The fighting years: vale tudo, and the war with Luta Livre

The Gracie name was made in the ring as much as in the classroom. From the 1930s the family issued open challenges in the Rio newspapers, inviting a fighter of any style to test himself against a Gracie with almost no rules. Those fights had a name: vale tudo, "anything goes." For half a century it was where jiu-jitsu went to prove it was not a bluff, and the proving was not always clean or kind.

Vale tudo, the proving ground

Vale tudo was Brazil's bare version of a real fight: striking and grappling together, few rules, often no time limit. It is the direct ancestor of modern mixed martial arts, and for decades it was the crucible the Gracies fought in to build their reputation. The art that won there was not the prettiest. It was the one that could take a stranger to the ground and finish him, and jiu-jitsu, with its patient ground game, kept doing exactly that.

The other grappling: Luta Livre

Jiu-jitsu was never the only grappling art in Brazil. Luta Livre, "free fighting," grew up beside it, a style fought without the gi, with roots in catch wrestling, and the two became bitter rivals. The bad blood ran back to the early 1940s, when Euclydes "Tatu" Hatem, a foundational figure of Luta Livre, beat George Gracie in a match Luta Livre would not let the family forget. The rivalry carried an edge that was not only about technique. Luta Livre needed no gi and no expensive academy, and it drew from outside the world the Gracie name moved in, so the feud became partly a question of who jiu-jitsu belonged to. By the late 1980s it had spilled off the mats into open brawls between the camps.

1991: the Desafio

It came to a head on 26 September 1991, at the Grajaú Country Club in Rio, in an event billed as the Desafio, jiu-jitsu against Luta Livre, broadcast live on Rede Globo. Three fights, one art against the other: Wallid Ismail, Murilo Bustamante, and Fábio Gurgel for jiu-jitsu, trained by Carlson Gracie, against Eugênio Tadeu, Marcelo Mendes, and Denílson Maia for Luta Livre. Jiu-jitsu won all three, and none of them went the distance. It was about as decisive as a style war gets. Luta Livre never recovered the standing it had, and jiu-jitsu stood, in Brazil at least, as the grappling art that had answered every challenge put to it.

Why it matters

The fighting years are where jiu-jitsu earned the reputation the rest of the world would later take for granted. By 1991 it had met the styles Brazil could put in front of it, in the newspapers, in the vale tudo ring, and against its closest rival, and it had mostly won. The one thing left was to prove it somewhere the rest of the world was watching. That stage was already being built, in California, and it would be called the Ultimate Fighting Championship.