Issue 107

November 2013

The very first UFC was intended to be a showcase for the Gracie clan’s jiu-jitsu, with young Royce chosen as the one to prove it the world’s most effective martial art. In his own words, he describes how he did it.

Royce Gracie was the man at the center of a revolution in fight sports. Selected by his older brother, Rorion, to represent the family’s jiu-jitsu in the first-ever UFC, Royce will be forever immortalized as the champion of the original UFC tournament, in Denver, Colorado, 20 years ago.

Then 27, he was the practitioner from the Gracie family who brought Brazilian jiu-jitsu to worldwide prominence for the first time, and sent fighters hurrying to their nearest gym to de-mystify its art.  

The concept was simple: which fighting style is best? On November 12th 1993, against boxing, karate, kickboxing, taekwondo, shootfighting, savate and sumo, Gracie jiu-jitsu emerged from the eight-man tournament as the answer in a total of just four minutes and 49 seconds, thanks to three submissions from Royce.

He reveals, in an exclusive interview with Fighters Only, he had “three months” to prepare for his opponents, after being chosen to represent the Gracie clan at the 17,000-seater McNichols Sports Arena. Amazingly, the actual attendance is thought to have been closer to 2,800.

In some ways, they had choreographed the event, based on knowing that combatting jiu-jitsu would be nigh on impossible.

“Yes, I knew my opponents,” explains Royce. “Art Jimmerson was a famous boxer at the time; a highly ranked fighter. Ken Shamrock was famous in Japan, so I saw fights of his. Of course, Art Jimmerson wasn’t fighting MMA – he was boxing – but I got to see how he fought and his style.

“The same for Shamrock. Then Gerard Gordeau, who I fought in the final; I did the same thing. He was involved in championships in Japan, so there was footage out there on most of the guys.”

Royce had been chosen for a reason. Rorion, co-founder of the UFC, explains the rationale.

“We chose Royce because first of all he was 27 years old at the time,” he tells us. “Royce had come to America to help me babysit my kids 10 years earlier. He had arrived in the United States at 17 or 18 years of age to literally help me take care of my kids. I’m teaching classes out of my garage and I said, ‘Royce, I need a babysitter to come to America.’

“So Royce was changing my kids’ diapers, running around, taking them to the park and going to the beach with us. He was an easy-going guy, not a killing machine or anything like that.

“When the Ultimate Fighting Championship came about, everybody in my family wanted to put Rickson in there. But Rickson is like a freaking rhino. I insisted it shouldn’t be him. If Rickson had won it would not have been a surprise. But, for the record, Rickson could have done the same thing Royce did, of course.

“He’s an amazing fighter, but Rickson is Rickson. With him, the impact would have been so powerful, because he was too intimidating, too strong. I wanted the opposite. I wanted the David and Goliath concept.

“To be honest, it worked like a charm. I said, ‘Royce, you go in there, and just do your thing, OK?’ So he goes in there, does his jiu-jitsu, and bada-bing, bada-ba, he wins the show. And of course he becomes an overnight sensation.

“Everybody was then asking, ‘Who’s that little guy?’ It was much more impressive, and just what I was looking for.

“The crucial thing we were looking for was the marketing catch of having the little guy defeat the big guy, to be almost as impressive as my father had been in Brazil 50 years earlier."

Rorion pauses to reflect on Helio Gracie, the founding father of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. “My dad was 140lb soaking wet, fighting people twice his size and fighting half-an-hour rounds. Why would he make long fights like this? To allow the opponent, who was twice his size, to get tired so he could maybe win the match.

“My father fought the longest uninterrupted fight in history. One round of three hours and 40 minutes. One round, non-stop, for three hours and 40 minutes.”

The whole point, he argued, was to demonstrate the effectiveness of jiu-jitsu in a real fight. The chances are that in a real fight, it’s going to get into a clinch and eventually end up on the ground. I’d say 95% of the time that will happen.

“Is there a chance of one punch knocking him out? Yes. But 95% of the fights are going to go into a clinch and eventually land on the ground.”

Considering UFC 1, the natural follow-up to Helio’s bouts, was a marketing tool to bring a fighting philosophy the Gracies had grown up with to the attention of the wider world, surely there was heavy pressure on Royce.

“It was not pressure from me,” states Rorion. “But we wanted to carry on the legacy. You go in there with a certain amount of pressure, with a certain amount of fear, with a certain amount of concern, but you put that pressure on yourself as much as you want.”

Not once did he intimate to Royce that it was win at all costs. “I wasn’t saying ‘Oh you’d better win!’ I’d say, ‘Hey, brother, go in there, do what you know, protect yourself, get into the clinch, get the guy down and the rest is history.’ And that’s what happened.”

Indeed, share any time with Royce, and you meet a man who is coolness personified.

“When Rorion set up the UFC, and he knew there would be a kickboxing representative, a karate guy, and a boxer he needed one of us from jiu-jitsu,” confirms Royce. “So right away he told me, ‘It should be you.’”

Rorion kept his youngest brother away from the planning and the detail.

“I was just a fighter in this. He treated me like a fighter; he didn’t treat me special. I was not involved in any of the details as it came together.”

But had Royce himself thought about Rickson – who really made his name in Japan – being the man to take center stage? He had, and even though Rickson has said recently he would have fought in the UFC today had he been younger, Royce considers it “a shame” his brother never entered the Octagon.

He says: “It’s a shame, but because he was fighting in Japan at the same time, he chose not to fight in the UFC.

“If we hadn’t done it like that (using the smaller Royce instead of the larger Rickson) it would just have been another boxing match, another wrestling match or just another judo competition. Back then nobody really watched judo or wrestling.”

But UFC 1 changed that perception. Forever. Royce remembers: “I had a lot of wrestlers and judo players who came up to my family after UFC 1 and tell us, ‘Thanks to you guys our sport is getting more interest.’ Back then, judo was never in a martial arts magazine. Wrestling was never in a martial arts magazine. It was never thought about, along with all the other martial arts. So it had to be done that way. You had to shock everybody.”

Although the ‘Gracie Challenge’ had been in place for decades in Brazil – where different disciplines attempted to decipher the clan’s predominantly victorious grappling system – those had usually been single bouts. If Royce was to win UFC 1 he’d need to defeat three other martial artists in one night. Confidence in winning one fight with Gracie jiu-jitsu is fair, but two more, and all the variables those contests could present, must have meant the fears began to creep in.

Royce thinks back. “I never really had any doubts. I just believed in it. It was for real. My family had been doing it for a long time and my father had developed it. We knew we were not going to lose the fight, and if you’re not going to lose the fight, then the only question is: how are you going to win?” 

Even if he had few concerns about what would happen in the ring, presumably he had to endure all kinds of logistical miscues in the months, days and hours beforehand. Turning a confident Royce into a twitchy, tetchy, nervous mess. But that first UFC, Royce recalls, was a smooth operation. 

“It was well organized; it was the first one so nobody knew exactly what was going to happen and which fighter was going to advance and which one was not. But yes, it was very well organized. But not as professional as it is today.” 

In keeping with the coolness of modern-day Royce, just as he has always been, he insists there were no nerves on the day, or indeed building up to fight night.

“I wasn’t nervous at all, man. I was waiting for the opportunity. I was the right weight, the right guy, at the right time. But there were so many good fighters in our family.”

He was so relaxed when it came to UFC 1, that night in November 1993, that he even had a cat-nap in his dressing room.

“I was asleep before my fights. An hour before my fights, my brother would come over and wake me up.

“There was no pressure. I trained for the day, I knew what I had to do. I had the challenge set up. I had my techniques from jiu-jitsu so all I did was ask to be woken up when it was time to get ready. I warmed up, I got dressed and we said, ‘Let’s go fight.’”

After winning at UFC 1, he received $50,000 for the three fights in one night. Even the prize money has faded into oblivion. “I can’t remember what I did with it, I think my wife took care of that.”

Given how young the Gracie fighter was at the time, it’s a surprise to hear that on the night of fights he was in a deep focus. He might have been inexperienced under the bright lights and with carrying the family legacy, but his trainer brothers were there to help.

“I could only hear my corner. You don’t hear the screaming. My corner talked to me. You have selective hearing in that situation.” 

What he does remember is the rules meeting just prior. He recalls: “We talked about whether it would be bare hands, or boxing gloves and I was just like, ‘Dudes, it’s a fight. We just get in there and fight.’”

But they agreed on no biting, no eye-gouging. Hands were shaken. The fights were on. “But there weren’t really any penalties in place for biting or eye-gouging,” Royce adds.

The other combatants may even have been shocked at that point by the deep confidence that the Gracies had in their fighting art. Save for Shamrock, they certainly didn’t know what to expect, or at least how to combat the submissions.

On fight night, Royce was in his element. Boxer Jimmerson was out of there in 2:18 when he found himself mounted in Royce’s opening fight; Shamrock was defeated by rear naked choke in 57 seconds, and in the final, the same fate befell Gordeau in 1:44. Mission accomplished, as far as Rorion was concerned.

Royce was hailed as a new fighting star. “It was all about strategy, and it still is,” he explains. “Back then there were no time limits, it was one round until somebody quit. So you train one way. Now, five rounds of five minutes means there is a different strategy that they’re using. But the training is still the same, the boxing part, the kickboxing part, the grappling part, all the same. It’s just that the strategy has changed.”

Royce, like Rorion, believes both luck and judgment provided the perfect storm for the jiu-jitsu explosion. Even down to the ‘no rules’ strategy, which in some ways saw the UFC alienated by the mainstream for years afterward.

“Yes, there were no rules, but it had to be built that way. It had to be built that way to shock everybody,” explains Royce. Indeed. Shock and awe, and look how far it has come in two decades.