About this deal
His story has everything - the greatest highs, and the lowest lows - and it all resonated with me more than any book has for a long time.
If you're into martial arts or pro sports, then this is a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the greatest of all time. Everyone should be able to take one or two lessons from the strange and incredible life of Rickson Gracie.
Recently I've been delving into combat sports for the first time since middle school (wrestling) and I've started to take Muay Thai classes at a Gracie Jiu Jitsu place. Rickson says nothing about racism in the jiu-jitsu world (as in the UFC, some of its biggest stars spout far-right rhetoric). Rickson Gracie is probably the greatest fighter--real fights, not rules restricted sport fighting--in the last 100 years. Stories have been passed down through time as to his incredible skill and understanding of his family’s art, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. I didn’t know anything about Rickson before reading this book, probably because I was 7 years old when he fought his last match.
Rickson was (is) no angel - there were things he simply had to admit (to stay credible), but don't get fooled. Along the way, he conveys lessons learned not only through personal experience and from his father and uncle, the founders of Gracie Ju Jutsu, but also through his studies with Olando Cani -- a yogi and developer of bioginastica. Un livre bien delà du Jiu-jitsu: de la violence du Rio des années 50 en passant par la surf culture, Rickson Gracie a su perpétré la volonté paternelle et familiale par le chemin le plus droit possible. This autobiography of the phenomenal Brazilian Ju Jutsu practitioner, Rickson Gracie, begins with ancestral origins that include a Gracie who fought in the US Civil War through Rickson’s boyhood in Rio and his professional fights in Japan, and onward to how he reinvented himself after family tragedy and the end of his fight career.I realize this sounds like a commitment verging on cultishness—and some degree of that is inescapable in a grueling discipline that emphasizes rituals, routines, community, and mind-body synchrony. After reading this, I have gained respect for Rickson as a fighter, but have unfortunately lost respect in ways for Rickson and the entire Gracie family. Rickson leans into the elevated rhetoric around jiu-jitsu in his new memoir, Breathe: A Life in Flow, the latest installment in the family’s long promotional campaign.
While the book is overwhelmingly about a life in Ju Jutsu, Cani’s influence plays a crucial role as the yogi taught Rickson about breath control, and, among a huge pack of skilled Gracie fighters, that ability was pivotal in Rickson’s rise to the top. It's also about mental aspect of it, how to connect with surroundings, nature, spirituality (which I haven't been able to achieve it), and more importantly, and how to "know thyself". We spend hours drilling a single move, figuring out how to react should our opponent put his leg an inch farther to the right, or shift her weight forward, or use a hand to block our foot, or, or, or. Yet it’s precisely in ascribing quasi-spiritual powers to jiu-jitsu that Breathe misses the art’s real appeal. Since retiring, he has focused on unifying and spreading his family martial art through his Global Jiu Jitsu Federation.
But as the time went on, and mostly due to the conversations that Joe Rogan had with Jean Jacques Machado, I got more and more skeptical about Royce's impact. To get a personal "road map" into his family's history and the history of the development of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu (and thus Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu).