On nights when I have trouble sleeping, instead of counting sheep, I count ways of choking people: the cross-collar choke, the triangle choke, the inverted triangle, the wrong side triangle, the Ezekiel, the gi-zekiel, the Darce, the anaconda. The list is long, with the setups for them uncountable, and strangles are only one of the dozens of submission holds I practice between four and six times a week at BJJ Fit, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school in Badalona, Spain.
Jiu-jitsu is hard to write about, principally because it is hard to say what it is. When I first heard of it in the mid-1990s, thanks to Royce Gracie’s groundbreaking victories in the early Ultimate Fighting Championships, I believed the origin myth still common in the thousands of gyms around the world where a photo of his father, Grand Master Helio Gracie, presides over the mats: In the early 20th century, a famed Japanese jiu-jitsu fighter, Mitsuyo Maeda (also known as Count Koma), arrived in the Brazilian city of Belem, where he taught his art to a descendant of Scottish aristocrats, Carlos Gracie. Carlos’s younger brother, Helio, a small, sickly man, adapted the style, emphasizing ground fighting to permit smaller men (Helio felt martial arts weren’t for women) to defeat bigger and stronger opponents. When what was then called Gracie jiu-jitsu began to spread across the United States, it was often said that Helio and his nine children would fight anyone who challenged them and that none of them had ever suffered defeat.
Thanks in principle to the digitizing of the Brazilian National Library’s archives and to researchers such as Roberto Pedreira, Jose Cairus, and MMA champion-turned-amateur historian Robert Drysdale, we now know that much of the above is hype. Maeda was a judo fighter, and there is no firm evidence that he taught any of the Gracies, whose techniques were furthermore known to many Japanese judo practitioners who came to Brazil at the turn of the century searching for work, particularly after 1924, when the U.S. Congress barred Japanese immigrants from entering the country. Though small, Helio was no weakling — he was a competitive swimmer and rower — and while he didn’t acknowledge his defeats, anyone can go on YouTube and watch judo master Masahiko Kimura throw him around like a rag doll before breaking his arm in 1951. As for the younger generation, two “Gracie Killers,” the Brazilian Wallid Ismail and the Japanese Kazushi Sakuraba, defeated several members of the family roundly in competition under various rule sets, and though dozens of Gracies have made a name for themselves in sport jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts, their aura of invincibility is no more.
For Drysdale, Brazilian jiu-jitsu didn’t surpass the ne-waza (ground fighting) techniques of judo until 1994, when Carlos Gracie Jr. founded the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation, which would hold its first world championship in 1996. Indeed, Drysdale has taken to calling the art “Brazilian Judo,” and he maintains that the most significant differences between Brazilian jiu-jitsu and judo are cultural: BJJ is about camaraderie rather than hierarchy, the language and attitude are relaxed and informal, with instructors addressed by their first name rather than master or sensei, there’s a lot of BS’ing and joking around, and as opposed to learning strict systems of moves to be done to a canonical standard, students are encouraged to improvise, try things out, and develop their own “game.” The reason isn’t just the Brazilians’ proverbial laxness and bonhomie. It’s also in the nature of the sport, where everyone on the mat, regardless of rank, gets tested every single day.
Anyone who liked ninja movies as a child and was inspired to study traditional martial arts has probably met a would-be guru of the type Danny McBride immortalized in The Foot Fist Way: out of shape and money-grubbing, with an office full of dubious trophies and medals, yelling at rows of people punching and kicking the air, never seen in action but reputed to know the touch of death or some other preposterous killing technique. In BJJ, it’s hard to be a charlatan: The number of black belts remains relatively low, with easily traceable lineages, and instructors are expected to roll with students at the end of every class. If they’re no good, word will get around. One of the great joys for jiu-jitsu fans is instructors’ availability. You’ll never shoot hoops with LeBron James, but for $40, you can spend the day at Marcelo Garcia’s school in New York or Lucas Lepri’s in Charlotte and enjoy getting clowned (but cordially!) by the greatest athletes in the history of the sport.
Rolling is the term used instead of sparring, and the concept is loose enough to encompass anything from a relaxed exchange of techniques to a war that might leave a person bruised and limping. In most schools, people start from the knees, with special sessions devoted to wrestling and judo-style takedowns. Rounds are five minutes, half the length of an adult competitive match, and people usually roll between three and five times at the end of a class. Mixing is encouraged — a brand-new white belt might roll with a purple belt who’s been at it for 10 years, and better athletes usually try to adapt so both parties get something out of training. The goal is basic: One tries to submit, from the top or bottom position, with any of several hundred arm locks, leg locks, foot locks, wrist locks, shoulder locks, or chokes. Sometimes people train in the kimono, called a “gi,” sometimes in a rash guard and shorts. The gi is more technical and harder on the hands, while rolling without a gi requires more athleticism, and the opponent is drenched in sweat, making him or her harder to immobilize and submit. Classes end with everyone bowing and shaking hands, but most people stick around on the mats. Friends or rivals will go for a few extra rounds, others will talk over technique, and the rest will just shoot the breeze before showering.
My gym closed when Spain went into lockdown in March of 2020 and reopened sometime in June. I had COVID-19 just before then, so the close contact the sport requires didn’t worry me much (the dread in the air has only gotten worse since then, but reinfection was and remains rare, even with the much-feared variants). Acquaintances in other countries were shocked that I was training and saw Spain’s permissiveness as symptomatic of the unseriousness that gave us, for a time, one of the highest infection rates in the world. I have many criticisms of the approach to the pandemic here, but its policies with regard to athletics aren’t one of them. We made a mistake early with our rhetoric about “beating” the virus. A virus with COVID-19’s peculiarities was never going to be beaten, and it was inevitable, in a democratic country in a union with open borders, that a great number of infections would occur. The responsible thing would have been to admit this and try to balance freedom and safety while recognizing that the pandemic wouldn’t just resolve itself in a few months. Our gym did what it could, improving sanitary measures, lowering capacity, and adopting an application for contact tracing — something the country as a whole still hasn’t gotten around to. Several of us got sick over the course of the past year, but we never had a single case of student-to-student transmission.
I don’t want to exaggerate the effects of the isolation people have suffered during the pandemic, though many, from teachers to elderly caregivers to counselors for addicts and the mentally ill, have described them as catastrophic. I will simply say that being with people, even touching people, is a basic human need that will never go away, no matter how many horror stories Eric Feigl-Ding tweets. And I am grateful that, on seeing that gyms accounted for around one-quarter of 1% of all COVID-19 infections, Spain decided to let them stay open. The past year would have been hell for me without jiu-jitsu, even if my joints might have thanked me for the time off.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
