Ihab Salloum[ad_1]
The martial art of Jiu Jitsu
The martial art of Jiu Jitsu can trace its history back at least a couple of centuries to Japan with roots in other grappling related combat forms like judo.
The birth of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
The distinctive modern style of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) was really born in that country in 1915 when a legendary Japanese master of Jiu Jitsu and Judo named Esai Maeda met a businessman named Gasto Gracie, a Brazilian of Scottish ethnicity.
The impact on MMA and UFC
If you’ve ever heard of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) competitions or the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) today, and you probably have since it is currently the fastest growing sport in the United States and around the world, then it’s due in large measure to the historic day in almost 100 years ago when Gasto Gracie met Esai Maeda, who later in life would come to be known in Spanish as the honorary “Conte Comte”, meaning “The Count of Combat”.
The journey of Esai Maeda
Maeda was born in 1878 and was a top student of the original founder of Judo, Jigoro Kano, at the famous Kodokan academy in Japan. In 1904 he Maeda travelled to the United States to showcase the techniques of Judo to Americans including cadets at the West Point Military Academy and US President Theodore Roosevelt, who was himself an avid boxer and student of marital arts. After several years of touring North America Esai Maeda eventually moved south to settle in Brazil.
The friendship with Gasto Gracie
In this work he met and befriended Gasto Gracie, who had settled in Brazil from Scotland. To thank Gracie for his help he taught his son Carlos the basic techniques of Japanese Jiu Jitsu. Carlos Gracie no doubt soon started applying his newfound combat skills on his brothers Oswaldo, Jorge, Gasto (Jr.) and Helio, as brothers are known to do, and thus were the seeds of the celebrated Brazilian Jiu Jitsu style first planted. By 1925, the four brothers had mastered the principles of Japanese Jiu Jitsu as well as incorporated their own ideas enough to open their first school, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu began to be shared with the rest of South America.
The influence on UFC
There is a direct connection between the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu style first taught by these four older Gracie family patriarchs and the birth of the UFC Fighting Championships of the early 1990’s, when a descendant named Royce Gracie challenged martial artists of any style to fight. Until the rest of the world really noticed just how amazingly effective Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is in real life fighting and learned to emulate it, martial artists of all stripes would eventually find themselves on the ground in the UFC bouts usually at a loss as to how to stop Gracie from choking or tapping them out with submission holds. In the 21st century, many fighting styles and combat systems have learned to incorporate grappling techniques from BJJ in order to operate on the ground.
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