asked me a few years ago, I would have said it was impossible, but now guys are doing impossible things all the time".  He might have had guys like Roleta and Leo Vieira in mind, although now, following their examples, even blue belts are doing some incredibly flamboyant and acrobatic moves. This is great for the development of jiu-jitsu as a spectator sport. Whether it is good for jiu-jitsu as a form of self-defense is a different matter.

At Corpo Quatro the emphasis was on solid fundamentals and versatility. In the jiu-jitsu world, there are three kinds of fighter: the guys who are tough, the guys who are technical, and the guys who are both tough and technical. Carlson's academy and Fabricio's academy were famous for producing tough guys. Corpo Quatro seemed mainly to train technical guys. But there were some undeniably tough guys there too--Sylvio said so. One of them, Marcio Corleta took second place in the pesadissimo (97 kilos +) brown belt division several weeks before in the Mundial. He was out of town during my time at Corpo Quatro. But Rodrigo Munduruca was there every day. Rodrigo had won regional titles in the purple belt pesado (91 kilos) division, and was was just days away from his brown belt, Sylvio said. He was also very technical for such a tough guy, not unexpectedly. I rolled with him a few times and once caught him in a triangle, but I was sure he had let me do it. "Não", he said, "I made a mistake. You exploited it". I didn't believe him for one minute. At most, he gave me a chance that he normally wouldn't give a serious opponent. Even so, there are too many effective ways to escape triangles. Most of them I didn't even know, at the time. But unquestionably Rodrigo did. The most reasonable interpretation would be that he didn't think I could do a triangle and gave me every opportunity to do it and then didn't bother to escape when I did. Sylvio was watching, grinning. 

Most people who practice jiu-jitsu are interested, or were when they started, in self-defense. You have to be able to react appropriately without thinking, because thinking takes too much time.  Sylvio believes that your techniques have to become automatic before they can be effective. But there is a place for conscious thought in the learning process. Sylvio developed a drill that he describes as jiu-jitsu xadrez. Xadrez is chess. The drill is to roll as you normally would but to segment your game into discrete decision-points and pause at each one. In other words, like chess, you make one move at a time, wait for your partner to analyze the alteration in positions that resulted, then plan, and then finally, make his response. You then make your response in the same fashion and you see what happened and in theory you find out why effective moves worked and ineffective moves didn’t. It lets you see gaps in your game that you otherwise wouldn’t see. It takes a while to get used to moving this deliberately and discretely, Sylvio said, but once you do, “you gonna love it”.

Sylvio also recommended isolating different parts of your game. Everyone has a tendency to do what they already do well and avoid doing what they don’t. But outside of a competition or fight, this is the opposite of what they should be doing. No one likes being tapped or mounted though, and if trying a move that you can’t do well means you are going to have to tap or get stuck in a bad position, then that makes it even harder to avoid doing what you already do well. In any event, you won’t have many opportunities to attempt it if you get stuck every time you fail. The solution is to make it a drill. For example, your task might be to sweep your partner from open guard and his would logically be to pass without being sweeped (for him to simply try to avoid being sweeped would make it extremely hard to sweep him, unless you already can do the sweep well, which of course you can’t--that's the reason you are doing the drill). As soon as either of you accomplishes your goal, you start over. No one wastes their time doing nothing and no one's ego gets shattered.

Sylvio had hundreds of unique drills, each designed to accomplish a particular purpose. But like everywhere else, rolling was the most highly valued of all drills. On any given night, there weren’t that many guys to roll with. So I rolled with Sylvio. He asked me what I wanted to work on and I always said passing open guard. I didn't have many open guard sweeps that I could consistently execute in real-time situations. That would make passing my open guard unchallenging for him. I was also having problems passing the open guard of anyone who had an open guard to speak of. "Keep your shin close to the guy's leg", Sylvio advised me. "Keep the pressure on". But of course, you have to maintain your base while doing it. I absent-mindedly leaned just a little bit too far forward while in his open guard, neglecting to get at least one hand free. "I love it when guys do that", he said, as I sailed through the air courtesy of a well-timed tomoe nage. 

It was an education. The kind you have to experience to understand. Jiu-jitsu tends to be that way.

 

Notes

 

1. See for example Robson.

2. The Portuguese word for clown is palhaço, although Sylvio used the English word. It wasn't  clear from the context in what respect Vitor was a "clown". Sylvio and other people who described Vitor as a clown might have been referring to his personal life, or training methods (such as laying up with his girlfriend for the two weeks preceding his disastrous fight with Randy Couture.)

3.  According to Sylvio, Pedro had a  blue belt, but Pedro Alberto (now a black belt with his own academies in Rio and Houston, USA), who was there at the time, recalls that Pedro's belt was purple. Pedro Alberto, incidentally, later commented to GTR that in his view the Behring family was just as instrumental, if not more so, than the Gracie family in spreading jiu-jitsu around Brazil, and the primary reason the Gracies were more famous was because there were so many  more of them. (Of course, the UFCs later altered the balance of fame.)

 4.  Rodrigo Munduruca is now teaching in at the International Martial Arts Club in Winnipeg, Manitoba, at 2 Donald Street, ph: (204) 4889856. He has no plans to return to Brazil. Contact Rodrigo at: rmunduruca1@home.com.

A Arte Suave index

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Revised December 2001

Revised January 1, 2003

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