BJJ History
How the art arrived where it is, and who moved it.
Reading connected to this category
Influential Figures
- Carlos Gracie
He turned a few years of instruction in an Amazon theatre into an institution, and the machinery he built - an academy, a family, and a standing public challenge - is why one household's version of the art is the one that travelled.
- Mitsuyo Maeda
The Kodokan judoka whose club in Belem is the point where every Brazilian jiu-jitsu lineage claims to begin, and the point at which the documentation stops agreeing with itself.
- Oswaldo Fadda
He taught in the Rio suburbs rather than the wealthy south zone, and in 1951 his students beat the Gracie academy in public - which is why the sport has an argument about lineage at all.