Issue 081

November 2011

Intimidating to most, Cesar Gracie knows the Skrap Pack quartet of Shields, Melendez and the Diaz Brothers perhaps better than themselves – and he reveals to Fighters Only they ain’t all bad!

LEADING MAN

CESAR GRACIE

Head Coach, Cesar Gracie Academy

The Gracie family name is synonymous with mixed martial arts. Through three generations – from Carlos and Helio, Rickson and Renzo, to Roger and Kyra – the Brazilian family that forged Gracie jiu-jistu has been instrumental in the global formation, building and acceptance of the sport. With their art catalyzing the founding of the initial Ultimate Fighting Championship tournament, they are the first family of MMA. That mission continues today, and arguably with no greater insistence than at the hands of Cesar Gracie, the San Francisco Bay-area jiu-jitsu master and mentor of the infamous ‘Skrap Pack.’

If the dynamic foursome of Nick and Nate Diaz, Jake Shields and Gilbert Melendez were portrayed as comic book heroes, they’d be ‘80s kids’ cartoon characters the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – with Cesar as Master Splinter, their father-figure sensei who molds them into crime-fighting heroes in a half-shell.

After a decade working with the quartet – all either former or current champions and leading contenders in their respective weight divisions – he is adamant that it is as much about the pupil as it is the master. “A coach is nothing without his team and a team is nothing without their coach, so it’s even,” insists the 45-year-old, who first moved to San Francisco from Rio in 1972. 

President Richard Nixon was in office when a seven-year-old Cesar first stepped onto US soil, emigrating from Brazil after his mother Sonia, daughter of BJJ founder Carlos Gracie, married an American. He recalls: “The Brazilian schools are a little harder than American schools so even at seven I was very advanced when I first got here, in terms and mathematics and so forth. I was already writing in cursive and the kids here weren’t. It was weird, but obviously there was a language barrier.”

At 18 Cesar decided to return to Brazil to be with family and, obviously, resume his jiu-jitsu training. “When I was young, all of my cousins and uncles, I was better than them. But, of course, when I got back they were brown belts, black belts, purple belts – I was only a white belt. In jiu-jitsu you only get your first adult belt at 15 or 16, your blue belt, so I never got an adult belt then. I was way behind them on the jiu-jitsu scene, so I used to train day and night to catch them up. Back then in Brazil it was huge, but completely unknown here in the US. Martial arts here meant karate.”

When the Gracie family brought BJJ to America, Cesar returned. He lived in LA, studied at UCLA and trained alongside Rickson. But his dream was to take his family fighting style to Northern California.

It was in the city of Pleasant Hill near Oakland and San Francisco, close to his mother, that Cesar set up his first gym – not too far away from the one he uses today. A middle-class suburb, Pleasant Hill was also completely separated from the growing number of jiu-jitsu schools popping up on the West Coast, such as those owned by the Machado brothers to match the gyms of Royce and Rorian. 

“I just wanted to start something new, start my own brand, and that’s what I did,” explains Cesar. “I came up here, which was pretty isolated, and I taught the guys jiu-jitsu how I wanted it to be taught. I incorporated some sambo moves with the leg locks. I had some excellent guys that had came in who were top ranked from Bulgaria and Russia that also lived in the bay area. We would meet up and exchange techniques, so my style of jiu-jitsu had a lot of leg locks in it, was gi-less and we became very popular here on the fighting scene in Northern California.” A good record in local MMA promotions saw Cesar’s become one of the top schools, national then international.

These days the new Cesar Gracie Academy is best known for the Skrap Pack, the four boys Cesar has shared blood, sweat and tears with since the start of the new millennium. “Those particular guys started close to the same time, maybe within a year apart from each other,” he states. “A brown belt named Steve Heath said one day, ‘I’ve got this kid I want you to take a look at,’ and he came in and showed a lot of promise. That was Nick Diaz. He was 16 and started bringing his brother along with him, who was 14 at the time.

“Everybody seems to think that they’re trouble, it’s that Stockton thing. And they were like that as kids too, but I think everybody there is kind of like that, so I have fun with it.” 

Shields joined shortly after he was TKO’d in the eighth minute on an IFC card in March 2000 by Gracie student Marty Armendarez. 

Cesar reveals: “After the fight I met Jake and was like, ‘Hey man, good fight’ and we were friendly so I invited him back to train. We told him that if he was ever in the area to come out. So when he started to wrestle out here in San Francisco, he stopped by and got put to sleep by David Terrell, who was my top fighter at that time. He woke up and said, ‘What happened?’ I think at that point he fell in love with it and said, ‘Hey, I gotta train here.’

“Jake came in and then he brought in Gilbert, who he had met at college. He brought him in to train with me when I was teaching at Fairtex, a big Muay Thai school, where I coached a grappling program twice a week.”

Master, mentor, father figure. Cesar has been tarred with many a superlative regarding his relationship with the Skrap Pack stars, yet he prefers a much simpler title: that of teacher. “I don’t like that kind of relationship where you try to put yourself above. I just taught them.”